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Right now if you want to use internet on weekends you need to pay a VPN.
Even some online games on Steam stop working. I've seen also a several Twitch streamers who can't stream, startups down, etc.
We're basically hostages of this stupidity. And you know the funny thing? Football streams are working just fine. Now I feel morally obligated to watch pirated football and never pay them for it.
They are stupid enough that they block almost no ipv6 range. So if your provider has ipv6, you're relatively safe.
That’s insane. Do citizens not have a recourse? Like maybe a freedom of speech constitutional angle?
I keep seeing this rhetoric, but every time I use a vpn for non piracy stuff I’m captcha’d to hell. Is my experience somehow different from most?
They could also make the sport more affordable to watch again.
> now if you want to use internet on weekends you need to pay a VPN.
Weekends? Do they specifically block the internet (or at least the websites mentioned in the article - GitHub, etc.) on weekends?
Blocking Cloudflare seems insane. That's a huge portion of the internet (for better or worse).
Maybe that’s the point? So that you have to watch soccer on TV?
The purpose of a system is what it does, after all.
In 2019, LaLiga mobile app turned on the mic and location to track bars showing matches without a license [1]. Protection data agency fined them with 250k EUR, but was overturned by the Supreme court in 2024 [2].
[1]: https://english.elpais.com/elpais/2019/06/12/inenglish/15603... [2]: https://cincodias.elpais.com/companias/2024-07-27/el-supremo...
It seems like the EU courts need to be involved in this case. Limiting internet to millions of people to make some people rich also flies too close to an human right violation in 2025 so maybe even ECHR can be involved.
Hard to imagine this being legal and the fine is a slap in the face of those whose privacy had been compromised.
This should pose as an existential threat to companies behaving like that.
I'm from Spain, never watch football or pay any attention to it at all, and this year I noticed the day that the Liga started due to the internet suddenly working like crap. After various websites failing to respond I thought "I bet the football season has started again", I googled it and indeed, it started that day. I resubscribed to my VPN right there and then.
This situation (which has already been going on for a year or so) has made my attitude towards football change from "I don't like it, but live and let live" to outright hate.
I will never understand how kicking or throwing a ball around somehow has mass appeal. Even worse when half of it is just people arguing over arbitrary rule interpretations.
In many football stadiums throughout Spain, chants like "Vaya puta mierda de Liga" and "Corrupción en la Federación" are heard almost every game. It's not the whole of the football world that wants to censor the internet, it's the league and the interests of a few corporations (including, sadly, clubs).
Football piracy is on the rise, because watching football has become extremely expensive in the last few years, even if you just want to watch your teams games. I know many people who used to pay for it; now most of them, including law-abiding citizens who wouldn't normally pirate, are learning how to do it.
and sadly there is so much money involved in this sport now it dictates everything, it's a mafia
Since LaLiga has no qualms with blocking Cloudflare IP's that could be used for emergency services. A cautionary tale:
In 2025, Optus suffered a network outage that prevented emergency calls (triple-0 in Australia) for nearly 14 hours. During this period, four people died, including an eight-week-old baby. The outage was reportedly caused by a botched firewall upgrade that affected up to 600 households in South Australia alone.
https://7news.com.au/news/optus-deaths-firewall-upgrade-repo...
It seems "move fast and break things" has infected the telcos too.
In any case, depending on Cloudflare for emergency services seems an extraordinarily stupid idea.
I live in Spain. The main problem is that your internet becomes patchy and things stop working for a few hours during the match. People notice the incident, but they don't understand what is happening, they just move on and come back few hours later for it to be resolved. Only some people understand the depth–usually tech people like us that get paged–and complain, and then the president from LaLiga call us a "bunch of freaks".
I have personally sent letters to everyone, including the court that ruled and allowed this whole mess. The judge in question must be either extremely incompetent or corrupted. The court response to this problem wasn't acknowledging it, but to double down, because it seems like some egos were hurt.
The only way I can imagine this situation stopping is by someone dying from a core healthcare system malfunctioning and a court case becoming viral. In the meantime, a single private institution can destroy the internet whenever they want, with full legal backup. Just insane.
It easier for me to watch La Liga in the US than it is for my brother in-law in Spain. Thank goodness we don’t have the reckless anti-piracy actions here but we do have some of the same BS going on because the same is true for him in reverse. Its easier and cheaper for him to watch the Red Sox in Spain than it is for me in Boston. 1yr of MLBtv is 30 bucks but local blackouts. 1 month of NESN the local broadcaster is the same price. Streaming all sports is a fragmented and extremely expensive mess for the fans and it only seems to be getting worse. I don’t blame people for cheating. Especially in Spain where incomes are significantly lower than the US.
UK has similar BS
> The "3pm blackout" rule prevents football matches from being shown on UK television between 14:45 and 17:15 on Saturdays.
> The policy was introduced in the 1960s to encourage fans to attend lower league games - and it remains in force.
> The blackout comes into effect when 50% of fixtures in the top two divisions are scheduled to kick off at 15:00.
Sucks to have to spin up the VPN anytime there's a match. Wonder how much money are Spanish companies losing out on online sales over this crap.
Have this: https://hayahora.futbol/ on my bookmarks every time some site doesn't respond.
I feel like affected ISPs and hosting services should identify LaLiga office IP ranges and block them during office hours.
Or just feed them a never ending series of cloudflare turnstile captchas.
iirc, part of the problem is that the main ISP (Movistar) is also a football rightholder (Movistar +). So they have decided that blocking cloudflare is profitable for them.
> I feel like affected ISPs and hosting services should identify LaLiga office IP ranges and block them during office hours.
Not just LaLiga, but pretty much any and all busineses and politicians in Spain. Bring the problem to all of Spain and let them figure out who screwed the pooch to end up with Spain back into the dark ages.
Of course, that will only work once.
Why is there no responsibility for that? And not just LaLiga, but everywhere?
You can claim copyright on anything anywhere, things get taken down, zero responsibility if it was wrongful, be it laliga streams, be it youtube copyright strikes or whatever?
If there was a law, that if you took down something that you shouldn't have taken down (eg. hundreds of pages), you should be liable for all the damages and income loss for those pages. Same for youtube... copyright strike, proven fair use.. now pay for the lost income of the creator, the creator (webmaster, ...) did nothing wrong, you should be liable for that.
In representative democracies, the laws (on everything, but especially so on property rights) are what they are because the people who benefit from them also, for the most part, own the politicians.
A few months ago I cancelled my subscription to watch LaLiga. I won't pay a single euro to these tyrants who impose censorship on innocent people.
This has been going on for years. A VPN is practically mandatory nowadays.
I can't intuit moral reasoning for why a media rights holder has the right to restrict a rebroadcast. They put it out there to reach a wide audience. Why can't I receive it and share it?
I can play physical copies of music and movies wherever I happen to bring them. Why can't I do it with the digital variant?
Largely I feel like the response to this is a rephrasing of 'because no one will be able to monetize the creation of entertainment'. But that's not a moral reasoning, that's a choice of how to foster a market. Which undermines the explanation of this being about piracy. We can try other ways of growing a market that doesn't inhibit an intuitive natural urge to share.
> I can't intuit moral reasoning for why a media rights holder has the right to restrict a rebroadcast.
Copyright is based on economic cost/benefit, not natural rights.
> I can play physical copies of music and movies wherever I happen to bring them
Wait, can you? In the US and EU, physical copies are for personal use only. Where are you that this would be legal?
Physical sharing is inherently limited. You can only share with some many friends, burn so many CD copies.
Purely digital files are so cheap to copy that cost is negligible.
Recreating “physical share” functionality in digital space takes work ($$) for $company and directly leads to less sales.
I think a good moral reasoning would be to think of it like ticket sales. You pay to get in. The event organizers take on risk and expense to run the show. Rebroadcasting is like sneaking people in.
> I can play physical copies of music and movies wherever I happen to bring them
But you can't buy them there.
Sure, you can buy them (cheaply) somewhere else and re-sell in the destination country, but you can't do it affordably at scale.
Last month I asked on HN what I can do to fight this as a non-EU citizen: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44997883
Intellectual property should be abolished or greatly limited. It rarely serves its intended purpose (rewarding authors/creators) and instead creates rents and dangerous monopolies.
A related issue that suggests that the copyright system is broken is that it isn't equally enforced everywhere. The rest of the world freely copies books, drugs, and tech in any way they please, so all it does in the end is inflate prices for U.S. consumers, who effectively subsidize the rest of the world.
A few years ago, I checked how many subscriptions I had to get in order to watch all games of my club in the season (in France).
I was ridiculous : 2.5 providers for the league (Canal+ with their "sports" pack for some games + Bein Sport), RMC Sport for the euro cups, Eurosport for the French Cup, and Infosport+ (a Canal+ channel but not included in their sports pack, go figure), the total was close to 115€/month (that's close to a full month of salary at minimum wage). All with a 12-months subscription, even if the channel (like Eurosport or Infosport+) may not broadcast one single game of the team (related to cup draws).
20 years ago, you could watch ALL French football with only TF1/FR2/FR3 (free TV Channels) and Canal+ for €30/month.
When the LFP decided to split games to different broadcasters, everything started to go South. And this year, they couldn't find any broadcaster for the league, so they had to create their own channel, which can broadcast only 8 games per match day, since Bein still has a contract for the 9th one.
How this is even legal is beyond me.
Imagine if the MPAA/RIAA knew about this during the 2000's to use against the Kazaa, Limewire, etc during that era anywhere/everywhere. It is so overreaching the Internet would have been stalled at the time.
It is astonishing the court systems for those countries to allow this if, other than maybe football factors into their GDP (which says something about the nation, maybe they should find something more useful to produce). Just for some silly sports event watching man-children kicking balls around.
I grew up in the US as sports were just something on tv, but this is practically holding the nation hostage as though it were a religion, and the world should stop just so they can sell tickets for the only one god, theirs.
I ordered a new 4G router here, I've been having so many failed connections, now it all makes sense, in a non-sense kinda way. Anna also gone dark, just when I was traveling and missing a book.
I had to use i2pd plus some mirror to update my BSD systems...
Can the service providers somehow block illegal streaming themselves? That way no third party services would be affected?
This will soon be turned into a political weapon. You do what I want or I cut your internet.
If the service use cloud flare expect for trouble :(
i've been trying to understand what was making the CI fail for about 3h, until i realised it was this thanks to this post.
thanks. this sucks.
I just wanted to to enter https://www.osnews.com and it's blocked because of LaLiga. Infuriating...
Why do they not pay for streams? Is this a “cable sub cost is too high” or a “broadcasters want to blackout stream so only locals and the right networks can see the game” situation?
EDIT: “One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue,” explained Newell [0]
[0] https://www.gamesradar.com/gabe-newell-piracy-issue-service-...