why would they?
> squabble between two huge corporations
I think this is just LaLiga using it's cultural and economical power, don't think Cloudflare or the courts should be making exceptions just so they can control how people watch football
Well, in this case, the alternative is all of Spain intermittently blocking lots of Cloudflare.
But if Cloudflare bows to Spain in this case, every jurisdiction will want to pile up lots of special case rules for Cloudflare to try and implement.
Cloudflare literally wasn't even a party to the ruling by which LaLiga has been compelling Spanish ISPs to do the IP-level blocking. They're just an affected third-party because the blocking scheme the courts have allowed LaLiga to impose on ISPs is on a per-IP basis.
Spain hasn't asked Cloudflare to do anything. Only LaLiga has acted like Cloudflare owes them a huge, expensive rework of their CDN's architecture for the purpose of censoring things for LaLiga purely as a favor to LaLiga. What LaLiga has over Cloudflare isn't a court order. It's a protection racket, or maybe a hostage situation, where court orders involving other parties are the gun held to the hostage's head.
Nor did I say they did.
The question was asked, "why would they [without an explicit order]" The answer is they probably shouldn't, but there's still an obvious incentive here.
Either they should police the content they serve themselves or they accept the right holders to do it (which sucks for everyone).
Also they certainly willing take all their customers as hostage, as they could certainly split their network into legitimate customers and shaddy ones so the blocking is not so impactful, but I guess they prefer to make it as impactful as possible to be able to complain.
Anyone can report illegal content on Cloudflare and Cloudflare will remove it. The pirate streaming sites pop up only in or just before the first few moments of the game, and LaLiga insists they must be removed instantly in order to prevent their losses. So what they actually want is preemptive removal without meaningful human review or anything else that could take 10 minutes.
That involves more than being responsive when someone reports abusive content or dropping bad customers. That requires becoming a censorship machine that preemptively treats all new customers as criminals, and probably having some unaccountable AI drive the censorship process. (That latter seems to be what LaLiga is pushing Fastly to do.)
That's beyond the legal obligations of infrastructure platforms, bad for the reliability of their service, and just a slice of what they'd have to do to rework their architecture to support this kind of preemptive censorship.
Yet this would actually be a better solution for everyone (except the pirates).
10 minutes seems like a reasonable response time that would allow a chance for human review. No football fan wants to have their viewing interrupted because they used a dodgy pirate site to watch it. Currently, pirates can simply use a VPN to get around the IP-level block while the huge collateral damage affects legitimate Cloudflare users.
Plenty of companies proactively take action against shady users, even if not 100% required under law. Youtube has content id, social media companies have "community guidelines", and ISPs have AUPs.