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Context: last year LaLiga (top-level Spanish football league) obtained a court order compelling Spanish ISPs to block certain IPs during football matches, as those IPs have been associated with illegal streams of live matches. Many of those IPs are shared Cloudflare IPs, with the result being many legitimate sites become unavailable in Spain during LaLiga matches

https://cybernews.com/news/spain-laliga-streaming-piracy-cam...

Personally, myself I have been greatly impacted by this measures. Several services of mine were unavailable because LaLiga said so. No notification, no justification, they block and that's all. It has been a shame since the beginning.
Maybe someone can explain, but I don't understand why such an order isn't applied to cloudflare themselves?
In Italy, Serie A got the approval of Government to do so, which is even worse
I fervently hope that no one manages to obtain a similar judgment at the pan-EU level, that would be a disaster.
As shitty as the government approach is here we can't keep glossing over the fact that a significant part of the web is now incredibly dependent on Cloudflare and no matter how many times we face issues with huge consequences nobody seems to care.
One of the things that so often gets lost in politics is the concept of a stopping principle. If you know you want to do X, be it "enforce traffic tickets", "spend money chasing drug trafficking", or anything else, you really ought to be able to articulate some sort of stopping principle where you stop pouring the resources in. Maybe the problem is adequately solved. Maybe the further resources don't justify the tiny incremental change. Maybe the intrusion on liberty starts to overwhelm the benefits. Something. Otherwise you just end up going farther and farther down the road with no idea when to stop.

These IP blocks don't seem to come with a stopping principle. They were large and growing, and inevitably more and more entities were going to say "Hey, if that company is large enough to flip the switch to protect their assets then I'm large enough for that too!" and the obvious and inevitable stopping point was 100% blockage.

Taken to its logical conclusion, and I do mean "logical" and not "rhetorically overblown for effect", this comes perilously close to just declaring that the value of the Internet is so net negative due to piracy that it should just be shut down in Spain. If that's true during certain sports matches it's already not far from being true for lots of other things too. This was leading in an obviously-economically-untenable direction.

> Taken to its logical conclusion, and I do mean "logical" and not "rhetorically overblown for effect", this comes perilously close to just declaring that the value of the Internet is so net negative due to piracy that it should just be shut down in Spain.

What you’ve described there is completely overblown for rhetoric.

The internet is still needed for delivering legal streams of matches. So there’s never going to be any pressure to turn off the entire internet.

Plus the likes of Amazon, and other online businesses would sue the hell out of La Liga for loss of trade.

So there’s no way in hell the situation would descend into your “logical conclusion”.

That’s not to say that the situation couldn’t get worse that it already is. Just that your logical conclusion isn’t very logical.

I think in this case, it's more of a concept of causing damages and not having to pay for them. If LaLiga had to pay for every lost cent of revenue for every site blocked by their too-wide ban, they'd rethink what they're doing.

But with copyright, everything is broken everywhere, so they don't have to.

Why not declare that the value of La Liga's "IP" is a net negative and holding society back, and then simply invalidate all of it on the spot?
I think if a court enforces a judgement and a court order, regardless of how trivial it was initially, all measures including use of armed force is warranted, the matter at hand stops being the original dispute, but sovereignity and power of the law.

Does it matter that it happens over IP or CSAM? It doesn't happen over CSAM because there is no dispute there, there is no desync there between spain,the us and cloudflare.

But the mechanisms around these court orders aren't much different than those that would be used for other illegal or contentious material.

If a vendor chooses to pool and encrypt connections in a way that it is impossible to filter by hosts, and that vendor doesn't comply with court orders, then a country should absolutely block that entire vendor.

The liability of an unrelated pooled service failing is either the responsibility of the vendor or the application that chooses that vendor, not on the courts for enforcing the law without a subjective 'stopping point'.

What these vendors do is very similar to pooling in the layering phase of money laundering, but with packets: get traffic from legitimate customers, mix it with traffic from unlawful customers, pool them, and send encrypted EHLO so that the origin domain is encrypted and the packet source /destination are replaced by the vendor's. If this were done with money it would instantly trip all AML flags, but the tech world is much younger and hasn't discovered that laundering isn't cool or free as in freedom, it's a tool that the baddies use.

Finally. The situation is ridiculous and afaik it really didn't do anything to solve the piracy problem.
1000% I got legit Cloudflare Workers Anycast IPs that I was using for websockets blocked.

I also got blocked from using RustDesk.

It's been crazy. As this happens intermittently. I had to set up a tailscale exit node in one of my servers to circumvent this crap. I lost several days and called Vodafone (ISP) to understand what was going on.

That's when I read Reddit and saw that crap.

Genuinely never thought I'd see the day. This has been horrible for me running an event ticketing business in Spain... where downtime is basically not acceptable.
Are you saying your event-ticketing business having downtime is not acceptable or that having downtime for the Spanish demographic is not acceptable?
Why would you be using Cloudflare when there are better options, especially if you've known for years that this has been going on? Seems like a poor business decision really.

Don't get me wrong, I hate getting blocked just because there is a La Liga game, but lets also take some responsibility for our own decisions here...

I'm interested in how those conversations went between the LaLiga and Cloudflare that convinced them to do this. I know I'm not Cloudflare, but if a company (any company) came to me demanding blocking IP ranges according the their schedule that would require a bunch of work on my end to make it happen, there's going to be a lot of push back. It'd take a dump truck load of money to make that happen.
No conversation at all needed to happen. LaLiga got a court order. The order specifically stated that if LaLiga flag your IP address, the internet providers in Spain must block it during the match. Cloudflare have nothing to do with it.

Who could have forseen, that LaLiga would end up abusing this system!?

Cloudflare are very much pushing back: https://www.laliga.com/en-GB/news/official-statement-in-rela...
That's not how this worked. Cloudflare was not involved at all. Spanish ISPs were ordered by Spanish courts to block their customers from accessing specific IP addresses.
I thought the government just forced their ISPs to block. Was CF involved at all?
It wasn’t a conversation. It was a court order.
Cloudflare are apparently not involved. It's an order against local ISPs to block Cloudflare.
It is insane that you could block access to hundreds of sites just because some people decided to watch an ilegal stream.
try 45 million sites including many absolutely critical to people's lives and health.

https://trends.builtwith.com/cdn/Cloudflare

And people wonder why Spain is doing so poorly when tribal corporate entertainment takes such a priority over everything else.
hope that doesn't end on "monitoring the situation" and doing nothing. entire cloudflare IP blocks are being blocked, even on work days
We actually had to revert our rollout of CF Workers because enough of our users were in Spain and couldn’t access endpoints at seemingly arbitrary times (due to the matches)
Finally. For anyone affected by this, I have been using Clouflare WARP successfully to bypass this block.
Great, this means Telefonica reliability goes from zero nines to still below zero nines.
What you need is some form of - European - megacorp getting hurt by this and going after LaLiga for a ridiculously huge, LaLiga-destroying amount of money.
I wonder why didn't Cloudflare just say that technically they can't block the IPs for a short time as they have no mechanism to do it and it would take a significant amount of $$ to develop it.

Right after this statement they could have permanently block all the IPs and let the outraged customers make enough noise that would have prompt the government to act sooner.

That a sports league was empowered by the courts to do this in first place is buck wild to me. I live in America, so it's not like I'm unaccustomed to the government giving preferential treatment to corporations but I cannot fathom a court allowing the NFL to tell ISPs to block IPs across the entire country.
Love the hypocrisy (my IP is blocked):

403 ERROR The request could not be satisfied. Generated by cloudfront (CloudFront)

> The PP and Vox voted against it. Junts abstained from the session.

This is the bad guys.

Very ironically I get this error trying to read the article:

403 ERROR The request could not be satisfied. Request blocked. We can't connect to the server for this app or website at this time. There might be too much traffic or a configuration error. Try again later, or contact the app or website owner. If you provide content to customers through CloudFront, you can find steps to troubleshoot and help prevent this error by reviewing the CloudFront documentation. Generated by cloudfront (CloudFront)

Qui blockat blockodiodes? Cloudfare, it turns out....

I understand organizations as LaLiga wanting more money but massive IP blockage seems quite unfair, effective maybe but unfair so this news does not come as a surprise.
Sorry. Why can't an indivudual bad actor site be targeted without affecting non bad actor sites? Why does the blocking have to be so broad?
If IP addresses are a shared resource then it shouldn't be possible to block an IP or IP range because some of the domains are hosting illegal stuff.

This is like blocking access to a street, a block of flats or even an estate because drug dealers and hookers operate from them.

Yeah, like in the massively ilegal user spying case with LaLiga app, where the fine can be huge in Spain (kinda like messing like the FCC in the US if not worse).
Wait, so a private company in the business of men kicking balls around a field was able to make this happen without government support?! How?
So politically speaking how influential is LaLiga compared to other nation's football leagues, or America's largest sports leagues?
Play stupid games... win stupid prizes.

The judicial, nation-wide blocks on CDN IPs is absurd and should have never been allowed.

It’s not football; it’s LaLiga.
About time, this was crazy and should result in some action against cloudflare for allowing it
An IT peon at La Liga has the chance to do the funniest thing …
And yet democrata.ch, who released the article, blocks me from accessing their free website because of my VPN :)
I'm torn on this. It always should have gone through the courts, but the fact is that cloudflare are providing access to illegal content and not doing anything about it. They were left with two choices if Cloudflare refuse to act. Either accept it (oh well, too big to fail), or block them.

I dislike what is happening but I kind of like that they don't care about the size of Cloudflare and hold them as accountable as they would a small hosting company in Belarus. Blocking entire ranges due to illegal content isn't exactly new, the scale is new.

Again though, I really dislike that it isn't going through the legal system