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by shevy-java7 hours ago |
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upvoteby lode7 hours ago|
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See this story from 2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47738883

Basically, to combat pirate streaming of football matches, La Liga (the Spanish football association) can compel Spanish ISPs to block wide ranges of IP blocks that are suspected of hosting those streams.

This includes Cloudflare, which - due to lots of websites depending on them (see what happened when they went down last year: https://blog.cloudflare.com/18-november-2025-outage/ ) feels like half of the internet is unusable. This happens weekly when football is on.

Now it looks like those bans are going to become even more frequent, which will have all kinds of unintended consequences.

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upvoteby gspr6 hours ago|
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I wonder when businesses will start suing ISPs for the losses they incur while they're cut off from half the internet.
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upvoteby embedding-shape6 hours ago|
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No one here is being "cut off from the internet" during the blocks, you grossly misunderstand what's happening here.

If you're on a residential connection, during play of the matches, you can't access any of the Cloudflare IPs, but everything else keeps working as-is. Most businesses already migrated away from Cloudflare once these blocks started happening, so most of the affected people are the ones using services that rely on Cloudflare.

As mentioned elsewhere, don't get me wrong, it sucks, makes no sense and I wish it went away, and I'll keep complaining to the ones I can about it, but "they're cut off from half the internet" isn't accurate unless somehow half the services you use happen to rely on Cloudflare (which, at least for me, isn't true, maybe 10% of what I use daily is affected by this).

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upvoteby littlecranky674 hours ago|
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I once had a day (and made a Tell HN about that too) where I couldn't access 3 of the links from the HN start page (and I didn't try all of them) during a match, because of that football IP block. It might not be half the internet, but I definitely felt like living in a country with massive censorship. And to me - given that I totally do not understand how people find watching football interesting in any way - for the most incomprehensible reason.
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upvoteby debugnik4 hours ago|
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Blocking Cloudflare is not significantly different from cutting the internet depending on which part of it you need. We recently had a thread about CI jobs failing to connect to Docker from Spain during football. I personally know when there's football because saucenao stops working.
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upvoteby martin84124 hours ago|
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I can’t do a simple `docker pull postgres:18` every time there’s a football match on.
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upvoteby gspr5 hours ago|
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Ok, I'm sorry for the hyperbole of saying "half the internet" if it's in fact 10%. But come on, that's still massive.

It's not a stretch for small businesses to be reliant on residential connections either.

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upvoteby littlecranky674 hours ago|
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No need to be sorry, it is a matter of how you define the percentage. If you would define it as "fraction of traffic generated by residential/home endpoints" you probably wouldn't be off that far. Maybe because Netflix does not use cloudflare, but if you say "CDNs make more than 50% of traffic to residential" you would definitely be right
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upvoteby wmf6 hours ago|
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ISPs are following the law. You want to sue the government.
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upvoteby gspr5 hours ago|
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Then I'm mistaken. I thought the law only demanded that piracy sites were blocked, and then ISPs made life easier for themselves by blocking all of Cloudflare.

At any rate, this behavior isn't befitting a serious country like Spain.

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upvoteby loupol7 hours ago|
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Even more hours where people in Spain will have to wonder why their online apps/services are not working anymore I suppose.
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upvoteby avalenn7 hours ago|
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Main ISP in Spain dynamically blocks IP it suspects sharing sport competition live streams. Began with football, now extended to other sports. Impact on legitimate traffic is real.
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upvoteby ErneX7 hours ago|
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It’s multiple ISPs though. A judge sentence commands them to do it. Insane, I know.
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upvoteby mmh00007 hours ago|
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Context, a few days ago, this was a very popular article on HN:

  Tell HN: Docker pull fails in Spain due to football Cloudflare block

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47738883
TL;DR: Spain blocks A LOT of CDNs during footy matches, including ALL of Cloudflare, thus breaking most of the internet. All in the name of stopping "pirates".
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upvoteby lamasery7 hours ago|
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I wonder how close they are in broad economic damage to it being cheaper to just pay FIFA or whomever for some kind of nationwide viewing license (which they'd surely be able to negotiate way lower than a simple "cost to view every match, times count of Spanish residents" since that's nowhere near as much as they're getting out of Spain now)
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upvoteby toyg6 hours ago|
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That's effectively how it was in European countries, when TV was nationalised. Then everything became about extracting as much money as possible from consumers, and here we are.
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upvoteby bombcar6 hours ago|
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It's La Liga - Spain should just nationalize them and make it a division of the government.
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upvoteby embedding-shape6 hours ago|
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Or follow the example of the Barcelona football club and make it be owned by the fans and supporters themselves instead.
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upvoteby YawningAngel6 hours ago|
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Movistar are paying a billion dollars a year, so probably a long way away
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upvoteby lamasery6 hours ago|
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$20/yr per Spanish resident? That's very few wasted labor-hours per worker per year (on average).
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upvoteby calgoo6 hours ago|
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No thank you, i don't watch sports, why should i pay for that crap just so a corrupt judge can get another car or sit on some board of some company when they "retire"
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upvoteby lamasery6 hours ago|
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I'm not saying it's a good idea, I'm trying to get a handle on whether Spain is on track to de facto spend more than this per resident in lost economic productivity (to say nothing of whatever value we might like to place on sheer inconvenience for residents that doesn't have measurable GDP effects). Like just paying a tiny tax and calling it a day might be less crazy than the current path, which would highlight how nuts this is precisely because that's also nuts.
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upvoteby martin84124 hours ago|
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The number will increase each year for sure. If all people are forced to pay, what’s to prevent them from charging 100€ a year or more?
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upvoteby embedding-shape6 hours ago|
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> TL;DR: Spain blocks A LOT of CDNs during footy matches, including ALL of Cloudflare

AFAIK, I don't think it's "A LOT of CDNs", it's only Cloudflare, at least personally Cloudflare is the only CDN I can verify I lose access to during the football matches.

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