I want to shed some light on what's currently happening with the Internet in Spain🇪🇸
Spoiler: it's bad. Like 2010-China-bad.
Let's start with the tl;dr:
🚫A judge gave the Spanish football league (LaLiga) the power to force ISPs to block IP addresses from a list it controls
Sounds dystopian? Well that's because it absolutely is.
Here is how things went down:
In a Dec 2024 Barcelona court ruling, LaLiga was granted the right to compel ISPs (starting off with Movistar and DIGI), to block thousands of Cloudflare IP addresses because of illegal football streams.
Initial blocks started in early February 2025, with LaLiga specifically mentioning @Cloudflare but scarily also "VPNs" in a statement.
Child pornography is being thrown into the justification, just to make sure everyone is aware of who the bad guys are.
https://www.laliga.com/en-GB/news/official-statement-in-relation-to-the-blocking-of-ips-during-the-recent-ea-sports-laliga-matchdays-linked-to-illegal-cloudflare-practices
As Cloudflare IP addresses are shared between customers, since approx. 15th of Feb thousands of legitimate websites using Cloudflare are not reachable from Spain when a LaLiga match is running.
Yeah... they were so thoughtful to only block when a match is on, thank you overlords ig🙏
Cloudflare & RootedCON filed an appeal against LaLiga, asking to declare LaLiga’s blocking measures illegal because the IP blocking measures were disproportionate.
But corrupt Spain being corrupt Spain the judge dismissed the appeal.
https://www.reddit.com/r/CloudFlare/comments/1jke3pc/the_judge_who_authorized_cloudflares_ip_address/
Since then the blocks only expanded, because via "Dynamic Court Injunction" LaLiga can freely update the blocklist. By now, Vercel and many others are heavily impacted. Hell, Vercel and Cloudflare seem to be working together for once.
https://vercel.com/blog/update-on-spain-and-laliga-blocks-of-the-internet
But here comes the absolute worst part of it all:
While for techies it's a button press, regular ppl are heavily affected and should be INFURIATED. But.. they are not.
No protests. No law suits. Almost no coverage by legacy media. Not a topic among friends. Nothing. It's just 🤯
It feels like Spaniards gave up. "Might as well enjoy the party while it lasts" vibe.
Socialist-led dystopian control is expanding since years: bank reporting requirements, war on cash, war on #Bitcoin, protection of illegal occupants on "your" property
https://x.com/gaceta_es/status/1915061853488914709
I am not sure what my conclusion or call to action with all this is as I have very little hope for the drastic change it'd require to rescue the country to happen.
Maybe just I'll just leave it as-is: a sad and dystopian status quo of a country having its Great Firewall moment.
