Internet censored by La Liga's blocking spree
La Liga's dynamic blocks are hitting legitimate internet services in Spain. We look at the digital censorship and its real impact on the network.
English · Original discussion in Spanish · Published
Internet censored by La Liga's blocking spree
Digital censorship has reached a new level in Spain under the pretext of protecting football's television rights. The dynamic blocking pushed by La Liga (Spain's professional football league) is not only affecting pirate streaming platforms, but is causing collateral damage to critical internet infrastructure, leaving legitimate users without access to services that use the same CDNs as the blocked sites.
Net neutrality collapsing
The forum debate brings up an uncomfortable reality: the indiscriminate use of ISP-level blocks against IP addresses shared by services such as Cloudflare, Fastly or Akamai. Forum members denounce that, in trying to curb access to sports content, a substantial part of the internet is being de facto censored. The outrage is palpable, not only because of the measure itself, but because of the impunity with which Tebas and his collaborators operate, drawing comparisons with other cases of systemic corruption where justice arrives late or never.
VPNs: a solution or a temporary patch?
Faced with the impossibility of accessing legitimate websites, the community is split between those who recommend using VPNs to bypass the blockade and those who warn about the privacy risks of handing traffic over to third parties. There is a pessimistic consensus: football has become the spearhead for normalizing a censorship that, once established, will be hard to reverse. Meanwhile, the suspicion that these blocks are just the beginning of tighter control over web traffic keeps gaining ground in the thread.
Related forum debates
Digital censorship has reached a new level in Spain under the pretext of protecting football's television rights. The dynamic blocking pushed by La Liga (Spain's professional football league) is not only affecting pirate streaming platforms, but is causing collateral damage to critical internet infrastructure, leaving legitimate users without access to services that use the same CDNs as the blocked sites.
Net neutrality collapsing
The forum debate brings up an uncomfortable reality: the indiscriminate use of ISP-level blocks against IP addresses shared by services such as Cloudflare, Fastly or Akamai. Forum members denounce that, in trying to curb access to sports content, a substantial part of the internet is being de facto censored. The outrage is palpable, not only because of the measure itself, but because of the impunity with which Tebas and his collaborators operate, drawing comparisons with other cases of systemic corruption where justice arrives late or never.
VPNs: a solution or a temporary patch?
Faced with the impossibility of accessing legitimate websites, the community is split between those who recommend using VPNs to bypass the blockade and those who warn about the privacy risks of handing traffic over to third parties. There is a pessimistic consensus: football has become the spearhead for normalizing a censorship that, once established, will be hard to reverse. Meanwhile, the suspicion that these blocks are just the beginning of tighter control over web traffic keeps gaining ground in the thread.
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Summary of a discussion on Burbuja.info - Foro de economía, actualidad y política., translated from Spanish and reviewed before publication. Read the full discussion (35 replies).
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