LaLiga against Cloudflare. Cartoon of 02/03/2025 in CTXT
To sum it up very well. LaLiga, a private sports association (and a company to all intents and purposes) and Movistar were granted by a court ruling the superpower (which is not the only one) to order the operators to block domains, and the operators must comply with the order.
This is how it was explained at the time.
"A ruling by Barcelona Commercial Court No. 6 has approved a new measure for immediate blocking of domains belonging to more than 40 pirate IPTV and cardsharing platforms. Spain's main Internet access operators - Vodafone, Orange, MásMóvil (R, Telecable, Euskaltel) Digimóbil and Telefónica España - will have to block domains identified as being linked to pirate platforms.
The ruling is in response to the joint lawsuit filed by TAD-Movistar+ and LaLiga for the protection of the content of their respective channels, through which LaLiga Santander and LaLiga SmartBank matches are offered.
The lawsuit requested judicial authorisation to obtain an agile and immediate tool to combat piracy of exclusive sporting events, in line with what was approved by the European Parliament, which in May of this year urged member states to implement legal measures in this regard.
The Barcelona Court's ruling gives LaLiga and Movistar+ an authorisation to request the blocking of the new domains every week within a specific period of time, which allows them to react at the speed required by the dynamism of the pirate content platforms themselves".
Well, it is not the first time that they have used this superpower, but now they have gone further and with the Cloudflare blocks they have taken away access to websites that have nothing to do with their football business, harming a large number of legitimate users of Cloudflare's services and people who don't even know what the matter is about, but see how they no longer have access to certain pages without explanation or warning.
Cloudflare has already announced that it will sue Laliga for indiscriminate blocking in its fight against "piracy".
However, from LaLiga they continue to deny that they are blocking the game at the drop of a hat. Its president, Javier Tebas, who believes that the staff is stupid, is selling stories and lies. He goes so far as to challenge the staff to quote a blocked website.
what a face hahahah pic.twitter.com/OdQC1mzlWt
- Jordi 😾 script kato (@iordic) February 23, 2025
They are so hypocritical that they went from denying that there were indirectly affected to blaming Cloudflare for the blockades they have ordered and even opened an"affected mailbox".
Shortly afterwards, LALIGA took down the RAE's website with its massive CloudFlare blocks and the domain rae.es was blocked for several hours on Saturday 8 March and Sunday 9 March.
Although most of the media have given a rather poor treatment to such a serious and worrying issue, there are those who have dedicated many hours to explaining it in a very chewed up way.
Extract from the infographic created by Manz, which he has released for anyone to use as they see fit. View full infographic in large size. In this thread, the author breaks down the points of the infographic.
If you have time and prefer to watch and/or listen to it, you also have the option.
If you want something shorter, but more focused. Here you have this short summary. The RAE doesn't work when there's football.
