Posted by akyuu 10 hours ago
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.
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).
It's not a stretch for small businesses to be reliant on residential connections either.
At any rate, this behavior isn't befitting a serious country like Spain.
Tell HN: Docker pull fails in Spain due to football Cloudflare block
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47738883
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.
Perhaps the frog is being boiled but the frog will learn to jump.
Whatever can be lapped up by any given nation as an excuse, will be used as such to advocate the crackdown on that nation's right to access the information freely.
Think about children, grandma, national security, sovereignity, economy, minorities, tennis, golf, copyright, solar flares, aliens, Keter-class objects, climate change, CO₂, fill your goto excuse in.
Don't give up so easily.
We'll pay the subscription and be done with it. Those who can't will suffer.
We live too comfortably and independently to risk it all for the thousands of paper-cuts eroding our lives. The capitalists learned from history: isolate us and change into the dystopia little by little and there will never be enough resistance.
GP's right in pointing that out even if it hurts to read it.
Net neutrality used to be a pillar of the EU internet. 2026; the mind fucking boggles.