Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times

Foot egg? I thought we were talking about soccer.

And that's how greed ends up destroying itself.

They can easily get away with soccer because everyone is glued to the match. Tennis? Eh. Golf? No way.

In theory, we should already be protected against this via the various "Net neutrality" directives, but as the US currently is showing us, laws and regulations are only worth as much as you're willing to enforce them ultimately. But things like these are supposed to be worth at least something:

> Regulation 2015/2120 also states that access providers “shall treat all traffic equally, when providing internet access services, without discrimination, restriction or interference, and irrespective of the sender and receiver, the content accessed or distributed, the applications or services used or provided, or the terminal equipment used,” although they are permitted to apply “reasonable traffic management measures.” In any case, those measures must be “transparent, non-discriminatory and proportionate, and shall not be based on commercial considerations but on objectively different technical quality of service requirements of specific categories of traffic” (Article 3.3) - https://www.cuatrecasas.com/en/global/intellectual-property/...

Remains to be seen if something/someone will put a stop to La Liga's shenanigans, judges have seem unwilling so far, and not a big enough problem for the average person to really care about it (yet?).

There's a "European Declaration on Digital Rights and Principles", signed by the member states, and I believe the right to access internet freely, without companies being permitted to mandate entire IP addresses blocks being forbidden from routing and within 30 minutes from the request surely would fit within that one, or others, in some way or another. No company should hold that power and it's a serious precedent others states in the union would want to leverage for their own reasons too. Reading this recent TorrentFreak article, the regulations should probably align with the following thinktank's analysis, at the very least:

>The report makes 12 formal recommendations. The most significant is that IP-based blocking should be avoided altogether, due to its inherent tendency to block large numbers of legitimate service sites. DNS-level or URL-level blocking should be used instead.

https://torrentfreak.com/eu-pirate-site-blocking-is-broken-r...

if it interferes with my ability to sell products and services in spain because my website gets blocked as a side-effect, then yes, the EU should care.

for example geo-blocking within the EU is also illegal. if you offer a service or product in any EU country, then anyone in the EU must be allowed to buy it.

among other things this also means that if there is any country in the EU where these sports broadcasts are accessible legally, then spain would not be allowed to block them either.

Surely EU members should care if Spain blocks the access to government services offered by EU members. In Finland various government services (like Police's website) do use Cloudflare.

And Spain is not blocking access to Spain's citizens, it's blocking access people in Spain. These could be citizens of other EU members who need to access their government's website for reason or another (e.g. renewing passport) while they visit Spain or reside in Spain.

Yes, it has the authority. There are plenty of EU regulations that states must obey, from fundamental rights to taxation.

Basically EU should step in whenever country level government doesn't do a good enough job for its citizens.

It's not strong enough to do that yet but a lot of people with cheap governments wish it was.

And replace them with other idiots, who also support this rubbish? There isn't anyone who has sanity and decency, as their platform.

This. The chat control 2.0 law includes blocking orders. And Ursula von der Leyen tried to introduce internet censorship when she was still in German politics.

I disagree, I think the bigger issue is blanket banning IPs because they can't decrypt the traffic.

This is the kind of manufacturing consent that would make some people be in favor of the government MITMing crypto so that they can verify that I'm not doing something naughty.

Both are problems. In Spain we have laws that are supposed to give us reasonable access to internet websites, and no one should be able to block large swaths of the internet in order to block access to few websites, supposedly at least. Clearly this been compromised, and the judges themselves seems to go against the law, but I'm hopeful it'd be restored one day.

> La Liga would never be able to secure blanket bans if people and services were more decentralised

They technically haven't either. According to "ban-supporters", La Liga first reached out to Cloudflare asking them to shut down the pirate stream websites using Cloudflare. After Cloudflare rejected that, La Liga went to judges that approved forcing ISPs to ban specific IPs (related to the services) which happened to be Cloudflare IPs that other services uses too.

End result is the same, it fucking sucks sometimes when shit unexplicitly breaks before you remember there is a football game, but at least I think that's a bit more accurate to what's practically happening :)

It's a service problem. Every new service is a colossal headache to set up payment, remember to cancel payment if you only wanted to see the single event and have no need for the service the rest of the year, find what's playing on what when, deal with their bullshit when they add ads onto an ad-free plan that you bought only because it was ad-free, yadda yadda yadda. The suits could have had 10x as much money out of me if I could just pay one-time prices. "Sure, fork over $10 and you can have a temporary account to watch the US Open this year." I will do that. In a single month I'll pay twice the cost of a monthly NYT subscription to read online articles, maybe $0.50/pop.

But they don't offer that, they offer difficult-to-cancel ad-laden plans that don't even get you access to the content you want to see reliably (edit: and as another commenters, signs you up to in some cases multiple mailing lists--thanks, The Athletic, for having a separate mailing list for every one of your terrible sub-orgs, I deeply regret paying you a dime). I'll be sailing the seven seas as long as it's viable.

One of the easiest things to pirate is music. Spotify basically killed mainstream piracy of music by making it cheap and easy to pay for nearly all music.

I used to pirate video games, but Steam basically ended that for me. The sales no longer make it worth it for me to pirate a $60 game, instead, I can buy it for $12 on sale.

For software, I used to pirate Adobe products and Sony Vegas, but there are alternatives for those now.

For something like sports, I think the cost can be hundreds of dollars per season. I watch the NFL and NHL, and to watch every game that I'd like to watch, it would cost me something like $600+ per year. There aren't really viable alternatives. I'd have to get three services to watch all of the NHL games I want to watch, and I don't even know how many services I need for the NFL. Amazon Prime, Sunday Ticket, CBS, Fox? Or cable/YouTubeTV with additional packages?

I'd happily pay $100 or $200 per year to watch all games in a league for a year if it was through a single service. Or a lump sum for all sports. But in the same amount of time to enter my payment information, create an account, etc. I could have easily found a stream and have it on any TV in my house.

I am part of this crowd. I have never paid a cent for software. I have spent many hours with Ida pro and Ghidra.

That time was well spent for the knowledge I gained, even if it wasn't worth it to save a few bucks.

Most software piracy is more convenient then what you describe.The warez takes pride in making the best cracks available.

It's absolutely a service problem. I can pay for the local sports rebroadcast packages.. but oh wait, you just don't feel like this week, playing the Raptors game, because there's a local thing you think people will watch? Fair enough, subscribe to DAZN, and pay there.. oh sorry, we've opted to stop carrying <insert all leagues>.

Sigh, fine, I'll pay for NBA Leaguepass. I don't live in your country... great, random blackouts. Fine, I'll try and use a VPN (hell, I literally used tailscale to a friend's house for a bit).. but then those games are blacked out too, at random?

I'm literally paying you for the service. So yeah, giving some insanely sketchy crypto website $5/month for unlimited whatever that just always works, is worth it. 10/10 will definitely do again. I'm sick and tired of fighting with the NBA, the CFL, or G-D only knows what just to try to watch the things I'm paying for.

Some people are just like that. They'll spend several times as much effort as just earning the money honestly would take. The thrill of petty crime I guess.

Netflix was ok when it was the only platform. Now that there are 10(?) platforms, and each of them has tiers, it is a service problem

Remember when a directtv subscriber bought the annual sports pack because they wanted to watch their team's matches, and just when the game was about to start the transmission was interrupted showing "not availabe in your area", and they called support to ask and were told for the first time by the rep that someone else has the airing rights, and to read TOS?

It is the same thing you are going towards.

Your friend exists, and he is not alone. But the vast mayority of people just want to watch what they were told they paid for, and not paying 10 different people either.

> see things like their $3,000 gaming PC build, but if they see a chance to avoid paying $10-20 for something they will take it.

A common phrase used to be "I pirate the software so I can afford the hardware". There's a tangibility to hardware that's not present for software and media, which means many people simply don't feel it's worth what is being charged, especially media intended to be consumed once and forgotten about (e.g. a sports match). Computer hardware is a durable good.

That said, I pretty much stopped pirating things when Steam got decently good and I was working a normal professional job. Prior to that, I really did have to choose what I was willing to pay for, and I really did get a better experience using pirated software vs buying the legit thing. At this point though, I get a better than average experience through Steam on Linux (I just avoid any games with Denuvo or other kernel-level bullshit), and I can easily afford both the hardware and the software, so the convenience and quality of experience + my better purchasing power makes it pointless to even engage in piracy anymore.

I'd like to think I'm a rational actor, sort of, and so are a lot of other people. Paying 79-115 EUR/mo to watch a few matches, in a country where the average monthly take-home pay is around 1700 EUR, you're talking about asking for nearly 7% of the average take-home pay /just/ to watch soccer. To put this into context, the common wisdom is to spend 30% on housing, so La Liga is saying its reasonable to ask a Spaniard to spend 1/4th what they do on housing on just the ability to watch soccer matches. No wonder people would rather find pirated streams.

Sometimes it's not just $5. It's $5, creating an account, handing over personal info, getting on a mailing list, agreeing to who knows what in a TOS, etc. Specifically, gamers look for cracks to allow them to play single player games offline. I don't doubt that some people are cheap, but there are lots of reasons aside from the price.

Maybe he does not think he deserves it? The logic is as follows. If he has to pay $10 for 90 minutes of watching football then he must think he deserves that. But if he can get it for free then he does not need to think he deserves it. Similar to how fat people may feel less guilty about eating candy when it is given to them than when they have to buy it.

> This would mean that they need sign in 20x more Spaniards to break even with the current situation. Are there 20x more Spaniards pirating the LaLiga than paying? Even in Spain I don’t think so.

Is it possible the product just isn’t worth the price they want to charge? Entirely likely.

On average at population scale, people are shockingly good at voting with their wallets.

> Apparently IPTV costs 20 to 60 Euros per year, the legal option is over 100 euros per month. To match the IPTV they need 20x price reduction.

Uh... Huh? How is EUR 20 * 20 approximately EUR 100?

This makes sense and the structure is similar to how sports packages are sold on US tv providers. It's getting somewhat better with more sports being streamed on big providers like Amazon but you more or less still have to pay out the ass and have to deal with local/national market exclusivity deals that make certain games unavailable.

I guess the question I'd have then is the economics of the pirate providers; I'm assuming that they have their own infrastructure costs to provide the streams at any level of reliability. Do they charge some nominal amount for access so that people who aren't willing to pay the full 200 euros for the top-tier official package can get just the sports games a la carte?

Official sites make things worse on purpose after getting any sort of traction because they can't stop chasing profits.

I don't watch sports, but my father watches soccer. He really only cares about 1 team and the national games from our home country. He was spending over $100/month to be able to watch the games, and they werent even in his native language. Now he pays $80/year for a pirate IPTV service and not only can he watch the games anywhere he wants, he also gets native language commentary for the games, national tv channels like news, etc.

When pirates can charge you money and offer a superior service, it absolutely is a service problem. You can claim that the realities of licensing and whatnot don't allow official channels to provide the best service they can, but that's not true in this case. When the same provider is splitting game broadcast from one team into different packages you know they're just trying to extract the most amount of money possible.

IDK the deal with scanlator sites nowadays, but I assume the official sites can provide more timely translations for manga since they can access the source material before anyone has seen it. I know most popular manga gets translated within hours of release, but if you're following some more niche stuff it can be several days. I also know a lot of scanlators have patreon pages so it's not like the demand from paying customers for translated media isn't there.

It doesn't have to be significantly better. If the service is stable, cheap and hassle-free, people will pay for it.

When Spotify came along, music piracy all but vanished. It has already been proven in other media, it needs to happen with sports and streaming in general, then media piracy will be a thing of the past.

> just serve images fast with a little nonintrusive ad. No login required. No way the official Japanese apps can provide significant better service than that.

Why not? Provide same experience but for logged in users with extra benefits that they feel like it's worth paying for, behind-the-scenes content, WIP, whatever.

There is always a way to stand out and provide a better experience, the very least because all people in the world don't want the same thing, and you can always find somewhat of a niche somehow.

Can they try providing equal service to that? Ie, localized into English at the same time as the fans group, fast loading site, etc. In my experience they're usually noticeably behind in those areas even with a subscription active.

Except that it isn't true.

Candycrush (CrunchyRoll of course) had gained the love of the anime crowd. Until they started to "optimise" bandwidth. It wasn't a pricing error as subscription price didn't increase.

They claim the degradation was perceptible. Except that it was.

It was many years ago, and since then candycrush lost subscribers. It won't because illegal streaming platforms got better, simply because the illegal platform provided the choice to go all the way to lossless quality.

For football, imo that's a pricing issue as well as a distribution issue. Basically I need to subscribe to a lock in plan even if I just desire to watch, say, the quarter to finals. Or simply the champions league.

But copyright law does exist?

I mean you just proved that it's service problem.

I read this as you are in fact in agreement with the statement. If that's the ceiling, provide the same level of service and gain more of the market. In which you have all the means to be faster, non-intrusive, and less faulty so that you can be always better.

That's kind of what I mean. From like 2000-2010 in the US, you could find Napster or Limewire icons on the desktops of people who would self-describe as not-a-computer-person. Conveniences like iTunes->iPod and streaming services like Spotify did a lot to depress the popularity of music piracy for a decade+ after that, though it seems to have made a bit of a comeback recently, apparently as a result of streaming services losing licensing rights and generally tightening the belts on their services. You could almost argue that the RIAA's (abhorrent, yes) behavior created the vacuum for new services that competed with piracy legally.

I don't know much about them but it seems like part of the problem might be that LaLiga is acting both as the distributor and enforcer? e.g. Universal Music Group might be among the RIAA members, but that doesn't stop UMG from having a distribution relationship with Spotify if it benefits them more to capture those sales directly vs. depending on the RIAA to be a legal watchdog. If all LaLiga has to do is lean on existing infrastructure to block sites that bother them, they'd seem to have no similar incentive to provide better paid service.

You are always going to find fringe users that would pirate everything no matter what. Hours of search, bad quality, bad audio? They don't care, they rather watch that shit than pay a buck for it.

But they are fringe, an anomaly. Most people will happily pay for stuff if it's confortable enough. Don't focus on the tail end of the human behavior distribution. Steam makes a lot of money, the devs publishing there, too. Spotify makes a lot of money. Netflix makes a lot of money...

Piracy is easily reduced to anecdotical as soon as you don't offer absolute shit service for a lot of money, as LaLiga does.

Browse r/homelab and your view might change.

Wondering which of the 8 providers has your show is lame.

How many middle class families can legitimately afford an extra $100/mo+ on multiple streaming services?

I guess I just wanna feel young again.

I’ve spend hundreds of thousands on just the hardware to store for all my pirated home theatre content.

I’d gladly pay money for it, but that’s not actually possible. The main cost of not pirating would be time, which is unacceptable because I’m neither a teenager nor poor.

Similarly, as a rich person who travels a lot, official sports streams just aren’t available for me.

Just for fun, I tried to Google and find an official site to watch LaLiga games:

“DAZN ISN'T AVAILABLE IN THIS COUNTRY”

“The request is blocked.” -https://www.laliga.com/en-GB/where-to-watch-laliga-easports

Movistar plus is in Spanish, probably not for me

But yeah, even fucking googling “laliga official stream” brings zero working paid alternatives for very very rich me.

There is only a market if there is a commodity.

La Liga is not a commodity as I can not equally make a La Liga.

This is the basis for antitrust regulations.

So no, there is not market. And as such there is no markets that functions as it should.

Markets don't make sense for non-fungible products.

Copyright has been OP for too long.

Its time we started whittling it back.

No really.... more so when some giant multinational that is bribing (lobbying is just legalized bribes, lets use the real word for it) the politicians start to loose money. Then an exception will be made for them, and they will continue. What they really want is for Cloudflare and others to give in and police it for them.

you think that a few deaths would stop this? optimistic...

I sure hope connected health device makers include some generous tolerance for network outages.

What kind of health devices require reliable internet connection to prevent death?

They just did not block anything today, the YES/NO is based on some frontend logic about the amount of IPs being blocked over multiple ISPs. The enforcement and exactitude of these blocks is pretty sloppy on their end so, despite the news today, I wouldn't be surprised if it takes them a bit longer to start blocking during these matches.

Maybe, although I don't think a lot of blocks will happen about anything other than different kinds of football. Given their following in Spain and the market I'd expect much more rampant piracy on F1 or MotoGP much sooner than... golf? which likely has a very very niche following in comparison. Surprising they didn't puruse about either of both, maybe because of different rightholders in the middle.

My Tailscale exit node disagrees ;)

However laws that stop large corporations' websites being accessible would never be passed in the US. Government for the corporation.

If they pass laws “with impunity” you can’t blame the voters that hard.

Last year a judge almost blocked all of telegram for everyone :( also because of a complaint of some large telco. Luckily they realised the extreme impact of this decision and reverted it.

That's why one company should not be allowed being an ISPs and a media company.

> This isn't stupidity. It's corruption.

Those two go hands in hands.

Speaking of which, the PM is surrounded by people a judge is currently indicting for various forms of corruption

His wife, right hand man, etc

What's that saying about the company you keep...

But cloudflare has no issue blocking the content if they receive a court order. The issue here is that La Liga wants to be able to get content blocked because they say so, and it has to be done right now.

I also don't support these organizations that destroy the sports that people love, force you to subscribe to different services as each game and "liga" has made their own deals to make as much money as possible. Until we remove the stupid amount of money that is involved in these sport events nothing will change. And now they are talking about other events like movies, series and live entertainment show. Hopefully they come for the VPNs next and break every business VPN tunnel whenever they want. Hopefully that will cause enough backlash that they finally fix this BS once and for all.

I never understood this attitude from native speakers towards their own language. I am a fresh NL citizen, and have struggled SO MUCH to assimilate into society largely due to this prevalent mentality of "dutch sux actually, we can all speak english amirite guys??" its so bafflingly self-destructive to your own culture. But go off I guess.

I mean, I also prefer to consume subtitled content, but sometimes it's nice to have the option to look away from the screen and not miss dialog. Some video content can even be consumed as audio-only content and not much will be missed.

Dubbed content is ok for young children I guess.

Regional accents are a thing and stuff like Argentinian Candy Candy or Cuban Mazinger Z are totally childhood-defining.

I hear la liga wants to do a prize too!

> but I do believe since watching football has become so expensive younger generations are going to watch less of it.

Every now and then we go out to watch some of the finals for the national (Spanish) team, and the audience most of the time lean young still today in 2026, although of course it's very mixed more depending on the bar/restaurant you go to rather than the football itself. Even if the subscription prices are expensive today, affording 4 EUR for two beers during a game in a bar is affordable even to teenagers.

I wonder when businesses will start suing ISPs for the losses they incur while they're cut off from half the internet.

It’s multiple ISPs though. A judge sentence commands them to do it. Insane, I know.

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)

> 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.

Does not seem like a good idea to a put a lid on a heavily boiling pot...

> And nothing can be done about it.

Don't give up so easily.

From this perspective, I kind of think that expanding the bans to golf and movie releases is a good thing - orders of magnitude less people partake in either of those, and so will start to feel the pain of their internet going down too...

Or you can have all of those things but also not block cloudflare. Because blocking cloudflare is in the interest of just a few company's profits and is unrelated to everything else you mentioned.

I don't think Spain has such amazing quality of life if you are not already set. It's very tough for young people. It doesn't reward hard work and education. If you have your nice house in a nice place and a good government job it's a happy place but from what I see around people, especially young productive people are not in good place here.

Spain is lucky that it gets around 20% of its economy because of nice weather (tourism + foreign real estate buyers) but I don't think it's enough to sustain the quality of life if there are no reforms.

You're welcome to walk to the cafe on the other side of town... however, if you're in a larger city in the southwest, you can expect that walk to take several hours. Just driving from one edge of the Phoenix metro area to the other corner can take upwards of over an hour and a half, and our traffic isn't nearly as bad as other cities.

As for healthcare... that's a mixed bag... you can go to the ER and you will be treated, but the bill afterwards may or may not be impactful... There have been some improvements, but the healthcare lobby is massive, and pretty much stops most reasonable and some unreasonable improvements.

On public transportation, it varies... you need to realize that the main part of the US is by itself about the size of Europe... I would assume there are plenty of areas of Europe where public transit is likely limited. Not even getting into Alaska, which is by itself massive and largely unpopulated. It's probably better to compare individual US States to EU nations in terms of transit.

As a Swede living in Spain for over 30 years, i much prefer to stay down here. My personal feel is that the Nordic countries "nanny" their populations too much. Too much say in way you can or can't do, and the culture encourages it (O my why are they talking so loud, O my they are arguing outside in public!.... My own experiences when visiting). The governments also don't know how to deal with the ingress of immigration as well as having a extensively privatized system that does not work (healthcare, schools, transport - i think its slowly getting better). Now there are great things too... But i feel safer walking the streets of Barcelona then the streets of Malmo.

Now Spain have their own issues - there are a lot of very light leaning people around still... there was no revolution when the dictator died. A lot of judges and military police officers that had murdered people under Franco continued in service. And of course, lets not forget how the countries plays everyone against Catalunya and Pais Vasco, everything is our fault if you ask people in the south and just like i mentioned above, all we hear about is the Vox and other ultra right people talking crap.

I think one of the few good things we still have down here in Spain is that there is still a memory of Franco, of the dictatorship. If not you, then one of your parents or grandparents lived it.

Ever been in France or Germany? Our bureoucracy it's nothing against theirs.

Any metric that treats the US as one single data point instead of 50 should be taken with a grain of salt. Denmark has 6 million residents, Minnesota has 5.7 million. You can't compare an entire continental nation, whose 50 states all set their own 50 different health, education and public spending policies, against e.g. Sweden or Spain. That's a bad comparison.

You’ll take my air gun out my cold dead hands?