Spain’s LaLiga has blocked access to freedom.gov

[rock_artist]

It’s sad that most comments are just focusing on political bashing instead of the root problem here.

It’s the fact LaLiga and Spanish ISPs comply.

They’re “carpet” blocking entire IPs of Cloudflare.

Every weekend if I need to access some of my work websites which are affected by this (while there are football games) - I need to VPN to bypass the blocking.

I’m new in Spain so my ability of surfacing the Spanish law or the European is limited. But I really wish they’ll have to find a nicer approach instead of this aggressive approach.

[beloch]

Cloudflare has become so ubiquitous that they've become a major vulnerability for non-U.S. governments. The recent outages offered a small taste of what might happen if the U.S. government, on one of their random whims, ordered Cloudflare to block everyone and every site within a target country.

This in no way excuses what Spain is doing, but its important to recognize that the internet is becoming more of a battlefield every day.

[isodev]

I also see another side of the problem - too many services are proxied via CloudFlare making it easy to disrupt at the same time. Folks really need to try and choose alternatives instead of feeding the “world firewall”

[KAMSPioneer]

Spanish ISPs comply because Spanish judges issue legal injunctions that obligate them to institute these blocks. Sure, Movistar/Telefónica would do it anyway (I understand that they're the rightsholder in this case), but other ISPs are forced to do this by the courts.

I'm a US immigrant here and since I couldn't give a shit about soccer it is extremely annoying to be blocked from websites for something I am barely aware of. The ultimate irony is that none of this bears fruit because I am capable of streaming these games with no VPN by just avoiding CF sites if I had any desire at all. The blocks are invasive and yet ineffective.

[carlosbaraza]

I have commented this in multiple occasions. What is happening here in Spain with LaLiga is just absurd. My company's domain gets blocked often because we use CloudFlare. In essence, any service using CloudFlare gets blocked often. The main problem is that the common Joe tries to navigate and finds that it doesn't work, and they blame their network, and when they come back two hours later after the game finished, the website works, so they move on. The only way for this to get resolved is if they blocked something critical and an accident happened because of that (e.g. hospital services, traffic control, or something like that). Eventually this will escalate to national courts (currently this was dictated by a regional court in Barcelona). But again, legal action is extremely slow. VPNs are becoming a must everywhere, because the Internet is becoming wild from all directions.

[egorfine]

> What is happening here in Spain with LaLiga is just absurd

So what? I don't see crowds protesting on the streets of Barcelona. People are compliant, unfortunately.

[hulitu]

> My company's domain gets blocked often because we use CloudFlare.

Then don't use it. When I want to go to "example.com", I want "example.com", not Cloudfare, a "mafia organization" which is "protecting" "example.com".

[everdrive]

The most obvious outcome possible.I was never able to load the website myself, but if you centralize things to a specific website, it's trivial to block it. Since I could never load the site, I don't know if they had any plans outside of just putting up a website. If not, this was incredibly stupid.

[mcny]

Pretty sure it is all performative and the actual audience is the voters in the US.

[NooneAtAll3]

the goal was to publicly display european censorship and to take down its moral "high ground"

it succeeded

[SilverElfin]

I think it looks stupid on the surface. But maybe it is a purposeful way to goad European countries into taking increasingly authoritarian policy changes like banning VPNs. They will use it to generate outrage among Europeans and undermine the leadership, and try to either split the EU along these lines or place friendly leaders.

Maybe this is conspiracy theory. But I feel like the aggression they’ve shown - even people like Marco Rubio - suggests they’re acting with a purpose.

[redbell]

For those wondering what is this freedom.gov thing, it was discussed here a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47067270

[embedding-shape]

FWIW, Vodafone ES still resolves freedom.gov fine via their own DNS resolver. They're usually very block happy, can't access Anna's, TBP and also not Cloudflare during La Liga games normally, as some examples. But freedom.gov still resolves seemingly.

Can any other Spaniards confirm if freedom.gov still resolves for them?

As a side-note, I don't know why anyone would want to block that website in the first place? Barely has any information about what it is, and doesn't seem to be able to be used for anything as of today either.

[rock_artist]

It resolves now but also other websites that are blocked during games are available.

[KAMSPioneer]

At 11.30 CET it resolved for me on DIGI ES, but as a sibling comment pointed out, there's no soccer game on at the moment, so that's probably why.

As for why it's blocked, isn't this website planned to be related to censorship evasion? By purporting to help Spanish ISP users circumvent the blocks on CF sites imposed by their government, this site would run afoul of the megalomaniacs that instituted the blocks.

[hedora]

Ignoring the disastrous policies of the Spanish government, I find it telling that this was the year when it finally became worth it to pay to VPN out of the US, and also the year when this freedom.gov propaganda thing launched.

[stackghost]

Perhaps Europe should put up a portal to bypass American copyright restrictions. Free speech, and all that.

[kube-system]

Copyright was invented in England and was globalized by France by a treaty signed in Switzerland. The US didn’t join the treaty until 102 years later. Up until 1989 the Berne Convention was stronger than US copyright law.

[iamnothere]

As an American I accept your terms. More freedom for all.

[helterskelter]

If Europe would set up a way to facilitate non-Europeans getting GDPR protections I'd pay them a good bit of money.

[drnick1]

It's sad to see that, in Spain, the soccer mafia controls the country.

[aucisson_masque]

The situation in Spain with laligua is becoming crazy, completely crazy.

[mschuster91]

No surprise, it's Cloudflare:

    $ host freedom.gov
    freedom.gov has address 172.67.219.106
    $ whois 172.67.219.106
    NetRange:       172.64.0.0 - 172.71.255.255
    CIDR:           172.64.0.0/13
    NetName:        CLOUDFLARENET

A lot of Cloudflare is netblocked during soccer games in Spain, this has been a thing for years now.

This is not a dedicated block against freedom.gov, it's just the ordinary collateral damage from the fight against sports piracy. Sigh.

The truly fun fact here rather is that the US government seems to be unable to host a website on its own these days but needs Cloudflare's protection. It's either a grift, a hack job / MVP demo or every last competent person in IT there has departed or been DOGE'd off. Ridiculous.

[SilverElfin]

Wait that’s a thing? It sounds outright crazy to block people from going about their business and using the Internet to protect one particular industry. Especially sports, which is low priority to me and I am sure to many people.

[Symbiote]

This Reddit post [1] says the block 188.114.96.0/23 is blocked.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1ravua8/psa_if_...

[EugeneOZ]

Just checked - not blocked, works just fine (Adamo and Vodafone).

[LtdJorge]

Adamo never blocks, at least for me. Vodafone does.

[13415]

That seems a bit fast since nothing is on that ridiculously looking website yet, but if this website is planning to host content that is illegal in the EU, then it will be blocked by many EU countries. Usually, these blocks aren't very effective. My country blocks most piratebay domains, for instance.

[mrtksn]

It's misleading title, not Spain as the government but LaLiga(a sports organization) abused its given powers and apparently demanded that ISPs block the site.

So it's very American style censorship in principle, that is it is censorship for profit reasons HOWEVER it is wrong in this particular instance because freedom.gov hadn't infringe copyrights. Nothing political despite what the title may make you believe so, purely internal issue. Italians are having similar problems with their football streaming organizations.

[petcat]

I'm not aware of American ISPs and CDNs straight-up blocking websites. That is distinctly European-style censorship.

American style censorship would be more like going through the courts to get an order to have the domains seized.

[bflesch]

What are the odds that the Cloudflare CEO will have a twitter meltdown about this?

[Hikikomori]

Are they restreaming football?

[rvnx]

www.rt.com is blocked in a couple of countries in Europe, so it's not about football, rather to curb "disinformation" for the next elections or whatever.

https://www.isdglobal.org/digital-dispatch/the-achilles-heel...

So, freedom.gov is also blocked to protect you from fake news I guess.

Sad.

[ionwake]

Whe you realise the most culturally important things in Spain were dragonball and football this all starts to make more sense. I don’t know if this still is the case but it seems so.

[jmclnx]

No surprise with that, I would think other countries will do the same.

But as we all know, there are ways around that for people who really have to go there.

[rvnx]

Until these workarounds are progressively made illegal or required to provide identification.

https://www.generation-nt.com/actualites/vpn-age-mineurs-roy...

It's not ok at all, because such operators will get punished if they don't.

Therefore they will more and more respect the law to block sites, etc.

[aprilnya]

great website explaining the situation for anyone not familiar: https://hayahora.futbol

(language switcher in the top right)

[mocmoc]

Spain living in 2010’s tech

[mezod]

if Spain does that to protect LaLiga football games, god knows what they do against political rivals or movements such as Catalonia in 2017...or now?

[morissette]

It looks like a landing page… wth is freedom.gov?

[diputsmonro]

I feel like this move is premature and playing directly into Trump's hands. "See how Europe flinched at even the suggestion of free speech, we haven't even started yet"

Surely whatever they eventually put up on there will be blatant and horrible propaganda, but I think judging the reactions are the purpose of the site, not the content itself.

[herbst]

It doesn't matter anymore. Trump is saying and turning everything the way he wants. The majority of the world doesn't listen anyway and you guys seem to have a horrible time either way.

[XorNot]

The site was created for the express purpose of enabling bypass of sovereign policy decisions: so yeah, it's going to be blocked.

[eaf7e281]

freedom is not coming

[tjpnz]

US ISPs would do the same if the EU started hosting the unredacted Epstein files.

[exabrial]

laughable on both sides.

[tovej]

Good. freedom.gov is a clear subversive political influence campaign that should be banned by all European countries.

[JohnLocke4]

It is basically just a proxy. I don't see how censorship could be an antidote to a "subversive political influence campaign" - if anything you're describing censorship