LaLiga Blocks Cloudflare Again, New Pirate IPTV Providers & Anything in The Way

After admitting it deliberately blocked Cloudflare to prevent a pirate IPTV service reaching users in Spain, LaLiga warned it would continue for as long as necessary to prevent live sports piracy. With thousands of innocent website owners and internet users suffering as collateral damage, a new LaLiga announcement reveals that two additional pirate IPTV providers with 400,000 local users have also been blocked, again by blocking Cloudflare. Charts and graphs produced by internet users leave little to the imagination.

When pirate site-blocking measures have hit Cloudflare in the past, those responsible responded in various ways when news of collateral damage began to spread.

A swift and relatively silent ‘CTRL-Z response’ seemed most effective at subduing criticism, mostly because it solved the problem.

When blunders were to blame, a quick-fix while pretending to know nothing was reasonably effective too. Flat-out public denials, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, has rarely shown to be effective. Bald-faced denial isn’t without its merits, however.

Denial tends to show that while blocking still took place, those responsible prefer not to be associated with the collateral damage making the headlines. In the grand scheme of things, only a tiny minority care about pirate sites being blocked because, in the grand scheme of things, only a small minority of people are pirates.

When paying customers end up paying the price, site-blocking successes are no match for widespread feelings of injustice.

Viva España

In Spain, LaLiga has torn up the metaphorical site-blocking etiquette rule book and challenged Cloudflare to a public fistfight instead. By admitting last weekend that it deliberately blocked Cloudflare to block a webpage run by a piracy app, and by extension many innocent websites and countless internet users, LaLiga publicly owned its actions and sailed into unchartered waters.

Paraphrasing Cloudflare, LaLiga blocked Cloudflare to get at piracy app Duckvision because it believes it has authority from a local court to do so. Having weighed its interests against those of pirates, Cloudflare, and all internet users in Spain, LaLiga’s interests came out on top.

LaLiga paints Cloudflare as an uncooperative villain who must now take responsibility for the consequences of its own inaction. And LaLiga has every right to take that position, just as Cloudflare has the right to refute the allegations.

In many parts of Spain, meanwhile, fundamental EU rights may face challenges: Article 11: Freedom of expression and information, and Article 16: Freedom to conduct a business, for example. Article 17: Right to property, which includes intellectual property, is the base upon which site-blocking measures ultimately stand, so at least everyone isn’t losing out.

Meanwhile on the Internet

So, in the all-important court of public opinion, Judge Disposable Income presiding, who will shoulder most blame for the disaster depicted in the image below?

Posted to X by a user in Spain, the image shows Uptime Kuma, a great tool easily configured to point towards most online services for the purpose of monitoring their availability. After pointing the software at a Cloudflare IP address, a series of successful ‘pings’ build to create the horizontal green line seen in the middle, with a history of what went before displayed in the chart at the bottom.

The huge block of red sits in a space where there was no connectivity for the user, at a time when a LaLiga match was airing on live TV. Cloudflare wasn’t offline, local ISPs were responsible for blocking Cloudflare under instruction from LaLiga. In a statement issued last weekend, LaLiga vowed that blocking Cloudflare would continue.

Google, Cloudflare, VPN providers, and other entities facilitating piracy are responsible for the illegal activities they enable and profit from. LALIGA, backed by the justice system, will not relent in its efforts to protect football and the interests of its clubs against criminal action related to audiovisual fraud and digital laundering.

LaLiga Makes Good On its Word

A new statement from LaLiga celebrates the successful blocking of two additional pirate IPTV services, DazcFutbolios and RBTV77, both of which reportedly used Cloudflare as a “digital shield” to stay online.

“In its ongoing commitment to protecting intellectual property rights, LALIGA has successfully blocked illegal broadcasts from the DazcFutbolios and RBTV77 platforms this weekend,” LaLiga’s statement reads.

“These illegal platforms, which allowed the unauthorized transmission of football matches, operated both on the Web and in Apps, and used Cloudflare’s infrastructure and resources to hide their criminal activity alongside legitimate domains, which are used as a digital shield, in order to try to evade security controls. Between them, they account for more than 400,000 unique monthly users in Spain.”

Addressing Public Concerns

From a business perspective, LaLiga’s recent statements address most of the key talking points underpinning the current controversy. The league says it obtained authority from a court but also understood that cooperation from Cloudflare would make a difficult job a lot easier.

As a result, Cloudflare was given every opportunity to cooperate but refused to do so, LaLiga notes, leaving it with no other choice or than to block Cloudflare in order to block the IPTV providers. Any suggestion of reckless behavior is incorrect, LaLiga adds.

“These blocks, which are neither massive nor indiscriminate as LALIGA has previously stated, have also disabled a series of IPs specifically identified as hosting pirate services and unauthorized streaming services that operated in parallel,” the statements adds.

No Backing Down, But at Any Cost?

In disputes of this magnitude, the devil can often be found in the detail. Before LaLiga obtained the court order, it knew that Cloudflare is generally opposed to blocking; hardly a revelation for a company with a mission to improve online connectivity. In the knowledge that collateral damage was inevitable, LaLiga had a choice too. Having made that choice, Cloudflare is framed as the party responsible for the collateral damage, despite the power to avoid that ultimately belonging to LaLiga.

Describing the blocks as neither massive nor indiscriminate is completely accurate, at least without context. The image to the right shows that LaLiga carefully selected its targets by blocking not one but several IP addresses, each with an unknown number of innocent sites behind them, in addition to the intended targets.

LaLiga wasn’t indiscriminate when it selected the IP addresses, nor did it block a massive number of them. That simply isn’t required; Cloudflare services a huge number of important websites in Spain using relatively few IP addresses.

No Peacemakers Available

Given that this dispute looks set to continue and backing down has been ruled out, the question of intervention raises its head and who might be responsible for preventing a potential national disaster. If malicious hackers had caused a similar loss in connectivity, Spain’s Ministry of Communications would be a logical choice. Thus far, we’re unaware of any action, or indeed any interest from groups that may have any power to step in.

Historically, ISPs have ensured that blocking orders “do no harm” in their quest to block pirate sites. The mechanism in Spain is unclear but at least thus far, the ISPs involved are informing the public they’re not to blame and are simply obeying orders.

Of course, attending court to negotiate the terms of blocking is always part of the process, just as it is for Cloudflare now, LaLiga insists. The truth is, choices are available in every direction but the only ones suitable for consideration put Spain’s internet users first.

Credit: @Sergio_deLuz

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