alt.hn

5/23/2026 at 6:54:49 AM

Spanish court declines to fine NordVPN over LaLiga piracy blocking order

 https://torrentfreak.com/spanish-court-declines-to-fine-nordvpn-over-laliga-piracy-blocking-order/

by gslin

5/23/2026 at 9:46:45 AM

fantastic work.

PSA: if you still think its not the time to fight for your rights for the status quo in privacy you will come to regret it. If you are the type of person who reads this type of news and thinks: "cool the system is working, it'll sort itself out" you will come to regret it.

you will need to become more active or it will be taken away

by thomastraum

5/23/2026 at 10:14:20 AM

I wish people who state "you have to fight" also said how.

The extreme majority of people has no fucking clue about how to act about anything, and it's definitely the biggest blocker.

by iLoveOncall

5/24/2026 at 2:18:37 AM

One of the biggest forces is simply the voice of the people, as demonstrated in threads like this. Note how NordVPN cited growing public sentiment against taking half the internet down in Spain in an attempt to stop streams during games.

by jlaternman

5/23/2026 at 8:36:26 PM

[dead]

by boston_clone

5/23/2026 at 9:49:34 AM

Literally it'll sort itself out, as the bans are unconstitutional and more, law just takes long time and we have other shit to sort out before starting to panic about 3-5 Cloudflare IPs getting banned for 2 hours a week...

by embedding-shape

5/23/2026 at 10:14:33 AM

In Spain we have a domestic abuse law that is unconstitutional (different prison terms for men and women) and it has been there for a very long time.

What do you think are your chances of winning this in the constitutional court?

by nekzn

5/23/2026 at 10:24:42 AM

Are you talking about "Juzgados de Violencia Sobre la Mujer" or "Organic Act of Protection Measures against Gender Violence" or what are you lamenting? What law exactly and how is it unconstitutional?

If you're talking about that "gendered violence" gets different penalties compared to just "general violence", I think that's less about "different prison terms for men and women" but again, maybe you're talking about something else?

by embedding-shape

5/23/2026 at 10:56:34 AM

I’m talking about the LIVG which sets different prison terms for men and women for the same crimes.

Check articles 153, 171, and 172 of the Spanish Penal Code.

by nekzn

5/23/2026 at 11:12:10 AM

It is not a general "men and women get different prison terms for all the same crimes" rule, it applies to specific offences and specific relationship/victim categories. The Constitutional Court has also upheld it, meaning it's quite literally not unconstitutional.

For the people following along at home, parent is talking about "Ley Orgánica 1/2004, de 28 de diciembre, de Medidas de Protección Integral contra la Violencia de Género" AKA LIVG, which is a law containing gender-violence provisions aimed at a specific form of inequality in intimate-partner violence, as we (Spain) has a lot of that.

by embedding-shape

5/23/2026 at 12:31:15 PM

>For the people following along at home, parent is talking about "Ley Orgánica 1/2004, de 28 de diciembre, de Medidas de Protección Integral contra la Violencia de Género" AKA LIVG, which is a law containing gender-violence provisions aimed at a specific form of inequality in intimate-partner violence, as we (Spain) has a lot of that.

Which, to be clear, does explicitly discriminate depending if the aggressor is a man or a woman, since it defines gender violence as something that men do to women, explicitly.

You are not even disagreeing. You are arguing in favor of such discrimination and justifying it. This is not the place to argue such matters but the point that generally considering a law to be constitutional or not is no guarantee is more than proven.

by Levitz

5/23/2026 at 12:44:32 PM

I'm not agreeing nor disagreeing, nor providing justification, I'm just giving more context for people who might be reading about this and not having the full context or background of the wider conversation.

The law does explicitly create sex-asymmetric criminal treatment in these partner-violence offenses, I wouldn't deny this. A man assaulting, threatening, or coercing a female partner can fall under the LIVG-linked "violencia de género" provisions while a woman doing the equivalent to a male partner generally does not.

But our Constitutional Court has ruled that this asymmetry is constitutionally valid, because it treats the offense as gender violence tied to structural inequality, not as punishment merely for being male. This is why I think this isn't considering discrimination, and why it isn't unconstitutional.

I think the disagreement comes from what actually is discrimination, rather than me being OK with discrimination and others not, or vice-versa. I'm trying to explain the legal situation as objectively as I can, based only on what the legal texts actually say, and I'm trying to help you understand the reasoning of the Constitutional Court here, as obviously they don't agree with this being discriminatory.

by embedding-shape

5/23/2026 at 11:16:17 AM

It actually is that. Once again I ask you that you read the articles which quite clearly say what I said.

As you said, despite being flagrantly unconstitutional since men and women are supposed to be equal, the constitutional court said it’s okay to have different prison terms for men and women for the same exact offences.

by nekzn

5/23/2026 at 11:21:56 AM

Having gone through the same tiring conversation with 80% of all the maschistas around me in real-life, then also hearing about it on TV every single day when a new woman gets murded by her ex/husband/boyfriend, I rather not bring in the same off-topic conversation into HN.

It's sunny today, finally getting a bit warmer today and the chiringuito just opened, I'm gonna go have some croquetas de pollo and enjoy the day at the beach, I hope your day will be similarly pleasant!

by embedding-shape

5/23/2026 at 11:30:24 AM

I was expecting a better argument than calling me a misogynist and bragging about living next to the beach, but hey what do I know.

by nekzn

5/23/2026 at 12:46:01 PM

And I was expecting comments about internet censorship, you don't always get what you want :) I don't think you're a misogynist, just to be clear, different interpretation of laws shouldn't lead us to label people who argue about their point of view.

by embedding-shape

5/23/2026 at 6:57:26 PM

I have no idea about that law in particular and no dog in that fight, but I find

> The Constitutional Court has also upheld it, meaning it's quite literally not unconstitutional.

a weak argument when stated that absolute. Constitutional Courts occasionally shift in their opinions over time. If they do change -- has the previous court violated the constitution? Or is the constitution flexible enough to hold opposite viewpoints without being violated? Doesn't it become very flimsy at that point?

I think a better wording would it is not currently considered to be unconstitutional. It might be in the future if the court changes. Naturally that only happens over longer periods of time as old judges die and are replaced with younger judges who were born in a different era and raised with different values.

by luckylion

5/24/2026 at 12:10:29 PM

Tbf it seems pretty common internationally that women get lower sentences for the same crime regardless of any legal framework behind it.

Moreso if the crime was done with a man as the that woman was "most likely coerced".

As a gay dude in the UK the fact we have a specific MP for violence against women and children confuses me in that men suffer from way more incidences of violence - but what I get told is "yeah but men are doing the crimes mostly" aka a sexist judgement applicable to all men regardless of what sort of person they actually are.

Honestly, I'd rather be harassed for being gay than every join the heterosexual ecosphere; the interactions between opposite sexes are just ridiculous and illogical.

by fennecbutt

5/23/2026 at 11:35:49 PM

I think the issue is, what does "constitutional" mean?

Does it mean "agrees with what I interpret the constitution to mean" or "agrees with what the constitutional court interprets it to mean"? This law is unconstitutional in the first sense, constitutional in the second.

This is not unique to Spain – the US Supreme Court has a long history of interpreting the US constitution to mean a lot of things which aren't obviously in the original meaning of the text. Its recent conservative turn has seen it overturn some of those precedents, but many of them still stand.

Spain's constitutional court – much like the US Supreme Court – is a politicised body – if one doesn't agree with its jurisprudence, the answer is to vote for parties who will appoint judges with different jurisprudence.

by skissane

5/23/2026 at 9:54:08 AM

> about 3-5 Cloudflare IPs getting banned

You missed a few zeroes there buddy

> According to LaLiga itself, around 3,000 IP addresses are blocked every weekend[1]

[1] https://cybernews.com/news/cloudflare-spain-laliga-piracy-bl...

by swiftcoder

5/23/2026 at 10:01:54 AM

Which IPs that you use daily are actually affected by this though?

I've been trying to keep track myself and so far in my months of collecting, I've noted down one service which is unavailable during the matches for me, Docker Hub, everything else seems to work today.

Keep in mind, when they first started the blocks, a lot more was taken offline than what gets taken down when a match happens today, as they seem to continuously adjust it. The article you linked is from almost exactly a year ago, fwiw.

by embedding-shape

5/23/2026 at 11:04:09 AM

> Which IPs that you use daily are actually affected by this though?

My own company would get taken down.

by dbbk

5/24/2026 at 12:38:17 AM

It seems an interesting argument that more people will watch soccer or races if they cant do other things. They shouldnt enjoy extra benefits.

by theendisney

5/23/2026 at 11:06:24 AM

Maybe don't use Cloudflare in front of your business if you know that doing so will make it unavailable for 2-3 hours per week? These blocks been happening for years, if you're still letting you be affected, maybe you want to provide a poor service to your users?

Most companies who used to use Cloudflare and actually want to be available to users, moved away a long time ago, it's a lot easier than many think.

by embedding-shape

5/23/2026 at 12:26:05 PM

> Maybe don't use Cloudflare

They've also blocked Fastly in the past. I doubt any large CDN is immune.

> if you know that doing so will make it unavailable for 2-3 hours per week?

You expect companies all across the world to abandon their CDN providers because two countries (Spain and Italy) are being dicks about futbol?

by swiftcoder

5/23/2026 at 12:38:33 PM

> They've also blocked Fastly in the past. I doubt any large CDN is immune.

When was this exactly? Last time I heard about Fastly and La Liga in the same paragraph, was when Fastly and La Liga joined up to combat piracy together, I'm guessing what you speak of predates this? Not finding any information about this online though, either in English nor Spanish.

> You expect companies all across the world to abandon their CDN providers because two countries (Spain and Italy) are being dicks about futbol?

No, where are you getting that from?

Parent says their company gets blocked when the Cloudflare IPs get blocked, so that makes it sound like they're Cloudflare users. If they've experienced these blocks for two years already, yet still are complaining about it instead of fixing it, then I expect them to actually try something else than just complaining about it. But I'm also a pragmatist, and I know not everyone in this country is, so this might be why it feels so obvious to me.

by embedding-shape

5/23/2026 at 5:07:48 PM

>If they've experienced these blocks for two years already, yet still are complaining about it instead of fixing it, then I expect them to actually try something else than just complaining about it.

I get why you would feel like this since it sounds pretty obvious. However, especially if we are being pragmatic, we should consider that reality is a little bit more complicated:

- We don't know the terms of their contract: how much does it cost them to use CloudFlare services, if they have a chance of "cancelling" just the CDN (in the case of them having more stuff contracted), etc.

- If they decided to pay for CloudFlare services and not some other companies, they might have reasons for not wanting to migrate.

- It does not change that a 3rd party unilaterally decided to start this practice (let's remember that even CloudFlare has finally talked about this and they are obviously pissed) affecting other businesses because apparently theirs is more important.

Honestly this doesn't affect me, but that doesn't change that I get why they feel like even if they could (which we don't know) move away from CloudFlare, they don't think they should just because Tebas said so.

EDIT: Formatting

by eskori

5/23/2026 at 9:51:32 PM

Yeah, I'll let a company I don't do business with dictate who I actually do business with just because of their money interests. I don't like or use Cloudflare, I believe they are not good for the internet due to how centralised everything gets on them, and their blocking of non-mainstream setups (browser, OS, Javascript, no VPNs, no Tor and so on); but I'm not letting a football company say "we don't care about screwing you, we are blocking this"

by arielcostas

5/24/2026 at 9:15:27 AM

> but I'm not letting a football company say "we don't care about screwing you, we are blocking this"

I'm not sure you understand how these blocks in practice works, no private individual is "letting a football company" do anything, these are legal blocks enforcing the ISPs via courts and judges to block the Cloudflare IPs, you don't "let them" do it or not, it happens regardless of what you want.

by embedding-shape

5/24/2026 at 1:12:46 AM

That's very shortsighted, this pragmatism might work for a while but when enough companies do the same then some other infra provider would become the new big one, pirate sites would move to it, and La Liga would also block it, bringing everybody to square one.

by j1elo

5/24/2026 at 9:18:20 AM

Ok, so what company is La Liga going after now, since most companies in Spain already moved off Cloudflare? Since these blocks been happening for some hours per week, for years now.

I think you're missing a vital piece of the puzzle, the reason Cloudflare IPs are being blocked is because Cloudflare are not listening to legal take-down requests. Other CDN hosts are, which is why you're not seeing piracy streams using Fastly, because La Liga collaborates directly with Fastly.

So, given that CDN generally respond to legal requests, yet Cloudflare does not, I think this loop wouldn't happen if people move to CDNs that respond to legal requests, to be fair, is most of them.

by embedding-shape

5/23/2026 at 1:43:11 PM

Yes thanks that is what I did, you'll see I used the past tense

by dbbk

5/23/2026 at 1:46:02 PM

Right, but that's slightly misleading when we're talking about how people are affected (or not) by the current blocks today, not a year ago...

by embedding-shape

5/24/2026 at 7:25:41 AM

Law enforcement killing citizens is also unconstitutional, and so was slavery in many countries. What a piece of paper says is far from reality.

by selfhoster1312

5/24/2026 at 9:13:34 AM

Yes, and we're supposed to have freedom of speech in Spain too, guaranteed by our constitution, yet we do not. What other irrelevant details should we bring up that is currently missing from the conversation?

by embedding-shape

5/23/2026 at 10:06:46 PM

"Constitutional" is a matter of opinion. Don't take for granted that opinions can be bought. Don't take for granted that fighting for your rights in court is cheap. In this case, La Liga has more money then you.

by dfxm12

5/24/2026 at 11:02:09 AM

Your messaging I'm afraid actually does the opposite of what it intends to do. Telling people what they should or shouldn't care about tends to turn people off your cause.

by ChocolateGod

5/23/2026 at 7:22:11 AM

> “Inside Spain, the consequences of indiscriminate IP blocking have become almost impossible to ignore,” NordVPN writes

Too fucking right. It is beyond tiresome to fire up the laptop and wonder whether I'll need a VPN to access GitHub today

by swiftcoder

5/24/2026 at 5:16:05 AM

I just permanently live on a US VPN these days. [0] Not Spanish, but my own country has started overregulating the web, and it seems prudent to develop a long track record of appearing as a US based user to the various online fiefdoms, rather than needing to do it all at once once they pass some digital ID mandate or other nonsense.

Not that there's any complete guarantee that the US web will forever remain open and free (no such guarantee is possible), but it's significantly more likely there than here. The state of the open web worldwide is pretty depressing. :(

[0] Mullvad, not the bad ones. Though with mandatory ISP-level retention of browser history here, pretty much anything is an improvement for privacy.

by troad

5/24/2026 at 9:19:28 AM

> Though with mandatory ISP-level retention of browser history here

Huh, how would that even work? At most they get the host, at least unless you're still mostly using http sites, only the Host header should be visible to your ISP.

by embedding-shape

5/24/2026 at 10:53:51 AM

Yes, I mean hosts, not literal browser history. I should've been clearer.

by troad

5/24/2026 at 6:48:01 AM

Mullvad is Swedish, right?

by rollulus

5/24/2026 at 6:56:08 AM

I believe so! Though with a healthy set of global endpoints to route through, naturally.

by troad

5/23/2026 at 11:09:30 AM

I hope there is a secondary effect to all this - that websites, operators and web apps look for alternatives instead of always using Cloudflare (who themselves are a kind of LaLiga just in a different vertical).

by isodev

5/23/2026 at 11:14:53 AM

The blocks been going on for around/almost two years now, the ones who cared about remaining online for their users during the La Liga matches they do the blocks (not all of them anymore it seems) already moved, the only ones left on Cloudflare seems to be some people that refuse to move away regardless of how their users are impacted by it.

I think it's the same group of people who experience AWS downtime while having all their infrastructure there then go "Well, we're tried nothing and we're all out of ideas, guess we'll blame upstream".

by embedding-shape

5/23/2026 at 9:40:34 AM

When the blocks happen, does it take GitHub with it for you? I'm on Vodafone (in Spain) and it's just a few Cloudflare IPs that get blocked during the matches, never had GitHub unavailable, as Microsoft doesn't use Cloudflare for GitHub, AFAIK.

by embedding-shape

5/23/2026 at 9:45:31 AM

Cloudflare seems to be the most common victim, but I've seen Fastly get banned out as well (which seems to be what GitHub uses as their CDN in the EU)

by swiftcoder

5/23/2026 at 9:48:00 AM

AFAIK, it's literally exclusively Cloudflare for me, never seen anything else (IP) banned, just the good old DNS-based blocking for some other crap, but maybe it's because of my ISP. What ISP are you on? They all seem to be responding and doing this differently.

by embedding-shape

5/23/2026 at 12:32:55 PM

Movistar, masmovil, and orange. From what I can tell they all tend to implement slightly different overlapping blocks.

I wouldn't be nearly as annoyed if the blocking actually worked - my neighbour happily watches pirate futbol streams over the internal while my dev tools get blocked

by swiftcoder

5/23/2026 at 12:48:04 PM

Huh, where is the court order about the Fastly stuff? Also funny that the only major one you seem to be missing is Vodafone, which is the ISP I have, and Fastly never been blocked here, although Vodafone is more than eager to add things to their block-list.

> while my dev tools get blocked

What dev tools are you talking about here, that depends on remote Cloudflare IPs? Maybe I got used to the overall crap internet service here in Spain, but I couldn't imagine basing anything I need for my day-to-day job on something remote/on the internet that I couldn't use just because I wasn't online.

by embedding-shape

5/24/2026 at 6:59:13 PM

Docker.

I'm on Movistar, and I've had trouble pulling Docker images from Docker Hub.

by martin8412

5/23/2026 at 1:11:29 PM

> What dev tools are you talking about here, that depends on remote Cloudflare IPs?

It's never just been Cloudflare. There's even a blogpost from Vercel[1] about it when they had their exit nodes banned during the biggest outage last year:

> This issue isn’t isolated to Vercel. Cloudflare, GitHub Pages, and BunnyCDN are also affected.

[1] https://vercel.com/blog/update-on-spain-and-laliga-blocks-of...

by swiftcoder

5/23/2026 at 1:14:51 PM

Again, what dev tool are you using that get blocked because of these blocks? Is it Vercel you're unable to use during the blocks? Because my local Vercal installations keeps working just as well with no internet as with internet, so I'm guessing some Cloudflare IPs going offline won't have any effect either.

You again reference blog posts from more than a year ago, the situation here in Spain isn't the same today as it was back then, it isn't blocking as much as it used to, and surely if you're personally impacted by these blocks, like I am, then you'd notice the difference today compared to before?

by embedding-shape

5/23/2026 at 4:50:41 PM

“But how does it affect you PERSONALLY?”

by iamnothere

5/23/2026 at 5:00:12 PM

As someone who actually IS affected by this personally, I'd love to have any details from others affected too, not sure why this would be surprising.

by embedding-shape

5/23/2026 at 5:10:15 PM

You seem to be in this thread downplaying the seriousness of the problem using the common trope I quoted above. The thing is, even if someone isn’t personally affected, it’s still a bad situation that a football league has this kind of power over internet infrastructure, and it’s ok for them to oppose that situation!

by iamnothere

5/23/2026 at 6:00:24 PM

I'm trying to understand the full scope of it, because I keep reading about how many websites don't work, and developer tooling that doesn't work, but then I sit here with a Spanish ISP and can only notice one going offline during games (Docker Hub), everything else I use on a daily basis keeps working. So I'm not downplaying, I'm trying to understand if the difference is truly so large between different ISPs, or if people just rely on completely different tooling, and if so, what are they using exactly?

Yes, I agree that it sucks and is terrible that the football league has so much power of internet infrastructure, especially when we're supposed to have free access to internet, that's in our constitution, and Spain also agreed as such when entering EU too, and many other reasons. That's a larger legal battle, one I'm personally not involved in, but I could take the time to actually understand what happens practically and the full scope, so I can at least note down exactly what went down at what time, so I can keep sending complaints about it.

But to truly understand, gather evidence and having any sort of chance of actually affecting this, you need to understand the full scope of it, outside of the piracy streams, the stuff that is getting blocked that shouldn't. A year ago I noticed a lot of that happening, but today not so much, so clearly it's different today, but still important to gather the full picture before you jump to conclusions.

by embedding-shape

5/23/2026 at 7:24:08 PM

> only notice one going offline during games (Docker Hub)

Even if it only affected DockerHub, that's sufficient to break many modern developer workflows.

It is however not only DockerHub - as I mentioned upthread, GitHub and AWS are both routinely affected. I've also had npm and crates.io blocked at various times.

You may be getting lucky with how closely your particular ISP is adhering to the block requests, but others are less lucky.

by swiftcoder

5/24/2026 at 4:55:40 AM

Can confirm they've null routed various cloud providers IPs - with no notification and when folks reached out to the telecoms it took them 2 weeks of impact before they responded (even when provided with sufficient data of specific IPs getting dropped in their network).

by pigggg

5/24/2026 at 9:21:23 AM

Yes, IT infrastructure been a mess for a long time in Spain, even some regions TLDs been raided over bullshit and more before, no question about it.

Never noticed any other cloud provider than Cloudflare being affected by these "La Liga" blocks though, all the others seems to open collaborate with La Liga directly, instead of having a judge enact ISPs to act against the CDNs, but maybe I missed some announcement?

by embedding-shape

5/23/2026 at 6:48:33 PM

I do not say it is not true because too many cases pop up here, however, I live in Spain and so does my company and we had this 0 times. Provider dependent? We have domestic fiber in Malaga.

by anonzzzies

5/23/2026 at 8:54:20 PM

Possibly. I'm on Orange fiber and I haven't noticed anything weird either.

However all my torrent traffic already goes through VPN and I don't watch football or any kind of live Spanish TV, I have zero interest in any sport.

by wolvoleo

5/24/2026 at 12:43:29 AM

If any unrelated ip is blocked they are in violation of the EU common market regulations. Its simply not allowed.

by theendisney

5/23/2026 at 9:37:22 AM

Finally, some common sense in this utterly absurd situation. I'm so glad this year's "fútbol" season ends this weekend. AFAIK, they don't break the Internet for Segunda División matches (yet!).

by mdlxxv

5/23/2026 at 9:39:03 AM

Oh boy do I have news for you; they're thinking of doing the same for other sports now too, not just football :) At least the blocks only been for a small amount of Cloudflare IPs, but still sucks big time.

by embedding-shape

5/23/2026 at 9:51:29 AM

Sigh. As if I had not enough reasons to hate professional sports ...

by mdlxxv

5/23/2026 at 8:51:28 AM

Considering web addresses are easily changed, it was a futile suggestion to say block LaLiga streams. Good on Nordvpn. As a football fan, the owners of the leagues have too much power. Like in the UK people have gone to jail for piracy, which should never happen.

by ktallett

5/23/2026 at 10:08:46 AM

I am not defending the current situation but I am not aware of any case where anyone in the UK has gone to jail for piracy. Invariably what actually happens in such cases is:

1. See headline 'movie pirate goes to prison' which implies a link between the activity and the event 2. Actually read article based on industry press release and learn that the defendant was actually convicted for counterfeiting because they were running a business selling set-top boxes with preinstalled unauthorised streaming software or running their own third party unauthorised streaming service with paid subscriptions or something.

by squiffsquiff

5/24/2026 at 9:35:57 AM

There have both been fraud, which I find is more often the case recently along with money laundering. However, one of the Woodward brothers was charged and convicted with distributing copyrighted material, hence piracy.

by ktallett

5/23/2026 at 9:19:11 AM

That is why they blocked the whole internet. You can't avoid a block by changing your address if the whole internet is blocked.

by chadgpt3

5/23/2026 at 9:39:46 AM

Who blocked the whole internet? Doesn't happen here in Spain, which is the context for this submission, is "blocked the whole internet" what they do in the UK?

by embedding-shape

5/23/2026 at 9:48:47 AM

> Doesn't happen here in Spain

Yeah, it does. They banned an unreasonably large range of Cloudflare CDN IPs pretty regularly during LaLiga matches, effectively blocking big chunks of the internet from Spain. It has gained fairly broad notice across the world in the last year[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-geGEYEw7g

by swiftcoder

5/23/2026 at 9:51:01 AM

Haha, what? Are you going in circles? We're talking about the La Liga matches, that's the context of this conversation :P

And no, "the whole internet" does not get blocked, a handful of Cloudflare IPs get blocked, so any neighbors using those IPs too, are also unavailable.

Maybe it's just me, but some IPs on Cloudflare being blocked isn't "blocked the whole internet" and if you it is, I suggest you start visiting more websites than the 1-2 American ones you're stuck in seemingly.

by embedding-shape

5/23/2026 at 10:01:28 AM

The whole internet wasn't blocked but a significant percentage was taken down due to the attempt to take down la liga streams. As explained, some banks, some payments systems, and a few other things stopped working due to the governments attempt at blocking streams. The government are clearly trying to exercise control over the people in a way that just doesn't work. It's no surprise though as the government has always been too heavily involved in football in Spain, especially Real Madrid and Barcelona.

by ktallett

5/23/2026 at 10:02:44 AM

> but a significant percentage

Which websites/services that you use was actually hit by this and what ISP are you on though?

> I've been trying to keep track myself and so far in my months of collecting, I've noted down one service which is unavailable during the matches for me, Docker Hub, everything else seems to work today.`

by embedding-shape

5/23/2026 at 10:45:05 PM

Why do you feel it necessary for someone to explicitly prove something that has been reported on for nearly a year?

by shimman

5/23/2026 at 11:57:32 PM

Because I should be seeing it myself, locally, but I am not. How come? Why the discrepancy? Am I missing to keep track of some websites, as I'm currently only seeing Docker Hub being down, and the more websites I can add to my complaints, the higher chance they have of working.

by embedding-shape

5/24/2026 at 11:01:20 AM

[dead]

by indianwashlet

5/23/2026 at 9:30:47 AM

They didn't mean to, just they were incompetent. Also considering Spanish league is spread over the full long weekend a waste of time.

However this is why infrastructure and connection method is needing to be removed from the government by creation and adoption of alternatives such as mesh.

by ktallett

5/23/2026 at 10:30:28 PM

If pirates "have to" use Cloudflare then blocking Cloudflare does work.

by wmf

5/23/2026 at 9:01:41 AM

Sue the courts for telecomms interruption and tampering from LaLiga.

by anthk

5/23/2026 at 9:18:41 AM

You can't sue a court in a court for doing court stuff. Courts are superuser. They can do anything they want to. The recourse is vetting people before they become judges.

by chadgpt3

5/23/2026 at 9:31:40 AM

This seems dysfunctional and a API for institutional subversion. If you can subvert the machinery that creates judges, you can basically take over a democracy without having any way to fix that except for institutional repair and waiting out the working lifespan of judges (which can be 1.5 generations)

by picsao

5/23/2026 at 9:51:06 AM

That is correct. It's why the Republican party went so hard to prevent any non-Republican judges from joining the supreme court over the last 1.5 generations.

by chadgpt3

5/23/2026 at 9:51:59 AM

Really confusing to talk about "Republicans" in a thread about Spain and not making it clear if you're talking about Republicans-Republicans or the modern Faux-Republican, AKA US-Republican :)

by embedding-shape

5/23/2026 at 9:51:54 AM

What do you mean "if you can"? It has already happened in several democratic countries.

by radiator

5/23/2026 at 7:55:53 PM

This is exactly what happened in my country and several others.

by matheusmoreira

5/23/2026 at 9:56:23 AM

Fuck European football and everything about it. Hopefully this year's world cup will be absolute unpopular failure.

by lifestyleguru

5/24/2026 at 2:24:21 AM

No, fuck LaLiga. UCL always delivers for us fans and so does the world cup. It'll be extremely popular as always, for good reason.

by regexorcist

5/23/2026 at 8:45:21 AM

[flagged]

by breppp

5/23/2026 at 8:49:31 AM

You mean other than Berlin, Malmö, Paris, London, Munich, and many others. Europe doesn't have so many huge companies but that's not a bad thing. We do have a lot of companies doing key work that may benefit society as a whole.

by ktallett

5/23/2026 at 1:03:41 PM

While there are outliers, most of the European economy is Spain rather than Sweden

The European economy is still largely the same as pre-WW2, heavy machineries, cars, chemicals and these are becoming less relevant with Chinese competition. However, the move to tech never materialized like in the US, so no surprise when soccer becomes more important than anything else, it's the only long term viable export in bleak places like Spain

by breppp

5/23/2026 at 1:54:48 PM

In Spain soccer is culturally important - not economically central. Everyone in the world knows teams like Real Madrid or Barcelona. On the other side Spain is home of major telecom and banking multinationals, high-speed rail networks, renewable energy... the startup ecosystem is strong in many cities.

Also european countries are deeply competitive in areas like industrial automation, aerospace, pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, telecommunications infrastructure, renewable energy systems, scientific instrumentation, petrochemicals etc.

Tourism is strong because the immense cultural heritage.

by bromuro

5/24/2026 at 8:58:09 AM

> Everyone in the world knows teams like Real Madrid or Barcelona

I promise you that if you go canvas a random selection of North Americans you would be astonished at how many do not recognize "Barcelona" as anything but a city. Football is really not very popular there. Though in recent years it is slowly becoming a bit more watched.

by SpaceNugget

5/24/2026 at 9:38:11 AM

I can assure you that Mexicans (where football is the main sport and has been for years) would, Hondurans, Panamanians, and many others. If you simply mean the USA and Canada say so. Football is the most watched sport comfortably, with the odd anomaly like the US.

by ktallett

5/24/2026 at 11:00:46 AM

If I'm refuting that everyone in the world knows x, by showing a large population that doesn't know x. Saying that there is some other population that does know x makes no difference.

GP: all trucks are red. Me: no, here's some trucks that are blue. You: but look how many red trucks I see over there.

by SpaceNugget

5/24/2026 at 1:35:42 PM

Seems a bit US-centric calling UA population "large": it is roughly the 4% of the world.

by bromuro

5/24/2026 at 12:31:17 PM

I think a good example of how this plays out is the way Gulf countries are buying European soccer clubs and Museums.

Countries that are economically conscious of a future time where they will be left producing nothing (oil replacement) are seeing the european model as inspiration

Your examples such as telecom and banking are supposed to support and grow out of a real economy, not replace it

by breppp

5/24/2026 at 1:44:35 PM

Actually I was referring to China, South Asia, Singapore, Hong Kong, India, South Korea. There European football is immensely popular. Or are these country not "economically conscious" either. Are the US economically "conscious" too?

by bromuro

5/23/2026 at 8:58:28 PM

Tech is very present in Europe. We don't have that kind of ultra capitalist startup culture but when I see what comes out of that (meta, Google, Microsoft) I'm glad we don't. They're all companies that place profit over ethics..

We do have more sustainable efforts. Not as big but better.

by wolvoleo

5/23/2026 at 7:41:35 AM

I'll repeat what I said the last time about laliga...

> Foot egg is so ingrained into the countrymen that nothing else matters.

> There wouldn't be so much of a forced monopoly if more people would stop watching games and stand up to laliga.

> Complaining on the internet every time laliga shuts down github etc isn't going to change anything, we can't solve your problems, the change has to come from within.

Props to the court for telling laliga to go away.

by nubinetwork

5/23/2026 at 8:28:12 AM

Refering to football as foot egg when it’s actually a ball as opposed to the hand egg in the US is weird to me.

OT: La Liga shouldn’t have this kind of power and it’s good to see the court take a stance

by JrProgrammer

5/23/2026 at 8:53:29 AM

They call American football handegg, we should be able to do the opposite. :P

by nubinetwork

5/23/2026 at 9:32:55 AM

The opposite of "hand egg" is not "foot egg".

And the point is that the object played in "American Football" is not a ball. Balls are round. It is egg shaped. The object played in "Football" is a ball. Describing the ball in football as an egg just makes you look like you can't see properly.

by AndrewDucker

5/23/2026 at 11:55:16 AM

i get it, it’s not the canonical “egg shape”, but many eggs (fish/frogs/etc) are spherical.

by cobbzilla

5/23/2026 at 12:16:39 PM

"Foot Fish-egg" would be pretty funny, I agree.

by AndrewDucker

5/23/2026 at 9:19:40 PM

Foot-roe, or foot-spawn for amphibians.

by Symbiote

5/23/2026 at 9:09:39 AM

that just sounds petty for the sake of pettiness, surely you can do better in terms of mocking

by Yiin

5/23/2026 at 9:12:56 AM

Which is foot ball. Not foot egg.

by louthy

5/23/2026 at 10:15:42 PM

Soccer is also known as "divegrass", not footegg...

by dfxm12

5/23/2026 at 9:12:04 AM

The opposite would be foot ball. Although both are petty as anyway both are called it because it is played on foot with a ball. Not because you use your foot to kick a ball.

by ktallett

5/23/2026 at 9:51:05 AM

> There wouldn't be so much of a forced monopoly if more people would stop watching games

I don't think giving up one's national sport is really the right response here. We should absolutely be able to enjoy sports without bowing down to regulatory-capture-by-former-government-ministers

by swiftcoder

5/23/2026 at 9:55:31 AM

> We should absolutely be able to enjoy sports without bowing down to regulatory-capture-by-former-government-ministers

You're right, you absolutely should... but the only way to tell them that you don't like their policies is to stop giving them your money.

by nubinetwork