Hi Raúl, thanks for the info... how weird that Spain's doing the same that Italy has been doing for over a year now... but of course the Spanish way, much less organised and more improvised. This is the second *known* country to widely implement this kind of thing now, and also the second that does it because football (aka "soccer"). I've read the snarky comments from two others; folks, this is serious business. Especially when you look at the experiences made by Italian Internet users (like Google apps unavailable for days because someone did the wrong thing) you'll quickly stop joking. ...a concerned Internet citizen (who also happens to be connected in Spain). nanog@lists.nanog.org (Raúl Martínez via NANOG) wrote:
This is an ongoing issue that might affect your spanish users if you use services like Cloudflare, Vercel, BunnyCDN or GitHub pages.
A couple of weeks ago, the most important ISPs in Spain started intercepting or nullrouting IP addresses from this CDN providers.
The reason is that a couple of local court orders allowed LA LIGA (sports association responsible for administering the two professional football leagues in Spain) to provide ISPs with a list of IP addresses that host soccer piracy sites to be taken down in a short period of time, even when the football match is taken place.
The issue is that most of this piracy sites use Cloudflare and others to protect themselves, so ISPs are nullrouting or intercepting IP ranges that serve thousands of websites, including all Cloudflare Free customers (but not limited to). For example, they blocked one IP address that served ChatGPT.
These blockages are applied when the soccer matches are played and they are turned off hours later.
Cloudflare has already taken legal action against this, but the issue is still ongoing.
You can find more information about this issue on TorrentFreak (LaLiga Blocks Cloudflare Again, New Pirate IPTV Providers & Anything in The Way), BandaanchaEU (bandaancha bloqueos del fútbol).