LaLiga and Telefónica may continue to block websites and services outside piracy after a judge dismissed the appeal for Cloudflare
Last February, the Protection and Infrastructure Services Company of Cloudflare filed a lawsuit against the managing entity of the Spanish Football League “Laliga”, for blocking with Telefónica (Movistar, O2, etc.) IPS indiscriminately alleging piracy of certain websites from which those matches would be broadcast illegally.
This means that, when certain soccer matches, company users are held Movistar and O2in addition to others that use their networks such as Digilose access to websites that use Cloudflare CDNs whose IPS have been blocked.
A judge has dismissed Cloudflare’s allegations And it will allow LaLiga to continue to block access to its customers to a multitude of third -party services. In addition, this decision has no possibility of ordinary appeal.
To explain a little above how CDN (content distribution network) operates, we could say that they are servers located in different parts of the world, which store copies of websites, documents and services, to offer them to users more quickly and closely to their location. In addition, they also serve to offer protection against service denial attacks, for example.
The problem of LaLiga and Telefónica blockages comes when a judge authorizes them to block a piracy service that uses a CDN, and Telefónica decides to block the IP of that CDN instead of the “Pirate” service, leaving its customers without access to all the websites and services that use that CDN.
Other companies such as the Grupo Masorange are also obliged to apply these blockages, but do not indiscriminately blocking the IPS of the CDNs, as is the case of Telefónica and their subsidiaries.
These blockages can cause serious damage to third parties, including companies that use Cloudflare protection or CDN services and see that a large number of Spanish Internet users cannot access their online websites and services when there is a football match. There have been blockages that have affected companies such as OpenAi, others on online newspapers, online stores, etc.
Other European countries prohibit these types of entities that apply indiscriminate blockages causing damage to third parties, but it seems that in Spain it will be allowed, at least for the moment and incomprehensible, that LaLiga and Telefónica leave without service to multitude of users and companies to favor a single company responsible for the broadcast rights of football.
Another entity that filed complaints against these facts was Rootedcon. From the Cybersecurity Association they assure that they will continue to resort to all the legal means necessary to defend users.
On the part of LaLiga and Telefónica, they seem to hold this decision.
On the part of the users, as long as there is no superior judicial instance that stops these practices, they can only unsubscribe from the Internet service of the companies associated with the Telefónica network and hire with companies that do not apply general blockages, or use a VPN to skip these indiscriminate blockages, Cloudflare itself has a free VPN service called “Warp”: how to skip the websites with Warp Free cloudflare vpn
