Cloudflare takes legal action over LaLiga's "disproportionate blocking efforts"

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Background and Legal / Technical Context

  • Spanish courts granted LaLiga a blocking order against sites pirating football streams; ISPs must comply.
  • With Chrome’s Encrypted Client Hello (ECH) hiding domain names, LaLiga asked to extend the order to IP-level blocking.
  • Cloudflare’s shared-IP model means a single IP can serve thousands of unrelated domains, making IP blocking highly collateral.

Impact in Spain

  • On weekends during matches, browsing is “severely impaired”: many unrelated sites go down (blogs, GitHub, Cloudflare Pages, payment processors like Redsys, Telegram).
  • Several major ISPs (Movistar, Digi, Orange, Vodafone) implement blocking, sometimes clumsily (DPI-based hacks, incorrect blackholing).
  • Users only realized what was happening when normal sites mysteriously broke (e.g., while traveling).

Views on LaLiga’s Actions

  • Many call this “banana country-tier” overreach and purely greed-driven, likening it to indiscriminate driftnet fishing.
  • Others note LaLiga is acting under a court order; the immediate problem is the blunt implementation and disregard for collateral damage.
  • LaLiga is portrayed as historically aggressive on enforcement (including past spying via its app).

Criticism of Cloudflare

  • Strong resentment from users who are blocked or endlessly captchad due to CGNAT, “suspicious” ISPs, non-mainstream browsers, or certain geographies.
  • Security workers complain Cloudflare is slow or uncooperative about phishing/scam takedowns and acts as a shield for malicious sites.
  • Some see poetic justice in Cloudflare being blocked, given its own “indiscriminate” anti-abuse systems.

Defense and Role of Cloudflare

  • Others stress Cloudflare keeps many small sites alive against DDoS and bot traffic; without it, many services would be offline.
  • Some argue Cloudflare should be treated as critical infrastructure / utility, or even nationalized, given dependence.

Centralization, Net Neutrality, and Legality

  • The episode highlights dangerous centralization: blocking one CDN cripples a country’s web access.
  • Commenters cite Spanish and EU net neutrality rules that supposedly forbid enforcement causing substantial collateral damage; whether shared IPs make sites “related” is debated.
  • Some hope Cloudflare’s lawsuit forces courts to recognize the illegality and rescind or narrow such blocking orders.