That’s insane. Do citizens not have a recourse? Like maybe a freedom of speech constitutional angle?

There's one recourse in the Constitutional Court driven by Clouflare and RootedCON but the thing about the Constitutional Court is that it can be very slow and it's heavily politicized and I'm not really sure the government position on this. Right now, only one leftist Catalan party has said anything against the blocks in the Congress. Also many mass media are not reporting this issues because they're also an interested party.

Freedom of speech, in the strong form that is most familiar in the US, is largely not a thing in other countries.

We have the freedom to say we're against it. The system is rotten to the core and run by people detached from reality.

So many people may not realize that this sort of thing has happened and does happen in the US.

Some may not know how large ISPs connect to each other. If you're sufficiently large, you basically get to peer for "free". There are common peering points where most of this happens. Now, how does traffic travel between ISPs? WWell, routing protocols (notably BGP4) dictate how these connetions are used.

Thing is, providers can directly and indirectly throttle traffic with all this. A famous example is where several US ISPs, notably Verizon FiOS (from my own experience) to Netflix. There was a time about a decade ago where in the evening you could get <500kbps and Netflix was unwatchable. Verizon alternated between denying it and saying it was a technical limitation.

But lo and behold if you just used a VPN to bypass Verizon's routing and peering Netflix was completely watchable.

Many believe (myself included) this was intentional to try and kill Netflix and prop up their declining cable TV business.