Basically, to combat pirate streaming of football matches, La Liga (the Spanish football association) can compel Spanish ISPs to block wide ranges of IP blocks that are suspected of hosting those streams.

This includes Cloudflare, which - due to lots of websites depending on them (see what happened when they went down last year: https://blog.cloudflare.com/18-november-2025-outage/ ) feels like half of the internet is unusable. This happens weekly when football is on.

Now it looks like those bans are going to become even more frequent, which will have all kinds of unintended consequences.

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gspr 6 hours ago | parent [-]

I wonder when businesses will start suing ISPs for the losses they incur while they're cut off from half the internet.

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embedding-shape 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

No one here is being "cut off from the internet" during the blocks, you grossly misunderstand what's happening here.

If you're on a residential connection, during play of the matches, you can't access any of the Cloudflare IPs, but everything else keeps working as-is. Most businesses already migrated away from Cloudflare once these blocks started happening, so most of the affected people are the ones using services that rely on Cloudflare.

As mentioned elsewhere, don't get me wrong, it sucks, makes no sense and I wish it went away, and I'll keep complaining to the ones I can about it, but "they're cut off from half the internet" isn't accurate unless somehow half the services you use happen to rely on Cloudflare (which, at least for me, isn't true, maybe 10% of what I use daily is affected by this).

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littlecranky67 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I once had a day (and made a Tell HN about that too) where I couldn't access 3 of the links from the HN start page (and I didn't try all of them) during a match, because of that football IP block. It might not be half the internet, but I definitely felt like living in a country with massive censorship. And to me - given that I totally do not understand how people find watching football interesting in any way - for the most incomprehensible reason.

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debugnik 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Blocking Cloudflare is not significantly different from cutting the internet depending on which part of it you need. We recently had a thread about CI jobs failing to connect to Docker from Spain during football. I personally know when there's football because saucenao stops working.

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martin8412 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I can’t do a simple `docker pull postgres:18` every time there’s a football match on.

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gspr 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Ok, I'm sorry for the hyperbole of saying "half the internet" if it's in fact 10%. But come on, that's still massive.

It's not a stretch for small businesses to be reliant on residential connections either.

	▲	littlecranky67 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		No need to be sorry, it is a matter of how you define the percentage. If you would define it as "fraction of traffic generated by residential/home endpoints" you probably wouldn't be off that far. Maybe because Netflix does not use cloudflare, but if you say "CDNs make more than 50% of traffic to residential" you would definitely be right

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wmf 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

ISPs are following the law. You want to sue the government.

	▲	gspr 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Then I'm mistaken. I thought the law only demanded that piracy sites were blocked, and then ISPs made life easier for themselves by blocking all of Cloudflare. At any rate, this behavior isn't befitting a serious country like Spain.