One of the things that so often gets lost in politics is the concept of a stopping principle. If you know you want to do X, be it "enforce traffic tickets", "spend money chasing drug trafficking", or anything else, you really ought to be able to articulate some sort of stopping principle where you stop pouring the resources in. Maybe the problem is adequately solved. Maybe the further resources don't justify the tiny incremental change. Maybe the intrusion on liberty starts to overwhelm the benefits. Something. Otherwise you just end up going farther and farther down the road with no idea when to stop.

These IP blocks don't seem to come with a stopping principle. They were large and growing, and inevitably more and more entities were going to say "Hey, if that company is large enough to flip the switch to protect their assets then I'm large enough for that too!" and the obvious and inevitable stopping point was 100% blockage.

Taken to its logical conclusion, and I do mean "logical" and not "rhetorically overblown for effect", this comes perilously close to just declaring that the value of the Internet is so net negative due to piracy that it should just be shut down in Spain. If that's true during certain sports matches it's already not far from being true for lots of other things too. This was leading in an obviously-economically-untenable direction.

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matheusmoreira 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Why not declare that the value of La Liga's "IP" is a net negative and holding society back, and then simply invalidate all of it on the spot?

	▲	chihuahua 9 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		That depends on whether Spain is interested in being a serious country with perhaps some technology jobs, or a clown show where the highest priority is Sportsball.

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hnlmorg 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Taken to its logical conclusion, and I do mean "logical" and not "rhetorically overblown for effect", this comes perilously close to just declaring that the value of the Internet is so net negative due to piracy that it should just be shut down in Spain.

What you’ve described there is completely overblown for rhetoric.

The internet is still needed for delivering legal streams of matches. So there’s never going to be any pressure to turn off the entire internet.

Plus the likes of Amazon, and other online businesses would sue the hell out of La Liga for loss of trade.

So there’s no way in hell the situation would descend into your “logical conclusion”.

That’s not to say that the situation couldn’t get worse that it already is. Just that your logical conclusion isn’t very logical.

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pdpi 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> The internet is still needed for delivering legal streams of matches. So there’s never going to be any pressure to turn off the entire internet.

Cloudflare serves a whole bunch of legal and genuinely important services, and yet there was enough pressure to block them off.

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hnlmorg 6 hours ago | parent [-]

…and that was already enough to get Congress to review the situation. The first paragraph in the article we are discussing says:

> The complaints about the massive fall of web pages caused by LaLiga's fight against piracy reached Congress months ago. And the Chamber is now preparing to take measures.

But even ignoring the fact that TFA directly disproves your and the GP's argument, the point you're making that "x got approved so y also will" isn't how things work in the real world. People do have a pain threshold and just because CloudFlare was tolerated until now doesn't mean greater blockages would have been equally tolerated.

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pdpi 6 hours ago | parent [-]

The Cloudflare block has been in effect since December 2024, so it's been in effect almost a year and a half, and Congress is at the "will act", not "has acted" stage.

And yes, of course you're right, that people have a pain threshold, but it's also true that people will normalise behaviour over time. I'm not saying further blockages will happen, just that I don't take it for granted that they won't.

	▲	hnlmorg 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Nobody was claiming that future blockages couldn’t happen. The argument I was disagreeing with was the statement that “a total internet block is the logical conclusion” Which it isn’t. But, and as I said in my comment you claimed to disagree with, that doesn’t mean things can’t still get worse.

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walrus01 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Blocking large swathes of cloudflare IP space at the entire CIDR range level has significant negative repercussions on thousands of other completely non-football related companies, governments, non-profits, personal projects who are hosting content on them. It's absolutely unfair to those impacted by this extremely heavy handed method.

It's like saying there's some people who have been seen selling counterfeit made in China purses from a blanket in a street market in one particular neighborhood in a big city, so we're going to erect a roadblock to all vehicle and pedestrian traffic, and cut off metro train access to the area.

	▲	hnlmorg 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I completely agree and nothing I posted suggested otherwise. My point was just that Amazon is large enough to scare La Liga in ways that nearly no other online retailer is. Ergo La Liga wouldn’t ever push for a total internet block like the GP claimed.

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ajsnigrutin 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think in this case, it's more of a concept of causing damages and not having to pay for them. If LaLiga had to pay for every lost cent of revenue for every site blocked by their too-wide ban, they'd rethink what they're doing.

But with copyright, everything is broken everywhere, so they don't have to.

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TZubiri 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I think if a court enforces a judgement and a court order, regardless of how trivial it was initially, all measures including use of armed force is warranted, the matter at hand stops being the original dispute, but sovereignity and power of the law.

Does it matter that it happens over IP or CSAM? It doesn't happen over CSAM because there is no dispute there, there is no desync there between spain,the us and cloudflare.

But the mechanisms around these court orders aren't much different than those that would be used for other illegal or contentious material.

If a vendor chooses to pool and encrypt connections in a way that it is impossible to filter by hosts, and that vendor doesn't comply with court orders, then a country should absolutely block that entire vendor.

The liability of an unrelated pooled service failing is either the responsibility of the vendor or the application that chooses that vendor, not on the courts for enforcing the law without a subjective 'stopping point'.

What these vendors do is very similar to pooling in the layering phase of money laundering, but with packets: get traffic from legitimate customers, mix it with traffic from unlawful customers, pool them, and send encrypted EHLO so that the origin domain is encrypted and the packet source /destination are replaced by the vendor's. If this were done with money it would instantly trip all AML flags, but the tech world is much younger and hasn't discovered that laundering isn't cool or free as in freedom, it's a tool that the baddies use.