> I think you're not faithfully trying to adopt their perspective here

I think you're not seeing the bigger picture.

Somehow La Liga (a private company) was able to convince the courts that it should be able to ban IPs almost in real-time without any oversight from the law. This is just insane in a modern democracy and only benefitted La Liga. Certainly not the population of Spain for whom the courts work for.

Time has proven what anyone with two brain cells knew already. Blocking IPs was never going to do much to solve the issue. It's a wack-a-mole game. Cloudflare knew this and La Liga did too.

> where can the block be done, and have the least amount of collateral?

Blocking one of the biggest providers of internet infra was anything but "the least amount of collateral". Plenty of companies and services depend on Cloudflare.

> Blocking IPs was never going to do much to solve the issue. It's a wack-a-mole game.

But that in their mind is "solving the issue, at that time". Why do you think they want to expand it to other sports now, because "doesn't do anything" or because they actually see some effect from it?

> Blocking one of the biggest providers of internet infra was anything but "the least amount of collateral". Plenty of companies and services depend on Cloudflare.

Ok, so given their perspective is "something must be done" and Cloudflare are not blocking the users after requests, what is the alternative here? Turning off the entire internet connection for individual users? Turning off all the internet during games? I really don't know what alternative could be possible, that still satisfies their "something must be done".

Again, I agree that this is an massive overstep, wildly miscalculated and I'm personally affected by this every time a football is on, I don't like it either.