It’s usually Italy and its at this point embarrassing “Piracy Shield” scheme that receives harsh criticism for indiscriminate censorship of legitimate services, this happening in a frenzied (and poorly thought-out) bid to protect every last euro cent generated by Italy’s top football league, Serie A.
Not to be outdone, now the authority behind Spain’s LaLiga is engaging in what those affected – among them, US cloud platform Vercel – call “indiscriminate blocking” resulting in “an unaccountable form of internet censorship.”
What’s happening here is that earlier in the year, LaLiga applied for and was granted the right to, together with massive telecom multinational Telefonica, carry out ISP-level blocking.
The goal is to block IPTV sites and services deemed as “pirates.” What this kind of setup – involving shared IP addresses – inevitably produces, though, is lawfully operating services having their servers blocked in Spain.
TorretFreak writes that Cloudflare was the first to be hit, and its failed legal challenge opened up the path for LaLiga and Telefonica to continue with their brand of anti-piracy crusade that involves blocking, uninvolved in piracy, third parties.
Vercel’s (legitimate) customers are the latest to be affected, despite the company being one of those who, rather than tacitly ignoring them, act on copyright complaints.
On April 15, Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch took to X to announce that Spain’s internet censorship was blocking the company’s CDN IPs – which he said is “the front door of millions of applications and websites.”
The post added the company was working to mitigate the damage and “restore freedom of speech as we can” – while at the same time slamming those behind the rules as “uncommunicative, secretive and undeterred by users’ complaints.”
This was “brought home” to US audiences with one of the reactions to the announcement likening the situation to the NFL having, at its discretion, the power to block access to services like AWS or Vercel to every AT&T and T-Mobile customer.
Rauch and Vercel Principal Engineer Matheus Fernandes issued a statement that said ISPs in Spain have taken to blocking “entire IPs, ignoring SNI (server name indication) and making no effort to distinguish between hosts.”
“Any website or service behind a blocked IP is taken offline, regardless of its legitimacy,” they continued.
LaLiga, as a private entity, now has the power to, with the blocks, “impact critical infrastructure, developers, and businesses; without review, due process, (and) transparency.”
“What started as an anti-piracy measure has become an unaccountable form of internet censorship. There’s no distinction between targeted enforcement and mass collateral damage. IPs are being blocklisted wholesale,” Rauch and Fernandes wrote last week.
