- LaLiga’s anti-piracy blocks in Spain disrupted at least 554,507 legitimate domains between January and June 2026, OONI reveals
- Blocking just 4 to 20 IP addresses during a one-hour match window took down over 400,000 unrelated websites.
- Researchers also discovered alarming TLS Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) interception tactics at a Spanish ISP.
Football fans in Spain are not the only ones feeling the impact of LaLiga’s aggressive war against illegal streaming. A shocking new report shows that the league’s court-sanctioned anti-piracy campaign has accidentally disrupted access to more than 500,000 legitimate websites, bringing down everything from human rights platforms to vital cloud infrastructure.
According to a June 2026 report published by the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI), Spain’s IP blocking campaign caused widespread collateral damage between January and June 2026.
The nonprofit organization, which specializes in measuring global Internet censorship, found that at least 5.8% of the 9.2 million most popular Internet domains were blocked at least once during football match broadcasts.
The magnitude of this collateral damage highlights a fundamental flaw in current anti-piracy tactics. Because much of the modern web relies on shared hosting and content delivery networks (CDNs), attempting to block a single illegal stream by banning its The IP address often drags hundreds of thousands of innocent websites with it.
If you want to bypass these extensive regional blocks, using the best VPNs is increasingly becoming a necessity for Spanish internet users trying to maintain access to the open web.
The collateral damage of La Liga’s anti-piracy blockade
Collateral damage arises directly from how the Internet is built. Providers like Cloudflare, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta use shared reverse proxy architectures, meaning that thousands of completely unrelated domains sit behind a single IP address.
Over the observation period, OONI found that enforcement affected 7,441 unique IP addresses across 36 infrastructure providers. Cloudflare was the hardest hit by the outages: the report identified more than 501,000 affected domains hosted behind just 2,218 blocked IPs.
Collateral damage included benign and critically important websites, including those of Amnesty International and Greenpeace.
đź”´ New report: Collateral damage from IP-based blocking during LALIGA football broadcast in Spain: Evidence from OONI Measurements’ latest research report presents data from OONI documenting widespread collateral damage caused by IP blocking in #Spain during… pic.twitter.com/vNirkfEKfZJune 30, 2026
Beyond widespread outages, anti-piracy tactics have introduced alarming security vulnerabilities.
OONI researchers noted in a post on
This invasion of privacy affected 7,334 unique IPs hosting more than 10,759 domain names, exposing Spanish users to possible data interception just to prevent them from streaming football matches.
As we covered on Tuesday, there is growing opposition to these reckless law enforcement measures. European ISP groups have strongly argued that rights holders should be held responsible for collateral damage in blocking piracy, as erroneous court orders from rights holders like LaLiga are repeatedly damaging the Internet.
While OONI admits its methodology has limitations and likely underestimates the true scale of the impact, the findings paint a bleak picture of IP-based blocking. When removing a handful of pirated streams takes down half a million legitimate websites, the cure may very well be worse than the disease.
