- Cloudflare presented an appeal before the Spanish Constitutional Court on antipiratry measures “Problematic”
- LaLiga and Telefónica have been blocking IP addresses during matches to stop illegal sports broadcasts since February 2025
- Many legitimate domains, including Google sources, institutional sites and payment platforms, have been affected so far
The IP block continues to create problems in Spain, and Cloudflare undertakes to find a solution before the new sports season begins.
To stop illegal sports broadcasts, Spanish sports transmission giants, LaLiga and Telefónica, have been broadcasting IP blocking orders since February 2025. However, this tactic has led many excessive incidents, with Google sources, institutional sites and payment platforms among legitimate domains in what you have blocked so far.
Now, the main resolution of CDN and DNS based in the USA.
The collateral effect
LaLiga and Telefónica are pointing to IP addresses during sports matches to avoid illegal transmission and copyright violation. An IP address is a chain of numbers that acts as a digital address, identifying devices enabled for Internet and allowing online communications.
According to the League statements themselves, the main soccer group in Spain has been blocking around 3,000 IP addresses every weekend to contain the damage of copyright violation.
The problem is that, as with most DNS suppliers, Cloudflare explained to Techradar, all the company’s IP addresses are shared.
“In some cases, they have thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands or even millions of domains behind them. So, blocking [an IP] Because there is only one domain that you want to block, it comes with a tremendous amount of collateral damage, “the vice president of Cloudflare and the head of global public policy, Alissa Starzak told Techradar.
According to Cloudflare, collateral damage in Spain has been remarkable.
We already know who is the culprit of the 🛑 Google Fonts. This is surreal.June 2, 2025
Google Fonts seems to be the last victim of the antipirateria IP block. The popular sources from Google’s cloud, Google Fonts, is used every day by millions of websites to load sources and icons in its interfaces. However, many users have discovered that these resources no longer work properly, including those who use Google Calendar or YouTube.
While problems only affected the clients of the ISP of Digi and Vodafone, Vodafone told a Spanish publication that the block arrived in response to a telephone request made on Thursday, May 27, 2025.
Many similar incidents throughout the year led to the co -founder and CEO of Cloudflare, Matthew Prince, to strongly criticize the online blocking imposed by the online League League of Spain.
“The strategy of blocking widely through ISP based on IPS is crazy because both content, including emergency services content, can be behind any IP. The collateral damage is vast and is harming Spanish citizens to access critical resources,” he wrote in an X publication.
“It’s just a matter of time before a Spanish citizen cannot access an emergency resource that saves lives because the head of rights in a football match refuses to send a limited request to block a resource versus a broad application to block a complete internet strip.”
What follows?
As mentioned above, Cloudflare decided to take the case to the Superior Court of Spain presenting an appeal. The supplier seeks to prove in front of a judge that what the League is doing and Telefónica should not be legal.
“They appeared to the Court that there would be no collateral effect, which is obviously not correct,” Starzak told Techradar. “The main point for us is this misrepresentation. Although these orders ended the season, we still have the ability to challenge the underlying base for that order.”
For its part, the League issued an official statement on February 15, 2025, accusing Cloudflare to “actively enable illegal activities.”
The organization wrote: “Google, Cloudflare, VPN suppliers and other entities that facilitate piracy are responsible for the illegal activities of which they allow and benefit. LaLiga, backed by the justice system, will not give in their efforts to protect football and the interests of their clubs against criminal actions related to audiovisual frudies and the digital washing machine.”
While now we have to wait to see what will happen later in the fight against sports piracy in Spain, we are likely to see similar legal battles.
For example, after successful legal action against DNS services last year, Canal+ managed to obtain a victory against VPN suppliers in France. In what comes as legal first, on May 15, 2025, the Paris Judicial Court ordered five of the best VPN suppliers in the market to block access to more than 200 illegal sports sites.
Italy has also shared plans to extend obligations against piracy to DNS and VPN suppliers. Portugal and Belgium are also exploring similar antipiratry tactics.
These measures can now increase that transmission giants have also asked the EU to press the VPN, CDN and DNS services to have a role in the antipiratía row in Europe.
However, Spain remains the main priority for Cloudflare.
“If you think you can create a locking regime like this and do not care about the effects on normal Internet users, you can have a problem,” Starzak said. “We really want to make sure that the EU, in particular, understands that some of the methods that are proposed have, a significant effect on the ability of normal Internet users to navigate online.”
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