- A Spanish court rejected La Liga’s request to impose fines on NordVPN
- NordVPN Proved that Blanket IP Blocking Harms Legitimate Websites
- Wider legal battle over Spain’s dynamic lockdown regime remains open
In a significant victory for the VPN industry, a Spanish court ruled in favor of NordVPN, rejecting demands from the LaLiga soccer league to impose periodic penalty payments.
The ruling, handed down on May 19, 2026 by the Commercial Court of Córdoba, marks a critical checkpoint in Spain’s controversial crackdown on illegal sports broadcasting. It also offers some peace of mind for anyone looking for the best VPN to protect their online identity.
The dispute arises from a February 2026 court order that ordered VPN providers such as NordVPN and Proton VPN to actively block IP addresses hosting unauthorized LaLiga streams. NordVPN resisted and presented technical evidence that ultimately convinced the court that imposing fines was not justified.
However, NordVPN was quick to emphasize that this is not yet a final victory. “It is important to note that this is a procedural decision at the preliminary stage, not a final judgment on the merit of the evidence,” the company wrote in a blog post.
Spain’s aggressive IP blocking regime and its consequences
To understand why this decision is so important, it is necessary to look at how the “war on piracy” has developed in Spain.
The League has been using dynamic injunctions to require Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and VPN companies to block access to specific IP addresses in real time.
However, this “carpet bombing” approach has caused enormous collateral damage. Because many pirate streams share CDN infrastructures like Cloudflare, LaLiga’s aggressive IP bans ended up breaking the internet in Spain for regular users.
Completely legitimate services, including GitHub, Docker, and Vercel, have experienced YoIntermittent blackouts during match windows. In a highly publicized mistake, the ban list even temporarily blocked Freedom.gov, a US government portal designed to fight Internet censorship.
This continued outage led thousands of frustrated Spaniards to download tools like Proton VPN as the weekend outages worsened.
Why the court rejected the fines
In its defense, NordVPN presented crucial technical evidence demonstrating that La Liga’s blocking claims were fundamentally flawed.
First, the company demonstrated that IP addresses used for pirate broadcasts “change constantly,” often within hours. Consequently, by the time any blocklist could be processed, the addresses were already stale.
Second, NordVPN argued that applying blanket blocks at the IP level would result in severe overblocking, making thousands of legal websites inaccessible to innocent users.
The Commercial Court of Córdoba accepted this evidence, ruling that “it cannot be concluded that NordVPN had failed to comply with the order deliberately and without justification.”
While the main legal battle is still ahead, NordVPN sees this preliminary ruling as a vital step forward.
The supplier stated: “What the ruling does is confirm something we openly said from day one: the technical concerns are real and demonstrated, and a Spanish court has now recognized this.”
