- The US Freedom.gov was collateral damage of LaLiga’s anti-piracy blocks
- Proton VPN confirmed that the blocking occurred during the weekend matches
- A Spanish court ordered VPN providers to block illegal football streams
LaLiga’s aggressive crusade against illegal football streaming has sparked a diplomatic oddity and digital rights fiasco, with the Spanish league accidentally blocking access to a US government website designed to fight internet censorship.
During the weekend’s match schedule, Spanish Internet users were unable to access Freedom.gov, a new initiative from the US State Department and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) aimed at helping Europeans evade content bans.
This latest blunder highlights the volatility of the Spanish league’s “whack-a-mole” approach to copyright enforcement. By ordering ISPs to block IP addresses dynamically during games, the league risks taking down innocent websites that share the same server space, a phenomenon that experts have warned about for months.
Cloudflare’s “carpet bombing”
In fact, the blocking of Freedom.gov is not an isolated failure, but a direct result of the technical measures granted to LaLiga by the Spanish courts.
The league uses “dynamic court orders” that allow it to update lists of banned IP addresses in real time, without requiring a new judge’s signature for each block.
Because many pirated streams use Cloudflare’s content delivery network (CDN) to mask their origin, LaLiga has resorted to blocking wide ranges of Cloudflare IP addresses. This “mass bombing” strategy does not distinguish between an illegal flow of The Classic and a US government portal.
LaLiga has been ordering Spanish ISPs to block ~3000 IP addresses almost every weekend. Because Cloudflare IPs are shared, this has caused massive collateral damage to thousands of legitimate websites, apps, and vital services, all at the whim of a private corporation. pic.twitter.com/MmonW1BXgjFebruary 17, 2026
Peterson turned to X to highlight the absurdity, pointing out the “massive collateral damage” caused by the blocks.
The legitimate sites and services affected, Peterson reports, include popular social media apps, local banking sites, and productivity apps like ChatGPT, GiftHub, and Microsoft services.
Now, the irony seems even more palpable: a platform funded by the US government to help citizens bypass censorship was censored by a European sports league.
A history of collateral damage
This incident is the latest escalation in a bitter conflict between Spanish football authorities and the open Internet. LaLiga has previously found itself in a deepening the conflict with Cloudflare, accusing the tech giant of not doing enough to remove illegal content.
In response, the league has stepped up its technical enforcement, leading to frequent weekend outages on legitimate sites that rely on Cloudflare’s infrastructure.
The situation escalated recently when a Spanish court issued a landmark ruling requiring NordVPN and Proton VPN to block illegal football streams. While VPN providers have rejected these orders, citing technical impossibility and lack of due process, the blocking of Freedom.gov demonstrates that ISP-level filtering remains a blunt and imprecise instrument.
As these blocks become more aggressive, Spanish users are increasingly looking for ways to keep internet access open, and Spaniards are reportedly turning to Proton VPN to navigate the blocks.
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