So it's very American style censorship in principle, that is it is censorship for profit reasons HOWEVER it is wrong in this particular instance because freedom.gov hadn't infringe copyrights. Nothing political despite what the title may make you believe so, purely internal issue. Italians are having similar problems with their football streaming organizations.
American style censorship would be more like going through the courts to get an order to have the domains seized.
The American censorship works by taking away your domain and lock you in prison but it is O.K. because your activities might have reduced shareholder value.
It's a fundamentally different thing. In Europe, ISPs and CDNs just block websites willy-nilly at the request of La Liga, for instance. That doesn't happen in USA. It takes a court order and then the FBI seizes the domain.
> In Europe, ISPs and CDNs just block websites willy-nilly at the request of La Liga, for instance
There's so much wrong with this sentence. It's not Europe, it's _Spain_ specifically. La liga aren't just dropping emails to ISPs, they're gaining court orders (now, whether these court orders are warranted, or delivered correctly [0] or not is another question).
> That doesn't happen in USA
It doesn't happen in "Europe" either.
[0] https://www.pcmag.com/news/nordvpn-protonvpn-ordered-block-p...
Also, when you don't do anything illegal in USA just take away your company either by forcing you to sell it or forcing American companies not doing business with you.
TikTok was removed from Apple AppStore forcefully, then reinstated and forcefully sold.
Why ISP blocking is considered low morale but seizing your stuff high morale endeavor?
This is classic whataboutism compared to the outright corporateocracy of la liga's blocking and seizure.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/us-law-enforcement-assists-bu...
The same thing happened but instead of some copyrights organization taking down YouTube/Twitter etc content, Italian copyrights organization blocked some Cloudflare IP addresses without due process for copyright reasons.
The implementations differ slightly but it is exactly the same thing.
It’s the fact LaLiga and Spanish ISPs comply.
They’re “carpet” blocking entire IPs of Cloudflare.
Every weekend if I need to access some of my work websites which are affected by this (while there are football games) - I need to VPN to bypass the blocking.
I’m new in Spain so my ability of surfacing the Spanish law or the European is limited. But I really wish they’ll have to find a nicer approach instead of this aggressive approach.
Can any other Spaniards confirm if freedom.gov still resolves for them?
As a side-note, I don't know why anyone would want to block that website in the first place? Barely has any information about what it is, and doesn't seem to be able to be used for anything as of today either.
Boy, I will miss this administration for their sense of humor and ingenuity. They always find something new. A firework of performance art.
it succeeded
Maybe this is conspiracy theory. But I feel like the aggression they’ve shown - even people like Marco Rubio - suggests they’re acting with a purpose.
https://www.isdglobal.org/digital-dispatch/the-achilles-heel...
So, freedom.gov is also blocked to protect you from fake news I guess.
Sad.
$ drill -Q rt.com | tee $(tty) | xargs whois | grep org-name
91.215.41.4
org-name: DDOS-GUARD LTD
$ curl --silent https://www.rt.com | grep '<title>[^<]\*</title>' | head -1
<title>RT - Breaking News, Russia News, World News and Video</title> This site can’t be reached
Check if there is a typo in rt.com.
DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN
Surely whatever they eventually put up on there will be blatant and horrible propaganda, but I think judging the reactions are the purpose of the site, not the content itself.
But as we all know, there are ways around that for people who really have to go there.
https://www.generation-nt.com/actualites/vpn-age-mineurs-roy...
It's not ok at all, because such operators will get punished if they don't.
Therefore they will more and more respect the law to block sites, etc.
$ host freedom.gov
freedom.gov has address 172.67.219.106
$ whois 172.67.219.106
NetRange: 172.64.0.0 - 172.71.255.255
CIDR: 172.64.0.0/13
NetName: CLOUDFLARENET
This is not a dedicated block against freedom.gov, it's just the ordinary collateral damage from the fight against sports piracy. Sigh.
The truly fun fact here rather is that the US government seems to be unable to host a website on its own these days but needs Cloudflare's protection. It's either a grift, a hack job / MVP demo or every last competent person in IT there has departed or been DOGE'd off. Ridiculous.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1ravua8/psa_if_...
Sports is worth billions of dollars - La Liga makes 6.1 billion € from domestic rights alone [2]. UK's Premier League made 7.1 billion € during the Covid years [3].
[1] https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/la-liga-w...
[2] https://www.laliga.com/en-GB/news/laliga-secures-over-euro61...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/football/2025/mar/06/premier-lea...
US misinformation is no different from Russian misinformation. freedom.gov is specifically meant to spread this misinfo, freedom of speech is the stated purpose, but if you believe that, you are naive.
This is obviously an influence campaign.
That is, what's blocked? Things that people consider misinformation. Some of it really is, and some of it is just stuff that's politically unpopular with the powers that be (which they're also going to label misinformation). And then some of it falls afoul of various copyright laws or other such.
But certainly real misinformation is a significant chunk of that. The proxy enables that misinformation (and disinformation) to bypass the censorship/blocking. So in that sense, yes, it spreads misinformation.
The solution to disinformation is not censorship, it's education and to teach early people on how to critically think by themselves.
This does not mean people should not also be educated. That critical thinking is also what leads me to the conclusion this should be blocked.
On a side note, setting up a website deliberately designed to circumvent such laws will itself likely violate the law and might lead to criminal prosecution. While the US government will certainly be protected by diplomatic immunity, other people involved probably won't be protected.
> Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
...
> Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
Spoken like someone who never walked the Isar river beaches in the morning after a Saturday night in summer. Used to be full of plastic bottle caps from all the party goers, now it's just the metal beer caps that you can easily pick up with a magnet.
This was more to put on perspective that innovation and gaining market share are the main priority in US/China, whereas in Europe, priority is more on regulation.
For example, one of the priorities here in the EU is to regulate and tax AI companies, rather than to make the place attractive.
But still, this is where I slightly disagree, because I feel the more regulation, the less innovation is possible.
Here just feeling frustrated when I see that freedom.gov getting censorship of that overall tendency to regulate, rather than to actively promote freedom of entrepreneurship, of expression, of thinking out-of-the-box etc, and this freedom.gov thing is just a symptom of that whole system.
Extracting maximum profit is correct.