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.
This in no way excuses what Spain is doing, but its important to recognize that the internet is becoming more of a battlefield every day.
European citizens have less control if they aren’t Spanish citizens as they can only talk to their local and European representivies and not the national ones. But they can still raise the cause, and there nothing politicians like more than a popular cause which wins them votes. Enough people say they won’t vote for party X as they back the blocking and that becomes a policy at whatever party conferences Spain has
People in Spain and Europe have no control over America though. If the American governments blocks a site they have to comply with no representation.
Freedom is impotent, but it doesn’t mean what Americans think.
The fact is LaLiga has more.. It's been that way for years. There was a case where they would (may still do) use the microphone on your phone via the laLiga app to hear if you were watching a match and correlate that with licensed venues.
They're the most aggressive I've ever seen, and their influence in the government is unmatched.
Citizens of other countries have less influence on the Spanish government than Spanish citizens? Not surprising.
Did you meant to say important?
If there's a single central point of control, then that also means an outage takes everything offline, instead of just 1-2 tools. That also makes it a bigger target for attackers.
if anything the "world firewall" here has a redeeming feature, making this nonsense a lot more costly
I'm a US immigrant here and since I couldn't give a shit about soccer it is extremely annoying to be blocked from websites for something I am barely aware of. The ultimate irony is that none of this bears fruit because I am capable of streaming these games with no VPN by just avoiding CF sites if I had any desire at all. The blocks are invasive and yet ineffective.
They are in theory. But they were claiming "technical difficulties" to block the IPs until they also offered DAZN (socker) in their TV packages. Now they are quick to ban.
Remember how this is working: TV operator (Movistar, Vodafone, Orange) demand ISPs (Movistar, Vodafone, Orange) that they block the IP for a couple of hours. The judge, who can't tell apart an IP from a car plate, agrees to the request. Nobody can appeal in practice the block, because if your site gets blocked, the judge now say "unblock", the ISPs claim "technical difficulties" to unblock, and the two hours are gone. Sunday after sunday.
You can avoid the block just proxying you traffic through a ssh loop to localhost, but that is not the problem. 99% of people won't do that to access your online shop, they just assume your site is down and buy from you competition. And sunday afternoon is one of the busiest day of the week for online stores.
So what? I don't see crowds protesting on the streets of Barcelona. People are compliant, unfortunately.
Then don't use it. When I want to go to "example.com", I want "example.com", not Cloudfare, a "mafia organization" which is "protecting" "example.com".
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
Also, we don’t actually have censorship in Europe, not in the way the US is trying to suggest.
But if you feel you have the perfect solutions, then by all means get yourself on the ballot so we can finally see the light.
Democracy is for deciding what to do with taxpayer money. It shouldn't be a mechanism by which people can vote to take away other people's freedoms.
This is a child-like argument. Pretty much every law such as requiring you to wear a seatbelt takes away your freedoms.
The US is evidently a poor example of what a fully formed government is so I wouldn't use that as a basis for one's world view.
https://eternallyradicalidea.com/p/the-situation-for-free-sp...
In short: nonsense. Completely made up narrative filled with quotes from same-belief people, claiming moral outrage about issues they either don't understand or wilfully misrepresent.
What's asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
> Nearly every example of his critique is of the UK, not Europe as a whole, and each of them has plenty of counterexamples of the same thing happening in the US.
Separated from the ad hominems on both sides, it seems like a pretty reasonable criticism to me. It doesn't seem obvious to me that it should be dismissed as irrelevant.
Censorship doesn't help your team, just the opposite. https://www.thefire.org/news/blogs/eternally-radical-idea/wo...
Trump's election was a reaction to left-wing cancel culture. If people had listened to FIRE, and refuted bad ideas instead of censoring them, maybe Trump wouldn't have been elected: https://qr.ae/pYCVXO
I just used a word count tool to sanity-check this claim. It said there are 1061 words about the UK and 1684 words about non-UK countries.
You appear to be fibbing about easy-to-check facts. Anyone who trusts you on your harder-to-verify claims is a fool.
There seems to be a bit of a pattern I've noticed with Europeans on HN. They criticize the US constantly, yet flip out instantly when their countries are criticized, to the point of reflexively lying about stuff which is easily checkable.
I can sorta understand lying about claims which are hard to verify. It's distasteful, but I can understand why a certain type of person would do it. But, why lie about stuff which takes under 60 seconds to check? What are you trying to accomplish?
BTW, I hope you aren't in Germany. It's a crime to insult someone or spread malicious gossip online in Germany. Your usage of "drivel" might be considered an insult which could get your phone confiscated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bMzFDpfDwc#t=3m
Of course you do. If you think it does not exist the brainwashing has worked on you.
Nor is sanctioning your own journalists? Or a former intelligence agent, a Swiss national who worked for NATO, and now lives in Belgium?
Even our "authoritarian" PM Modi ignores petty nonsense like this. You people need to wake up.
https://www.stimme.de/heilbronn/stadt-heilbronn/friedrich-me...
He didn't even quote a Russian source in his books, has refused to appear on any Russian media channel.
Now explain why he's sanctioned.
Got it.
Does that include all of the sites that share the same IP addresses as those sites?
For that matter, you're posting a reply to an article about a European country blocking the website of a generic US government VPN service, and the service isn't even operating yet. So not only have they graduated to censoring VPNs, they're now censoring a website whose only content is political criticism of their other censorship.
This is how democracy dies - when we stop caring about truth. This is how fox ruined the US, when lies becomes fine just because they are "opinion" or "entertainment".
lenta.ru ? (aha, management personnel has been replaced 2014 [1])
[1] https://t.me/systemasystema/89 [RU]
Yes it is.
> For example in my EU country I can see the list of all websites blocked, and all of them are for piracy/copyright infringement and illegal betting (legal betting is allowed, but must register and pay taxes). That and rt.com.
You provided a counter-example that disproves your claim in the next sentence. I'm just flabbergasted.
If you know that a foreign actor intentionally tries to undermine your government you honestly think the right course of action is to just relax and let it happen? Absurd.
Europe has seen it's share of dictators and knows that a democracy needs to also protect itself.
Every country in Europe has some restraint to freedom of expression (lots of them ban either nazi or communist symbols, for starters). US has none.
On a US ISP aljazeera.com loads right up, as does The Guardian and RT.
No, we do not. You've been lied to. You should go back to whoever told you that, ask them why, and ask them not to do it again.
The real issue here is that accusations of hypocrisy are misdirection. Two wrongs don't make a right and it's not a competition to see which government can screw people worse.
If your murder rate is up 300% and your defense is "well what about the murder rate in <other country>", the most conspicuous thing about that response is that it contains zero absolution from your murder rate being up 300%. The same is true of the censorship rate.
Covid is a great example, since most of the disinformation was coming from public health authorities, and people who were skeptical about vaccine safety and effectiveness were ruthlessly suppressed online. People who turned out to be right.
When you peddle horse paste during a pandemic, you can expect some pushback. It's part of what my taxes pay for.
I say "normally" because the same religious factions are rapidly expanding their dominance over those very courts. Absolutely no historical freedoms can be taken for granted in the US right now. Nevertheless, the fact is, there is no national Internet censorship regime including age verification. No such laws are currently under consideration at the national level.
(Yes, you can be prosecuted for downloading or distributing child pornography, but that is not an Internet-specific issue, and there is no other country I'm aware of where such laws are not also on the books.)
Edit: if you are willing to move the goalposts that far, there is probably no way to convince you that the facts are as stated. Nevertheless... those are the facts. For further reading, look up the term "prior restraint." That's what's actually different in the US versus other countries that use technical means to enforce legal restrictions on Internet speech.
Likewise, there are plenty of rules and regulations around adult content on broadcast airwaves managed by the FCC.
Challenging adult content as "free speech" has happened and already settled precedent at the Supreme Court.
Yes, individual states are still trying to figure out how to actually best enforce the laws on the books at the Internet level, but there's no pretending that it is just a few states that actually have those laws.
Wikileaks is one such. Operation chokepoint, another. OFAC sanctions. Holder v Humanitarian Law Project. Knight First Amendment Institute.
But thats the point - USA speech says you can say "Hitler did nothing wrong" and its legal. But you infringe on Powers that Be, and money is involved, your speech via money will quickly be eliminated.
Or, in general, any other country that people die trying to get out of, as opposed to trying to get into.
the truth of course is much harsher and hopefully you'll never run into it but you absolutely do not live in a free society, the censorship is all around you (if you care to look deeper), the freedoms you think you have are daily being taken away, you can't carry a bottle of water or a f'ing toothpaste onto the airplane (and apparently we have 4th amendment?)... - this is all normalized in the US but we still think we are "free" and your best is "see how many people are flocking to come here, we must be great..."!!!! :) quite something...
Where's the "gaslighting"?
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.
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.
As for why it's blocked, isn't this website planned to be related to censorship evasion? By purporting to help Spanish ISP users circumvent the blocks on CF sites imposed by their government, this site would run afoul of the megalomaniacs that instituted the blocks.
Yeah, but if it's matching with the La Liga games, then it's just the typical "pirate-streams-using-cloudflare" block that kicks in, very different from the title which is "Spain's La Liga has blocked access to freedom.gov", which makes it seem like that website in particular is targeted.
If instead it's just about the general Cloudflare block we "enjoy" for match days, then this is way less interesting, it's just another collateral victim in the overly broad censorship.
Overall the whole thing sucks, and I'm not sure how it's still going on, clearly against so many rules, regulations and norms to block large swaths of the internet just because of some misbehaving websites. And meanwhile they say we have freedoms and are free of censorship...
Seems great. Wish Europe didn't censor free speech.
Copyright in Spain is automatic and life plus 70 years. Same as the US and every country in Europe except for Monaco and San Marino where it’s 50.
Every extension of copyright for the last several decades has been driven by the desire to keep Mickey Mouse out of the public domain.
Regardless, my point is that copyright evasion is not anything that any European authority is interested in building a website to facilitate.
$ 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.
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...
Edit: according to this article, Cloudflare have not been ordered to block the sites. Very odd.
https://cybernews.com/news/cloudflare-spain-laliga-piracy-bl...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1ravua8/psa_if_...
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efforts_to_ban_TikTok_in_the_U...
Getting your domain blocked is favourable to getting sued and jailed usually
https://www.isdglobal.org/digital-dispatch/the-achilles-heel...
So, freedom.gov is also blocked to protect you from fake news I guess.
Sad.
What’s changed about the RT is public perception. It’s widely recognized and labeled as a Kremlin propaganda outlet — which is precisely what it is — so audiences can approach its content with appropriate awareness.
If someone can't access the page, it's likely caused by a particular ISP and not by "European censorship".
This site can’t be reached
Check if there is a typo in rt.com.
DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN
$ 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>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.
(language switcher in the top right)
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.
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.
- pen and paper
- the printing press
- the telegraph
- radio
- television
- the internet
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.
That would be true if there were objective definitions of "foreign political influence" and "misinformation campaigns".
But there isn't. One can wave their hands and say any information falls into those categories.
I can wave my hand and make that claim about anything.
“Oh those evil Americans and their influence campaign on free speech rights!”