Spain is a soccer powerhouse, home to some of the best and largest clubs, and winner of the most recent European Championship. Spain is also a champion in indiscriminate Internet blocking. 

LaLiga, the organization that manages Spanish soccer television rights, wants to combat pirated broadcasts. It has teamed up with Spain’s leading internet provider, Telefónica, to execute massive IP address blocks based on the suspicion that they might be linked to pirated streams. This crude and dangerous method blocks entire IP address ranges, shutting down thousands of legitimate websites. 

It’s a fundamental clash over how to address online piracy. Rightsholders want to protect their rightful and valuable intellectual property. But they are willing to sacrifice freedom of expression, access to information, and the integrity of the Internet.  

Across the globe, governments are leveraging infrastructure-level tools – particularly domain name and IP blocking – as shortcuts for content enforcement. A new report from the Internet Infrastructure Coalition, DNS at Risk, documents more than a dozen such cases from countries including Russia, France, Malaysia, India, and the US.  

The policy objectives vary. Democracies target piracy. Authoritarians aim to suppress dissent. Their technique is often the same: tamper with the systems that make the Internet function.  

The battlefield is often the world’s most popular sport, soccer. Italy launched a system called Piracy Shield last year – an enforcement tool designed to block unauthorized sports streams in real-time. It allows rightsholders to trigger DNS and IP blocks through a platform with no judicial oversight, and forces compliance within 30 minutes. 

Spanish judges are taking a similar line, endorsing massive indiscriminate IP address blocks. How can this be happening without anyone in the judiciary pausing to consider the enormous damage caused? Services unrelated to football – such as X (formerly Twitter), Steam, Redsys, paddle apps, regional media outlets, and numerous business tools – suddenly vanish, without warning, justification, or compensation for the damages.  

Their only “crime”? Sharing infrastructure with a site that allegedly distributes unauthorized content. And all of this with the blessing of a judiciary that serves as a rubber stamp for the demands of Spain’s national entertainment giants. 

LaLiga demanded that IP addresses be blocked, despite knowing that this would harm legitimate websites. Internet security company Cloudflare calls the blocks “disproportionate” and “indiscriminate” and has requested that the courts declare the orders unlawful.  

Cloudflare is right. Not only are LaLiga and Telefónica blocking legal websites without due process, they misrepresent a technical issue called the encrypted client hello that enhances user privacy. Since it’s no longer easy to see which domain a user is connecting to under encryption, the “solution” has been to block a broad swath of IP addresses. 

It’s the digital equivalent of shutting down electricity to an entire city because one house is stealing power. The logic of “if I can’t see it, I’ll block everything” is technically and legally absurd – and represents a dangerous authoritarian drift. 

Some courts understand that danger. A French judge recently denied Canal+ television station’s request to block sports streams, ruling that the “wrong logo” represents insufficient evidence to bring down an entire website. 

LaLiga’s underlying argument is that football generates hundreds of millions of euros a year and that piracy costs them dearly. Professional football is profitable. But profitability is not a fundamental right. It is not an essential service. It does not justify, under any democratic standard, the sacrifice of the internet’s global functionality and the rights of millions of users. If it’s acceptable to block a website for sharing an IP with an infringer, tomorrow it will be acceptable to shut down entire platforms because one account violated copyright.  

Defense of copyright must never become a license to dismantle the Internet’s open architecture. The idea that soccer justifies everything – preemptive censorship, collective punishment, and disregard for third-party damage – is legally indefensible. What’s happening in Spain should serve as a global warning. 

Enrique Dans is a Senior Fellow with the Tech Policy Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis and a Professor of Innovation at IE University in Madrid. 

Bandwidth is CEPA’s online journal dedicated to advancing transatlantic cooperation on tech policy. All opinions expressed on Bandwidth are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.

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