Top Spanish football association LaLiga has gone to war with Cloudflare over its refusal to adequately (in the league’s view) tackle online piracy of LaLiga matches. Unsurprisingly, many in Spain are turning to VPNs such as Proton VPN to access these legitimate services.
What is going on?
Empowered by a December 2024 court ruling(new window), LaLiga is compelling Spanish internet service providers (ISPs) — notably Movistar and DIGI — to block thousands of Cloudflare IP addresses because of previous alleged associations with piracy, including many that are now used by entirely legitimate websites.
This has left millions of people in Spain unable to access some 3,30(new window)0 popular sites , including(new window) ChatGPT, Instagram, Bluesky, X, and GitHub. These blocks are most prevalent during weekends that LaLiga matches are broadcast live.
The dispute between LaLiga and Cloudflare is becoming increasingly acrimonious, with Cloudflare positioning itself(new window) as the champion of online freedom:
“Although LaLiga fully understood that blocking shared IP addresses would affect the rights of millions of consumers to access hundreds of thousands of websites that do not break the law, LaLiga went ahead with such a blockade. This seems to reflect the erroneous belief that their commercial interests should prevail over the rights of millions of consumers to access an open internet.”
In response, LaLiga has doubled down on accusations that Cloudflare willfully enables online piracy and other criminal activity:
“LaLiga wants to clarify that American technology is profiting with knowledge of illegal activities related to live sports piracy and other crimes, such as scam or fraud, as it uses its legal clients as a digital shield to protect criminal and mafia organizations.
“”LaLiga has repeatedly required Cloudflare to stop this complicit activity with criminal organizations, which infringe on intellectual property and incur in multiple criminal activities such as intellectual property violations, all kinds of scams and pornography, without a favorable response.
“Thus, LaLiga does not stand against free access to the internet, but calls for measures and carries out controlled actions against companies or organizations that profit from illegal and criminal acts using legal companies as a digital shield”.
How did we get here?
The case is complex and involves issues of intellectual property protection, net neutrality, and the unintended consequences of aggressive anti-piracy measures. To understand how the dispute has snowballed so dramatically, it’s useful to view a timeline of how events unfolded:
December 2024: Court ruling
A court in Barcelona required(new window) ISPs to block IP addresses linked to unauthorized IPTV streams of LaLiga content. Crucially, it empowered LaLiga to specify the IP addresses to be blocked, a list that LaLiga can update on a weekly basis.
February 9, 2025: Initial blocking actions
LaLiga announced(new window) that it had disabled the pirate streaming platform DuckVision by targeting Cloudflare’s services. This action led to widespread disruptions for numerous legitimate websites in Spain, as Cloudflare’s shared IP addresses meant that blocking one site affected many others.
February 15, 2025: LaLiga’s releases an official statement
LaLiga released a statement(new window) accusing Cloudflare of knowingly protecting criminal organizations that profit by facilitating activities such as human trafficking, prostitution, and child pornography. LaLiga claimed to have identified IP addresses covered by Cloudflare that provide access to child pornography, and to have reported this to the police.
February 16, 2025: Further blocks put in place
LaLiga reported successfully blocking(new window) two additional pirate IPTV services, DazcFutbolios and RBTV77, which had around 400,000 unique monthly users in Spain. These platforms were allegedly using Cloudflare’s services to conceal their identities and evade measures designed to block them.
February 19, 2025: Cloudflare’s legal response
Cloudflare filed a legal action against LaLiga(new window), asking a Spanish court to declare LaLiga’s blocking measures illegal on the grounds that the IP blocking measures were disproportionate and had inadvertently blocked millions of users from accessing unrelated websites. It also contended that LaLiga secured the blocking order without notifying cloud providers and without considering predictable harm to third parties.
March 6, 2025: Ongoing legal dispute
Both sides issued statements outlining their positions in the strongest terms possible, with Cloudflare asserting that LaLiga’s actions pose a threat to the open internet, and that the football association was intensifying its unlawful blocking practices. LaLiga maintained its stance, accusing Cloudflare of enabling various illegal activities.
Unless some kind of resolution is found (which seems unlikely given how entrenched each side’s views have become), the current round of blocks are expected to last at least until the end of the 2024-25 LaLiga football season, which is scheduled to conclude on May 25, 2025.
Our view and how a VPN can help
Whether or not LaLiga’s accusations against Cloudflare have any substance, it is unacceptable for a single commercial organization to block access for millions of people to thousands of legal websites and online services — including bank websites and services that many rely on to perform their jobs. This is purely collateral damage, meaning LaLiga’s remedy is clearly disproportionate and creates new problems while not even solving the problem of piracy, as people will simply move to new platforms to stream matches illegally.
For now, virtual private networks (VPNs) provide a convenient way to bypass these and other censorship blocks. By connecting to a VPN server that’s located somewhere without censorship, you can access the free and open internet as if you were in that country.
Learn more about how a VPN works
Proton VPN is a no-logs VPN service based in privacy-friendly Switzerland and with 11,000+ VPN servers in 110+ countries, Proton VPN offers unique anti-censorship technologies such as Stealth protocol and alternative routing(new window) (which routes connections through third-party networks if access to our servers is blocked).
