When the football season resumes in Spain, so does one of the most aggressive digital filtering mechanisms in Europe. LaLiga, the league body led by Javier Tebas, uses court rulings to order Spanish internet operators to block, in real time, hundreds of IP addresses suspected of illegally broadcasting matches. The stated goal is to curb piracy, but the actual effect is far broader: because the internet does not assign a dedicated IP to every website, cutting off an address can drag down a host of unrelated services.
This practice, which has been running for several seasons, raises serious questions about net neutrality and the collateral damage inflicted on innocent internet users. As Spain's digital economy grows, the impact of these blocks is becoming harder to ignore.
How the blocking works
Shortly before kick-off, LaLiga identifies IP addresses associated with pirate streaming services and asks operators to block them for the duration of the match. On the opening matchday of the 2026-2027 season, 15 August 2026, around 550 IP addresses were blocked simultaneously. Since then, the blocks have continued on every matchday.
The Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) estimates that in the first half of 2026, 7,441 addresses belonging to 36 different providers were blocked, including Amazon AWS, Cloudflare, Akamai, Alibaba Cloud, Microsoft and Meta. LaLiga maintains that these are dynamic blocks that are neither massive nor indiscriminate, and justifies them by pointing to annual losses of between 600 and 700 million euros due to piracy. But the reality is that innocent parties end up paying the price.
Collateral damage: thousands of sites go dark
The underlying problem is the way the internet works, which clashes directly with LaLiga's method. A content delivery network (CDN) such as Cloudflare caches under a single IP address thousands of pieces of content from services that are independent of each other. If that IP is blocked, content from thousands of services and sites is blocked, and the current system cannot tell whether the user was trying to access a pirate stream or a site such as that of the RAE, Amnesty International, Greenpeace, UNICEF, UNHCR or Caritas, courts, universities and projects like Hugging Face, which hosts AI language models, or even some football clubs' websites and those of their sponsors.
The OONI report, which cross-referenced measurements recorded in Spain between January and June 2026 with a list of 9.2 million domains, estimates that more than 554,000 legitimate domains were affected at some point. Cloudflare took the brunt of the damage: with only 30% of the blocked IPs, it accounted for 90% of the affected domains, more than 501,000.
In Spain, one of the best-known cases is the payment service Redsys, which has suffered repeated failures in confirming online payments during LaLiga matchdays, without affected retailers even knowing where the problem lay. At other times WikiDex, the largest encyclopaedia on Pokémon in Spanish, has also been hit, reporting access problems to its image servers.
A practical case: Real Madrid's match on 15 September
During the Elche C.F. v Real Madrid match, blocks increased sharply after kick-off, with Cloudflare IPs blocked by Spain's five main internet operators. By 22:25, more than 112 IPs had already been blocked, from several CDNs, including Cloudflare and Tencent CDN. Some websites became completely inaccessible, such as mandalaweb.es.
In my own case, with DIGI fibre, I have noticed blocks during previous matches when downloading open LLM models to my server from Hugging Face (usually hosted on AWS), when using services for a pair of smart glasses (Halliday) or even when trying to view certain websites. If anyone can find the connection between those sites or services and the piracy that LaLiga talks about, please let me know.
Tebas has gone so far as to claim that there were no mass blocks and that the complaints they were receiving came from "a few geeks". Yet the evidence is clear, with blocks that do affect third-party services and between 500 and 1,000 IPs blocked per match. A web service, hayahora.futbol, tracks these cut-offs in real time.
The practice is not unique to Spain, but it is particularly aggressive here. As other European countries grapple with digital interference, the Spanish approach stands out for its scale and its disregard for collateral damage. The question is whether the courts, which have so far backed LaLiga, will eventually reconsider the broader consequences.
