Seems obvious at this point there needs to be EU-level regulations against individual countries, such as Spain and Italy, implementing these absurd restrictions. It would at least make lobbying from those sports companies more difficult. These same companies have been pushing for banning VPNs -- consumer VPNs -- as they easily circumvent half the internet going dark because of some dumb sports event, and they're going to be targeted next when everyone's using them. It doesn't help "piracy" always ends up being an excellent excuse to undermine everyone's privacy.
In theory, we should already be protected against this via the various "Net neutrality" directives, but as the US currently is showing us, laws and regulations are only worth as much as you're willing to enforce them ultimately. But things like these are supposed to be worth at least something:
> Regulation 2015/2120 also states that access providers “shall treat all traffic equally, when providing internet access services, without discrimination, restriction or interference, and irrespective of the sender and receiver, the content accessed or distributed, the applications or services used or provided, or the terminal equipment used,” although they are permitted to apply “reasonable traffic management measures.” In any case, those measures must be “transparent, non-discriminatory and proportionate, and shall not be based on commercial considerations but on objectively different technical quality of service requirements of specific categories of traffic” (Article 3.3) - https://www.cuatrecasas.com/en/global/intellectual-property/...
Remains to be seen if something/someone will put a stop to La Liga's shenanigans, judges have seem unwilling so far, and not a big enough problem for the average person to really care about it (yet?).
There's a "European Declaration on Digital Rights and Principles", signed by the member states, and I believe the right to access internet freely, without companies being permitted to mandate entire IP addresses blocks being forbidden from routing and within 30 minutes from the request surely would fit within that one, or others, in some way or another. No company should hold that power and it's a serious precedent others states in the union would want to leverage for their own reasons too. Reading this recent TorrentFreak article, the regulations should probably align with the following thinktank's analysis, at the very least:
>The report makes 12 formal recommendations. The most significant is that IP-based blocking should be avoided altogether, due to its inherent tendency to block large numbers of legitimate service sites. DNS-level or URL-level blocking should be used instead.
if it interferes with my ability to sell products and services in spain because my website gets blocked as a side-effect, then yes, the EU should care.
for example geo-blocking within the EU is also illegal. if you offer a service or product in any EU country, then anyone in the EU must be allowed to buy it.
among other things this also means that if there is any country in the EU where these sports broadcasts are accessible legally, then spain would not be allowed to block them either.
> if it interferes with my ability to sell products and services in spain because my website gets blocked as a side-effect, then yes, the EU should care.
As long as you’re not disadvantaged compared to a Spanish seller of goods or services or Spain’s law is specifically violating an EU one, I don’t think so.
> for example geo-blocking within the EU is also illegal. if you offer a service or product in any EU country, then anyone in the EU must be allowed to buy it.
Definitely not. You’re not automatically obliged to sell to other EU countries just because you’re selling in one. There are some categories where you have to, but that explicitly excludes video streaming.
There is another regulation for subscribers temporarily traveling to a different EU country not losing access to a service they subscribed to in their home country, but that’s also something else.
so even if not a reality in all sectors, removing geoblocking is in the interest of the EU.
going back to the original question:
Why should other EU members care what websites Spain allows their citizens to access? Does the "EU" even have authority for such a thing?
they do care, and they should, and yes, they have the authority.
personally, when i read the report, seeing how young people are more interested in viewing content from other countries, what first came to my mind is the increased integration of EU countries and cultures that comes from that. that's the why.
> As long as you’re not disadvantaged compared to a Spanish seller of goods or services or Spain’s law is specifically violating an EU one, I don’t think so.
Aren't you being disadvantaged though? A customer in Spain can buy from an EU internet retailer (let's say ~10% of those retailers are in Spain using the population ratio of Spain to the EU), or from a brick and mortar retailer in their location 100% of which are in Spain.
They're blocking the thing where ~90% of the retailers are outside of Spain but not the thing where all of them are in Spain, is that not a disadvantage?
Surely EU members should care if Spain blocks the access to government services offered by EU members. In Finland various government services (like Police's website) do use Cloudflare.
And Spain is not blocking access to Spain's citizens, it's blocking access people in Spain. These could be citizens of other EU members who need to access their government's website for reason or another (e.g. renewing passport) while they visit Spain or reside in Spain.
The question is about the authority to pass laws that only some countries need to obey. To my knowledge, the EU does not have the authority to do that.
The EU doesn't work like that. It's a union of sovereign states, not a central government.
Banning the member states from legislating something would require changes to the Treaties of the European Union. And that in turn would require unanimous consent from the member states.
The EU could legislate the matter on its own, which would override national laws. But it's not in the habit of doing narrow single-purpose laws, because that's not in the culture of the people who run the union. Instead, there would probably be a comprehensive law on internet blocking and censorship, which would be a very bad idea.
The way this works best is that you have a federal system that sets out what the member states can't do (e.g. block internet, censor speech, ex post facto laws, trade barriers) and then the central government exists only to enforce those constraints on the member states, who choose whether and how to do any of the things they are allowed to do.
Ask Hungarians at any point of the last 16 years. The problem is that 30% vote in a conman. 29% of people try to prevent that. Then 100% of people suffer for years.
It happened in Poland and in Hungary.
And even if that scenario doesn't play out exactly like that it always works this way to some degree.
People need enlightened remote central power to protect them from local petty tyrants.
It's the same thing as HOAs. If there aren't enough laws (with enforcement) in place, people tend to be exploited by "voluntarily" chosen local tyrants. At the level of home owners associacion, or at the level of national government.
> Seems obvious at this point there needs to be EU-level regulations against individual countries, such as Spain and Italy, implementing these absurd restrictions.
I don't think there is EU-level "regulation" in this specific thing. However there is something somewhat better: European Convention on Human Rights. It's just that challenging these kind of bans via that route is very slow (similar how slow it is to challenge the laws which go against the Constitution in the US via Supreme Court).
I would say the root problem is not someone seeking to prevent piracy but rather the fact that so many services are clustered behind the same proxy / CDN service (e.g. Cloudflare).
That in my view is what needs to be regulated and Cloudflare designated as a “gatekeeper” with all the responsibilities to go with that.
La Liga would never be able to secure blanket bans if people and services were more decentralised
If you know Spain, you know this makes total sense:
- Half the country or more just doesn't work or do anything else when there's an important match anyway.
- There's a big intersection between "people that doesn't care about soccer" and "people that knows how to use a VPN"
- Matches are usually at night, past 7pm. It's well after the average citizen work hours.
- There's not really huge internet companies there that can lobby the other way around (e.g. infrastructure collapse because of the block).
So in short, the ruling is incredibly stupid because they're allowed to do so, save for the vocal minority, the vast majority of the population doesn't care: they're watching the match.
Assuming that "piracy is a service problem, not a pricing problem" is still the prevailing wisdom, what is Spain / La Liga doing wrong that sports piracy is so prevalent as to warrant this? It seems like a no-brainer to expand stream availability and charge appropriately for it vs. scheduling daily kneecaps of other economic activity.
This is how greed works. The players want as much money as they can get. The owners want to charge as much as they can for everything while paying the least possible amount. The networks that buy the broadcasting and other rights want to most they can charge for them.
Sports have gotten way out of hand, even without the betting aspect. People criticize gambling, porn, and other less desirable forms of entertainment while giving (commercialized) sports a free pass. It's not that different when you really get into it at this point.
Oh hi HN, I'm one of the folks behind https://hayahora.futbol, we monitor the blocks via a varying set of homelab infrastructure to at least try to make a bit more transparent when they occur and what gets blocked (which isn't public, and we have to guess). Feel free to AMA!
Can Spaniards work around this with a VPN? I know that causes other issues though.
To what degree is it feasible for a startup to move around in Europe? This is the sort of heavy-handed, tech-illiterate, authoritarian activity that might make me seriously consider moving my infrastructure or headquarters if I was a Spanish startup.
> The announcement speaks of blocking domains, URLs and IP addresses, the latter of which affects legitimate services if the addresses belong to CDN services such as Cloudflare.
> La información habla tanto de bloqueos de dominios, URLs y de direcciones IP, caso este último que, cuando se produce, afecta a servicios legítimos si se trata de direcciones pertenecientes a servicios CDN como Cloudflare.
Another casualty of the centralized internet of our time
Ironically, I live in Spain, and at this very minute, there is a football game going on (Atlético Madrid vs Barcelona) which I literally just learned about because I could just hear my neighbors scream about the 0-1 score, and with Vodafone ISP I'm not experiencing the block of Cloudflare right now. https://hayahora.futbol/ also shows "NO" incorrectly (if you're being strict about the title+domain). I'm guessing it's specifically because it isn't a La Liga game, it's UEFA Champions League. At least ISPs aren't indiscriminately blocking things without court orders, which seems to have been specifically about La Liga.
This is incredibly stupid, but don't laugh at Spaniards: your (and my) lawmakers are equally likely to enact similarly stupid laws. It's mind-boggling how stupid the world can be sometimes.
Are there any ways in Cloudflare to mitigate against this? If all sports matches basically mean "our clients can't access our Cloudflare backed app in Spain" then it's worse than fewer-nines; it's a correlated event that could disrupt things like travel checkins, etc. - and it's a hard pitch to say "Cloudflare costs us money and it has no solution for its network putting our Spanish arrivals at risk."
461 comments
> Regulation 2015/2120 also states that access providers “shall treat all traffic equally, when providing internet access services, without discrimination, restriction or interference, and irrespective of the sender and receiver, the content accessed or distributed, the applications or services used or provided, or the terminal equipment used,” although they are permitted to apply “reasonable traffic management measures.” In any case, those measures must be “transparent, non-discriminatory and proportionate, and shall not be based on commercial considerations but on objectively different technical quality of service requirements of specific categories of traffic” (Article 3.3) - https://www.cuatrecasas.com/en/global/intellectual-property/...
Remains to be seen if something/someone will put a stop to La Liga's shenanigans, judges have seem unwilling so far, and not a big enough problem for the average person to really care about it (yet?).
> there need to be EU-level regulations against individual countries, such as Spain and Italy, implementing these absurd restrictions
Why should other EU members care what websites Spain allows their citizens to access? Does the "EU" even have authority for such a thing?
>The report makes 12 formal recommendations. The most significant is that IP-based blocking should be avoided altogether, due to its inherent tendency to block large numbers of legitimate service sites. DNS-level or URL-level blocking should be used instead.
https://torrentfreak.com/eu-pirate-site-blocking-is-broken-r...
for example geo-blocking within the EU is also illegal. if you offer a service or product in any EU country, then anyone in the EU must be allowed to buy it.
among other things this also means that if there is any country in the EU where these sports broadcasts are accessible legally, then spain would not be allowed to block them either.
> if it interferes with my ability to sell products and services in spain because my website gets blocked as a side-effect, then yes, the EU should care.
As long as you’re not disadvantaged compared to a Spanish seller of goods or services or Spain’s law is specifically violating an EU one, I don’t think so.
> for example geo-blocking within the EU is also illegal. if you offer a service or product in any EU country, then anyone in the EU must be allowed to buy it.
Definitely not. You’re not automatically obliged to sell to other EU countries just because you’re selling in one. There are some categories where you have to, but that explicitly excludes video streaming.
There is another regulation for subscribers temporarily traveling to a different EU country not losing access to a service they subscribed to in their home country, but that’s also something else.
according to my understanding yes, you are:
https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/geoblockin...
i don't see mention of any exception for streaming there either. (maybe one exists, if you have a reference, i'd love to take a look)
> [...] services in sectors currently fully excluded such as transport and audio-visual
if you look at the actual report summary however it shows that they want to change that:
https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/commission-pub...
so even if not a reality in all sectors, removing geoblocking is in the interest of the EU.
going back to the original question:
Why should other EU members care what websites Spain allows their citizens to access? Does the "EU" even have authority for such a thing?
they do care, and they should, and yes, they have the authority.
personally, when i read the report, seeing how young people are more interested in viewing content from other countries, what first came to my mind is the increased integration of EU countries and cultures that comes from that. that's the why.
> As long as you’re not disadvantaged compared to a Spanish seller of goods or services or Spain’s law is specifically violating an EU one, I don’t think so.
Aren't you being disadvantaged though? A customer in Spain can buy from an EU internet retailer (let's say ~10% of those retailers are in Spain using the population ratio of Spain to the EU), or from a brick and mortar retailer in their location 100% of which are in Spain.
They're blocking the thing where ~90% of the retailers are outside of Spain but not the thing where all of them are in Spain, is that not a disadvantage?
And Spain is not blocking access to Spain's citizens, it's blocking access people in Spain. These could be citizens of other EU members who need to access their government's website for reason or another (e.g. renewing passport) while they visit Spain or reside in Spain.
Banning the member states from legislating something would require changes to the Treaties of the European Union. And that in turn would require unanimous consent from the member states.
The EU could legislate the matter on its own, which would override national laws. But it's not in the habit of doing narrow single-purpose laws, because that's not in the culture of the people who run the union. Instead, there would probably be a comprehensive law on internet blocking and censorship, which would be a very bad idea.
It's not strong enough to do that yet but a lot of people with cheap governments wish it was.
How do you know the EU is guaranteed to do a better job than national governments representing the desires of that nation’s citizens?
It happened in Poland and in Hungary.
And even if that scenario doesn't play out exactly like that it always works this way to some degree.
People need enlightened remote central power to protect them from local petty tyrants.
It's the same thing as HOAs. If there aren't enough laws (with enforcement) in place, people tend to be exploited by "voluntarily" chosen local tyrants. At the level of home owners associacion, or at the level of national government.
> Seems obvious at this point there needs to be EU-level regulations against individual countries, such as Spain and Italy, implementing these absurd restrictions.
I don't think there is EU-level "regulation" in this specific thing. However there is something somewhat better: European Convention on Human Rights. It's just that challenging these kind of bans via that route is very slow (similar how slow it is to challenge the laws which go against the Constitution in the US via Supreme Court).
That in my view is what needs to be regulated and Cloudflare designated as a “gatekeeper” with all the responsibilities to go with that.
La Liga would never be able to secure blanket bans if people and services were more decentralised
- Half the country or more just doesn't work or do anything else when there's an important match anyway.
- There's a big intersection between "people that doesn't care about soccer" and "people that knows how to use a VPN"
- Matches are usually at night, past 7pm. It's well after the average citizen work hours.
- There's not really huge internet companies there that can lobby the other way around (e.g. infrastructure collapse because of the block).
So in short, the ruling is incredibly stupid because they're allowed to do so, save for the vocal minority, the vast majority of the population doesn't care: they're watching the match.
Sports have gotten way out of hand, even without the betting aspect. People criticize gambling, porn, and other less desirable forms of entertainment while giving (commercialized) sports a free pass. It's not that different when you really get into it at this point.
To what degree is it feasible for a startup to move around in Europe? This is the sort of heavy-handed, tech-illiterate, authoritarian activity that might make me seriously consider moving my infrastructure or headquarters if I was a Spanish startup.
> The announcement speaks of blocking domains, URLs and IP addresses, the latter of which affects legitimate services if the addresses belong to CDN services such as Cloudflare.
> La información habla tanto de bloqueos de dominios, URLs y de direcciones IP, caso este último que, cuando se produce, afecta a servicios legítimos si se trata de direcciones pertenecientes a servicios CDN como Cloudflare.
Another casualty of the centralized internet of our time
Other countries including Spain have laws "ensuring that access is broadly available and preventing unreasonable restrictions."
Something has to give.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_Internet_access#Ensur...