- Spanish court rejects La Liga’s request to impose fines on NordVPN
- NordVPN demonstrated that blanket blocking of IP addresses harms legitimate websites
- Wider legal battle over Spain’s dynamic blocking regime remains open
In a significant victory for the VPN industry, a Spanish court has ruled in favor of NordVPN, rejecting requests from the LaLiga soccer league to impose coercive fines.
The ruling, handed down on May 19, 2026 by the Commercial Court of Cordoba, marks a critical checkpoint in Spain’s controversial crackdown on illegal sports streaming. It also reassures anyone looking for the best VPN to secure their online identity.
The dispute stems from a February 2026 court injunction that ordered VPN providers like NordVPN and Proton VPN to actively block IP addresses hosting unauthorized LaLiga streams. NordVPN resisted, presenting technical evidence that ultimately convinced the court that imposing fines was unjustified.
However, NordVPN was quick to point out that this is not yet a final victory. “It is important to note that this is a procedural decision at the preliminary stage, not a final judgment on the merits of the evidence,” the company wrote in a blog post.
The aggressive intellectual property blocking regime in Spain and its consequences
To understand why this decision is so important, it is necessary to examine how Spain’s “war on piracy” unfolded.
La Liga has used dynamic injunctions to demand that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and VPN companies block access to specific IP addresses in real time.
However, this “carpet bombing” approach caused enormous collateral damage. Since many pirate streams share CDN infrastructures like Cloudflare, LaLiga’s aggressive IP bans ended up breaking the internet in Spain for normal users.
Completely legitimate services, including GitHub, Docker and Vercel, have experienced IIntermittent outages during match windows. In a high-profile mistake, the banlist even temporarily blocked Freedom.gov, a US government portal designed to combat internet censorship.
This continued disruption led thousands of frustrated Spaniards to download tools like Proton VPN as weekend outages worsened.
Why the court rejected the fines
In its defense, NordVPN presented crucial technical evidence demonstrating that La Liga’s blocking demands were fundamentally flawed.
First, the company proved that IP addresses used for pirate streams are “constantly changing,” often within hours. Therefore, by the time a blocklist could be processed, the addresses were already obsolete.
Second, NordVPN argued that enforcing blanket IP-level blocks would result in severe overblocking, making thousands of legal websites inaccessible to innocent users.
The Commercial Court of Cordoba accepted this evidence, finding that “it cannot be concluded that NordVPN had deliberately and without justification violated the order.”
While the main legal battle is still to come, NordVPN considers this preliminary ruling a vital step forward.
The provider said: “The decision confirms what we have said openly from day one: the technical problems are real and proven, and a Spanish court has now recognized this.”
