- Spanish LaLiga anti-piracy blockages disrupted at least 554,507 legitimate domains between January and June 2026, OONI reveals
- Blocking just 4-20 IP addresses during a one-hour match window took down over 400,000 unrelated websites.
- Researchers also discovered alarming TLS Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) interception tactics at a Spanish ISP.
Football fans in Spain are not the only ones feeling the impact of La Liga’s aggressive war against illegal streaming. A stunning new report shows that the league’s court-sanctioned anti-piracy campaign accidentally disrupted access to more than 500,000 legitimate websites, taking down everything from human rights platforms to vital cloud infrastructure.
According to a June 2026 report published by the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI), The Spanish blocking campaign based on intellectual property caused significant collateral damage between January and June 2026.
The non-profit organization, which specializes in measuring global Internet censorship, found that at least 5.8% of the 9.2 million most popular Internet domains had been blocked at least once during broadcasts of football matches.
The scale of this collateral damage highlights a fundamental flaw in current anti-piracy tactics. Because much of the modern web relies on shared hosting and content delivery networks (CDNs), which attempt to block a single illegal stream by prohibiting its The IP address often brings with it hundreds of thousands of innocent websites.
If you want to get around these broad regional blocks, using the best VPNs is increasingly becoming a necessity for Spanish internet users trying to keep access to the web open.
The collateral damage of La Liga’s anti-piracy block
Collateral damage is a direct result of the way the Internet is built. Providers like Cloudflare, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta use shared reverse proxy architectures, meaning thousands of completely independent domains sit behind a single IP address.
Throughout the observation period, OONI found that enforcement affected 7,441 unique IP addresses across 36 infrastructure providers. Cloudflare was hit hardest by the outages, with the report identifying more than 501,000 affected domains hosted behind just 2,218 blocked IP addresses.
The collateral damage included innocuous and critically important websites, including those belonging to Amnesty International and Greenpeace.
đź”´ New report: Collateral damage from IP-based blocking during LALIGA soccer streaming in Spain: Evidence from OONI Measurements’ latest research report presents OONI data documenting widespread collateral damage caused by IP blocking in #Spain during… pic.twitter.com/vNirkfEKfZJune 30, 2026
Beyond widespread outages, anti-hacking tactics have introduced alarming security vulnerabilities.
OONI researchers noted in an article on
This privacy breach affected 7,334 unique IP addresses hosting over 10,759 domain names, exposing Spanish users to potential data interception simply to prevent them from streaming soccer matches.
As we discussed Tuesday, there is growing resistance to these reckless enforcement actions. European ISP groups have strongly argued that rights holders must be responsible for the collateral damage of blocking piracy, as erroneous court orders from rights holders like LaLiga repeatedly destroy the Internet.
Although OONI admits that its methodology has limitations and likely underestimates the true scale of the impact, the results paint a bleak picture of intellectual property-based blocking. When removing a handful of pirate feeds takes down half a million legitimate websites, the cure could very well be worse than the disease.
