- Cloudflare appealed to the Spanish Constitutional Court for “problematic” anti-piratorship measures
- Laliga and Telefónica block IP addresses during matches to stop illegal sports flows since February 2025
- Many legitimate areas, including Google policies, institutional sites and payment platforms, have been affected so far
IP Blocking continues to create problems in Spain, and Cloudflare undertakes to find a correction before the start of the new sports season.
To interrupt illegal sporting flows, Spanish sports streaming giants, Laliga and Telefónica, have issued IP blocking orders since February 2025. However, this tactic has led to many exaggerated incidents, with Google fonts, institutional sites and payment platforms among the legitimate areas blocked so far.
Now Cloudflare, Major CDN and DNS based in the United States, has appealed to the Spanish Constitutional Court on what it deems “problematic” anti-piracy measures.
The collateral effect
Laliga and Telefónica target IP addresses during sports matches to prevent illegal streaming and copyright violation. An IP address is a chain of numbers that acts as a digital address, identifying the internet compatible devices and authorizing online communications.
In accordance with the own statements of the Liga, the first Spanish football group blocked around 3,000 IP addresses each weekend to contain the damage to copyright violation.
The problem is that, as for most DNS suppliers, Cloudflare explained to Techradar, all the IP addresses of the company are shared.
“In some cases, they have thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions of areas behind them. So, blocking [an IP] Because there is only one area that you want to block, comes with a huge amount of collateral damage, told Techradar, vice-president and world leader in public policy, Alissa Starzak.
According to Cloudflare, collateral damage to Spain was remarkable.
Ya sabemos quién es el vulnerable del 🛑 block of google fonts.esto es surrealista.🧵1 / 3 👇 pic.twitter.com/kocnfyw7ogJune 2, 2025
Google Fonts seems to be the last victim of the anti-piration IP blocking. The Google cloud -based police service, Google Fonts, is used every day by millions of websites to load fonts and icons on their interfaces. However, many users have found that these resources no longer work properly, including those using Google Calendar or YouTube.
While the problems only touched the customers of the ISP of Digi and Vodafone, Vodafone told a Spanish publication that the block had come in response to a request from Telefónica made on Thursday, May 27, 2025.
Many similar incidents throughout the year have led the co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, Matthew Prince, to strongly criticize the online blockade applied by the online liga of Spain.
“The blocking strategy widely through the ISP on the basis of the IPS is crazy because so much content, including the content of the emergency services, may cause any IP address. Collateral damage are vast and hurt Spanish citizens access to critical resources,” he wrote in an article on X.
“This is only a matter of time before a Spanish citizen could not access a vital emergency resource because the rights holder of a football match refuses to send a limited request to block a resource compared to a general request to block an entire internet band.”
What is the next step?
As mentioned earlier, Cloudflare decided to bring the case to the Spanish Superior Court by appeal. The supplier seeks to prove before a judge that what La Liga and Telefonica do should not be legal.
“They presented in court that there would be no collateral effect, which is obviously not correct,” Starzak told Techradar. “The main point for us is this false declaration. Even if these orders ended with the season, we always have the capacity to challenge the underlying base of this order.”
For its part, La Liga published an official statement on February 15, 2025, accusing Cloudflare of “actively allow illegal activities”.
The organization wrote: “Google, Cloudflare, VPN suppliers and other entities facilitating hacking are responsible for the illegal activities they allow and take advantage of. Laliga, supported by the judicial system, will not give in its efforts to protect football and the interests of its clubs against criminal actions linked to audiovisual fraud and digital money laundering.
Although we must now wait to see what will happen in the fight against sports hacking in Spain, we will probably see similar legal battles vanish.
For example, after a successful legal action against the DNS services last year, Canal + managed to win a victory against VPN suppliers in France. In what comes first, on May 15, 2025, the Paris Judicial Court ordered five of the best VPN suppliers on the market to block access to more than 200 illegal sports sites.
Italy has also shared plans to extend anti-piration obligations to DNS and VPN suppliers. Portugal and Belgium also explore similar anti-piration tactics.
These measures can be set to increase now that streaming giants have also called upon EU services to support VPN, CDN and DNS services to play a role in the anti-pirate line in Europe.
However, Spain remains the main priority of Cloudflare.
“If you think you can create a blocking diet like this and you don’t care about normal Internet users, you can have a problem,” said Starzak. “We really want to make sure that the EU, in particular, understands that some of the proposed methods have, a significant effect on the capacity of normal Internet users to travel Internet.”
