- The American Freedom.gov was collateral damage to LaLiga’s anti-piracy blocks
- Proton VPN confirmed that the blocking occurred during weekend matches
- A Spanish court ordered VPN providers to block illegal soccer streams
LaLiga’s aggressive crusade against illegal soccer streaming has sparked a diplomatic oddity and a digital rights fiasco, with the Spanish league accidentally blocking access to a US government website designed to fight internet censorship.
During the weekend battle plan, Spanish internet users found they could access Freedom.gov, a new initiative by the US State Department and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to help Europeans avoid content bans.
This latest blunder underscores the volatility of the Spanish league’s “whack-a-mole” approach to copyright enforcement. By ordering ISPs to dynamically block IP addresses during game times, the league risks shutting down innocent websites sharing the same server space — a phenomenon experts have warned about for months.
The “carpet bombing” of Cloudflare
Indeed, the blocking of Freedom.gov is not an isolated error, but a direct result of the technical measures granted to LaLiga by Spanish courts.
The league uses “dynamic injunctions” that allow it to update lists of banned IP addresses in real time without requiring a new referee’s signature for each block.
Because many pirate streams use Cloudflare’s Content Delivery Network (CDN) to mask their origin, LaLiga has resorted to blocking a wide range of Cloudflare IP addresses. This “carpet bombing” strategy does not distinguish between an illegal flow of El Clásico and a US government portal.
LaLiga has ordered Spanish ISPs to block ~3000 IP addresses almost every weekend. Because Cloudflare IPs are shared, this has caused massive collateral damage to thousands of legitimate websites, apps and vital services – all at the whim of a private company. pic.twitter.com/MmonW1BXgj17 February 2026
Peterson took to X to highlight the absurdity, noting the “massive collateral damage” caused by the blocks.
Affected legitimate websites and services, Peterson reports, include popular social media apps, local banking websites and productivity apps such as ChatGPT, GiftHub and Microsoft services.
Now the irony seems even more palpable – a platform funded by the US government to help citizens circumvent censorship was itself censored by a European sports league.
A history of collateral damage
The incident is the latest escalation in a bitter conflict between Spanish football authorities and the open internet. LaLiga has previously found itself in a deepening conflict with Cloudflare, accusing the tech giant of not doing enough to remove illegal content.
In response, the league has increased its technical enforcement, leading to frequent weekend outages for legitimate websites that rely on Cloudflare’s infrastructure.
The situation recently intensified when a Spanish court issued a landmark ruling requiring NordVPN and Proton VPN to block illegal soccer streams. While VPN providers have pushed back against these orders, citing technical impossibility and lack of due process, the blocking of Freedom.gov shows that ISP-level filtering remains a blunt and imprecise instrument.
As these blocks become more aggressive, Spanish users are increasingly looking for ways to maintain open internet access, with Spaniards reportedly turning to Proton VPN to navigate blocks.
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