- Cloudflare filed an appeal to the Spanish Constitutional Court on “problematic” anti-piracy measures
- Laliga and Telefónica have blocked IP addresses during matches to stop illegal sports streams since February 2025
- Many legitimate domains, including Google types, institutional sites and payment platforms, have so far been affected
IP blocking continues to create problems in Spain, and Cloudflare is required to find a solution before the new sports season starts.
To stop illegal sports flows, Spanish sports -flow giants, Laliga and Telefónica, have emitted IP blocking orders since February 2025. Still, this tactic has led to many overpowering events, with Google types, institutional places and payment platforms among the legitimate domains that were wrongly blocked.
Now, US-based Major CDN and DNS Resolver, Cloudflare, filed an appeal to the Spanish Constitutional Court about what it finds “problematic” anti-piracy measures.
The safety effect
Laliga and Telefónica are targeted at IP addresses during sports matches to prevent illegal streaming and copyright infringement. An IP address is a number of numbers that act as a digital address that identifies Internet-activated devices and allows online communication.
According to La Liga’s own statements, Spain’s leading football group has blocked about 3,000 IP addresses each weekend to contain the damage to copyright infringement.
The problem is that Cloudflare, as with most DNS providers, explained to Techradar, all the company’s IP addresses are shared.
“In some cases they have thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands or even millions of domains behind them. Then block [an IP] Because there is a single domain that you will block comes with a huge amount of security injuries, “CloudFlares Vice President and Global leader of public politics, Alissa Starzak, told Techradar.
According to Cloudflare, the security damage in Spain has been remarkable.
Ya sabemos quién es el culpable part 🛑 bloqueo de google font.esto es surreal.🧵1/3 👇 pic.twitter.com/kocnfyw7ogJune 2, 2025
Google font types appear to be the latest accident of IP blocking of piracy. Google’s popular cloud-based font service, Google Fonts, is used every day of millions of websites to load fonts and icons on their interfaces. Still, many users have found that these resources no longer work properly, including those using Google Calendar or YouTube.
While the problems only affected customers of Digi and Vodafone’s ISP, Vodafone told a Spanish publication that the block came in response to a request from Telefónica, which was made on Thursday, May 27, 2025.
Many similar incidents during the year, CloudFlar’s co -founder and CEO, Matthew Prince, led to strongly criticizing the online blockade enforced by Spain’s La Liga Online.
“The strategy of blocking widely through ISPs based on IPs is Bonkers because so much content, including content of relief, can be behind any IP. The security damage is huge and harm Spanish citizens from accessing critical resources,” he wrote in a post on X.
“It’s only a matter of time before a Spanish citizen cannot access a life -saving emergency resource because the rights holder in a football match refuses to send a limited request to block a resource versus a broad request to block a whole cut of the Internet.”
What is the next?
As mentioned earlier, Cloudflare decided to bring the case to Spain’s higher court by presenting an appeal. The provider seeks to prove in front of a judge that what La Liga and Telefonica do should not be legal.
“They submitted the court that there would be no security effect that is obviously not correct,” Starzak told Techradar. “The most important point for us is this erroneous representation. Although these orders kind ended with the season, we still have the ability to challenge the underlying basis of this order.”
On its side, La Liga issued an official statement on February 15, 2025 and accused Cloudflare of “actively enabling illegal activities.”
The organization wrote: “Google, Cloudflare, VPN providers and other devices facilitating piracy are responsible for the illegal activities they enable and serve from. Laliga, supported by the justice system, will not waive its efforts to protect football and the interests of its clubs against criminal acts in connection with Audiovisual and Digital smell.”
While we now have to wait to see what will happen next in the fight against sports piracy in Spain, we are likely to see similar legal matches that flare up.
For example, after a successful lawsuit against DNS services last year, Canal+ managed to score a win against VPN providers in France. In what comes as a legal first, on May 15, 2025, Paris Judicial ordered five of the best VPN providers in the market to block access to over 200 illegal sporting sites.
Italy has also shared plans to expand anti-piracy obligations to DNS and VPN providers. Portugal and Belgium also examine similar anti-piracy tactics.
These measures can be set to rise now that streaming giants has also called on the EU to push VPN, CDN and DNS services to have a role in the anti-piracy rates in Europe.
Still, Spain remains the main priority for cloudflare.
“If you think you can create a blocking regime like this and you don’t care about the effects on normal Internet users, you may have a problem,” Starzak said. “We really want to make sure that the EU in particular understands that some of the methods proposed have a significant impact on the ability of normal Internet users to browse the Internet.”
