Are people on the streets or is this some Franco-Pavlovian reflex kicking in?
Net neutrality used to be a pillar of the EU internet. 2026; the mind fucking boggles.
Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times
61–70 of 482 posts
Re: Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times
#62Seems obvious at this point there needs to be EU-level regulations against individual countries, such as Spain and Italy, implementing these absurd restrictions. It would at least make lobbying from those sports companies more difficult. These same companies have been pushing for banning VPNs -- consumer VPNs -- as they easily circumvent half the internet going dark because of some dumb sports event, and they're goin…
> there need to be EU-level regulations against individual countries, such as Spain and Italy, implementing these absurd restrictions
Why should other EU members care what websites Spain allows their citizens to access? Does the "EU" even have authority for such a thing?
Re: Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times
#63It's always hilarious to see HN users claim how the "quality of life" is so much better in the EU than the USA. When in reality most of them only ever visit a handful of EU first-tier cities for short vacations or business trips, and never have to deal with the reality of living and working under an oppressive bureaucratic state.
I'd trade "not being able to access Cloudflare-websites for some hours per week" over "My neighbors can't afford healthcare, there is no public transport for anyone nor can I walk to a cafe on the other side of town", but we all have different priorities :) Don't get me wrong, it sucks, makes no sense and I hate the responsible people for it, but in the grand scheme of things, Spain does have a higher quality of life…
Or you can have all of those things but also not block cloudflare. Because blocking cloudflare is in the interest of just a few company's profits and is unrelated to everything else you mentioned.
Re: Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times
#64Should also block themselves from dubbing stuff into spanish, they are horrible, thanks god southamerica has many talented spanish dubbers
Subtitles all the way. Only advantages of dubbing I can see is accessibility for vision impaired and employment opportunities for local VA talent.
But dubbed live action media is such a horrid experience for me.
Re: Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times
#65At what point does spanish internet become too unreliable? There was a thread the other day about someone's CI jobs failing due too this.
when connected health device cause a death I guess
No really.... more so when some giant multinational that is bribing (lobbying is just legalized bribes, lets use the real word for it) the politicians start to loose money. Then an exception will be made for them, and they will continue. What they really want is for Cloudflare and others to give in and police it for them.
Re: Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times
#66Assuming that "piracy is a service problem, not a pricing problem" is still the prevailing wisdom, what is Spain / La Liga doing wrong that sports piracy is so prevalent as to warrant this? It seems like a no-brainer to expand stream availability and charge appropriately for it vs. scheduling daily kneecaps of other economic activity.
LaLiga has the same kind of attitude and culture as the RIAA. Interpret their words and actions accordingly.
That's kind of what I mean. From like 2000-2010 in the US, you could find Napster or Limewire icons on the desktops of people who would self-describe as not-a-computer-person. Conveniences like iTunes->iPod and streaming services like Spotify did a lot to depress the popularity of music piracy for a decade+ after that, though it seems to have made a bit of a comeback recently, apparently as a result of streaming services losing licensing rights and generally tightening the belts on their services. You could almost argue that the RIAA's (abhorrent, yes) behavior created the vacuum for new services that competed with piracy legally.
I don't know much about them but it seems like part of the problem might be that LaLiga is acting both as the distributor and enforcer? e.g. Universal Music Group might be among the RIAA members, but that doesn't stop UMG from having a distribution relationship with Spotify if it benefits them more to capture those sales directly vs. depending on the RIAA to be a legal watchdog. If all LaLiga has to do is lean on existing infrastructure to block sites that bother them, they'd seem to have no similar incentive to provide better paid service.
Re: Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times
#67Wtf? Just the other day I had chat about how stupid this is: they're blocking cloudflare to stop pirates! So half the internet goes down, but pirates just.. Don't use cloudflare anymore.. Or use a proxy... Or use tor... These policies cause nothing but collateral damage, and now apparently they've decided to cause some more of it! Good job Spain.
CloudFlare loves pirates so much that they disclose loss of DMCA safe harbor protections as a material business risk on all their SEC filings. Piracy friendliness is key to their business model. It’s a risky position that no other large-scale CDN is willing to take.
Forcing piracy consumers to use Tor or other proxies is unlikely to be popular. They’ll still be used, for sure, but so long as CF makes pirated content easily accessible over the Internet, this is just going to keep happening. It’s just too damned convenient.
I don’t believe CF is going to win here, long term. If Spain and other countries block their ASNs, enough of their legitimate paying customers may start abandoning ship, and CF will have to get serious about unplugging notorious proxy configurations for piracy origin servers.
Re: Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times
#68Can Spaniards work around this with a VPN? I know that causes other issues though. To what degree is it feasible for a startup to move around in Europe? This is the sort of heavy-handed, tech-illiterate, authoritarian activity that might make me seriously consider moving my infrastructure or headquarters if I was a Spanish startup.
Yes, that's the funny thing, the people that want to pirate sports are still unaffected. In fact, one of the most famous pages to pirate soccer matches doesn't get blocked during this lockdowns
Re: Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times
#69Are people on the streets or is this some Franco-Pavlovian reflex kicking in? Net neutrality used to be a pillar of the EU internet. 2026; the mind fucking boggles.
Its football, so no people are not in the streets, they are watching tv.
Re: Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times
#70Can Spaniards work around this with a VPN? I know that causes other issues though. To what degree is it feasible for a startup to move around in Europe? This is the sort of heavy-handed, tech-illiterate, authoritarian activity that might make me seriously consider moving my infrastructure or headquarters if I was a Spanish startup.
IPs are blocked at Spanish internet provider level, the problem would be if you have customers in Spain, but it doesn't matter where you move your infra, if your ip is in one of the affected IP blocks, customers from Spain won't be able to reach no matter in what country is placed (what happened with docker pull )