Repeating Failure: How Spanish Overblocking Ignores the Lessons of Italy’s Broken Piracy Shield
Main takeaways
- The Spanish football league has established an aggressive blocking regime based on a single court judgment, allowing them to block IP addresses with limited oversight
- Due to the nature of shared IP addresses, dynamic IP blocking is inherently flawed, causing massive collateral damage to legitimate websites and services
- Rather than resorting to blunt measures, existing legal mechanisms – especially the Digital Services Act (DSA) – should be used to tackle online piracy
Since early 2025, LaLiga (Spain’s top-tier football league) has been operating an aggressive and largely unchecked IP-address blocking regime in an attempt to tackle sports piracy. In 2024, LaLiga and several Spanish internet service providers (ISPs), some of whom have direct commercial interests in LaLiga broadcasting, sought a court order authorising the blocking of specific domain names.
They succeeded in this particular endeavour. However, LaLiga has thereafter continued to interpret this order as a green light to unilaterally select Internet Protocol (IP) addresses and domains to block, without ongoing court oversight or accountability. While the goal of combating online piracy is universally supported, Spain’s approach perfectly illustrates the dangers of blunt infrastructure-level blocking and privatised enforcement without judicial oversight.
1. What is going wrong in Spain right now
The legal foundation of LaLiga’s anti-piracy enforcement model rests on a single, seven-page judgment issued by a Commercial Court in Barcelona on 18 December 2024. This ruling should have never been treated as setting a strong precedent, as it was not the result of a rigorous legal battle and didn’t seriously examine whether the blocking approach is lawful or proportionate under EU law.
Nevertheless, empowered by this ruling, LaLiga now compiles and updates lists of IP addresses and domain names that it wants to see blocked. This process is completely opaque: these lists are not publicly disclosed, there is no independent technical or judicial validation before new addresses are added, and the court does not appear to continuously review any additions.
Once someone gets blocked, there is no redress mechanism to remove addresses from the list, even when they are no longer associated with infringing content, nor any appeal process for mistakenly blocked services. Therefore, these practices are fundamentally incompatible with the rule of law.
Due to the way the internet is built, addresses are frequently shared by thousands of websites, especially in modern cloud and content delivery network (CDN) environments. Therefore, blocking one single IP address often ends up restricting Spanish users from accessing legitimate services hosted on the same shared infrastructure, also known as ‘overblocking’.
2. Spanish blocking is not incidental
Overblocking in Spain is not an occasional accident. LaLiga’s approach has caused widespread disruption, preventing access to tens of thousands of legitimate websites in recent years – including critical services such as payment providers and a national health operator. This disproportionate cost is borne by innocent third parties and small businesses, reflecting a mistaken belief that the commercial interests of one dominant party should trump Spanish consumers’ rights to a functioning internet.
The situation has become so severe that members of the Spanish Parliament have sought explanations from the government. While acknowledging that the blocks have significantly impacted legitimate websites, the Spanish Government maintains that this is a judicial matter falling under the jurisdiction of the courts.
Understanding the full scale of disruption is difficult due to the opaque practices of Spanish ISPs. In response to this lack of transparency and due to widespread social discontent, grassroots efforts – like Hayahora Futbol or laligagate – and users leveraging the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) have emerged to monitor the proliferation of unchecked overblocking and to raise awareness about it.
3. Ineffective, but LaLiga still doubles down
This approach is also inherently ineffective in blocking the serious problem of piracy. Dynamic IP blocking leads to a ‘whack-a-mole’ scenario where bad actors simply rotate to new infrastructure and hide behind other (shared) IP addresses, while legitimate static services remain blocked.
Instead of acknowledging these flaws, LaLiga decided to double down. In February 2026, the Commercial Court of Córdoba even granted them an ex-parte preliminary injunction against NordVPN and ProtonVPN. This means the court issued a binding order, based solely on LaLiga’s arguments, without notifying those virtual private networks (VPNs) or allowing them to present a defence beforehand. The VPNs only discovered the judgment through the media and are now obliged to implement the blocks enforced by LaLiga.
Forcing neutral intermediaries, like VPN services, to act as infrastructure gatekeepers contradicts their core function of providing privacy and secure internet access. Qualities for which these tools are explicitly recommended to consumers by Spain’s National Cybersecurity Institute. A VPN is a digital tunnel, it does not store any content. A VPN cannot selectively block one site behind a shared IP address, meaning they are forced to block large amounts of lawful traffic regularly, with extraterritorial consequences stretching beyond Spain. What is more, broad IP-level blocking also risks breaching the net-neutrality principles of the EU’s Open Internet Regulation.
Conclusion: How to curb online piracy more effectively
The simple reality is that blocking has little to no effect on piracy: it neither reduces demand nor removes illegal content from the internet – leaving the overall scale of piracy unchanged.
The most effective way to tackle online piracy is to address the root cause of the problem. This can be done by allocating additional resources to law enforcement and applying a ‘follow the money’ strategy – targeting payment gateways that knowingly process illegal IPTV fees and advertisers funding pirate sites, for example. Furthermore, rightsholders should focus on increasing the supply of legal, accessible, and affordable content available to users.
Any national strategies aimed at fighting online piracy should be anchored in a robust liability regime and come with clear redress mechanisms. Instead of escalating blunt measures that target fundamental parts of our internet infrastructure, like CDN and VPN providers, the Spanish government must ensure that courts, ISPs, and private entities comply with established EU legal safeguards – especially those enshrined in the Digital Services Act (DSA).
