While the controversy for dynamic blockages ordered by LaLiga continues, and Spanish Internet users continue to lose access to their legal websites and services, the organization is working on a new system that, at least in theory, should avoid such situations.
It is evident that LaLiga has taken inspiration from the Piracy Shield, the Automatic IP website blocking system in just 30 minutes established by the Italian government a year and a half ago. However, instead of appealing to the Spanish government to implement something similar, LaLiga has taken the private path and created what it calls its own “technological ecosystem”, a system that allows the organization order the blockage of retransmissions and services directly to the companies that house themwithout going through justice or requiring government authorization.
The new blocking system created by LaLiga has already managed to convince several technological companies, starting with CDN77 and Akamai Technologies last April; And this week, it has been announced that Twitch, Vercel, Scaleway and Gcore have joined the platform. These companies will now have to block the content requested by LaLiga within an average period of just 15 minutes, once they have been notified by the owners of the rights.
The presence of Twitch on the list may be surprising for the Spanish reader – the free android, taking into account that Twitch was blocked in Spain last week, leaving without access to live broadcasts live to millions of Spaniards. However, the sports organization said it had A “good relationship” with the Amazon service and an “exceptional collaboration”something that did not prevent him from ordering the dynamic block of several IP addresses of the service that, according to LaLiga, were “broadcasting content.”
Another surprising statement is that LaLiga presumes that the new type of blockade “It prevents dynamic IPS blockages that may affect third parties”. Recall that LaLiga managed to convince the judge of the Commercial Court No. 6 of Barcelona that the dynamic blockade was not going to produce innocent collateral victims; The judge came to rule out the existence of “indiscriminate blockages” even after two resources presented by Cloudflare and Rootedcon that appealed just that.
Now, and once those appeals have been dismissed without the possibility of resource, LaLiga publicly accepts that dynamic blockages “They can affect third parties” and that can cause “possible impacts” to customers of cloud services. In that context, LaLiga has presented this new “blocking” ecosystem that allows you to work directly with these Internet companies to avoid collateral victims in blockages.
Therefore, everything indicates that LaLiga is offering two alternatives to the Internet companies: or suffer the dynamic blocks that can leave most of their customers, or accept to block content in less than 15 minutes after an order of LaLiga, opaque and without judicial supervision.
It is a strategy that is succeeding, judging by the number of companies that are aiming, although the greatest is still: Cloudflare. The leader of the sector is in a war, both legal and words, with LaLiga and for now it seems unlikely to add to the new blocking system, although everything will depend on whether the therars organization can maintain the pressure.
