New script rotation in the history of the massive blockages of web pages in Spain: the Constitutional Court has received an appeal that could end this practice, at least in a precautionary way. It has been presented by Rootedcon, against the decision in favor of LaLiga and Telefónica of the Commercial Court No. 6 of Barcelona.
Last December, LaLiga and Telefónica obtained a Great victory against football piracyobtaining permission from the judge to order dynamic blocks of IP addresses; In this way, the Spanish operators were obliged to block access to the denounced addresses, regardless of whether they affected legal services.
The IP addresses blocking is different from the domain block used so far in the fight against piracy in Spain. On the current Internet, several services can share the same IP address if they obtain it from the same supplier; As a result, the blockade of an IP address used by a pirate service also causes the lock of legal services that use the same supplier.
That is the reason why, since last February, Spain is suffering Internet connection problems every weekend; Since small independent web pages to large platforms such as Twitch have been collateral victims of the fight against piracywith Spanish Internet users losing access for several hours and even days.
The reaction of the industry was swift, but the conclusion of justice was not in its favor. The Commercial Court No. 6 of Barcelona dismissed the nullity incidents presented by the cloudflare provider and the Roothedcon cybersecurity community that alleged that the blockade was affecting legal pages massively, affecting their fundamental rights. However, the judge considered that there were no sufficient evidence that this was happening, and He came to rule out the existence of “indiscriminate blockages”.
Now, Rootedcon has taken the next step in the legal battle that he already promised in his day, with the presentation of an appeal for the Constitutional Court. The organization affirms that the judicial resolution “ignores the arguments raised” in the resources before the original resolution, which made direct reference to “Fundamental rights to effective judicial protection and freedoms of expression and information”covered by the Constitution.
Rootedcon believes that the judge’s refusal reveals a worrying derives “in the use of judicial measures to censor and criminalize Internet access“, and appeals to LaLiga, to the operators involved and the Judiciary to” reflect “on the impact of this type of decisions.
The appeal for the Constitutional Request precautionary measures to stop the blockages ordered by LaLiga; In addition, Rootedcon asks the Congress of Deputies for a public and technical debate about the limits of network control. Until now, these blockages have gone unnoticed in Spanish politics, but that is also changing; This same week, the BNG (Galego nationalist bloc) demanded the government’s performance against blockages.
