The consequences of the massive IP addresses ordered by LaLiga are still noticed every weekend in Spain, when a multitude of websites and legal services are inaccessible to users. They have become collateral victims for using Cloudflare services, one of the world’s largest Internet companies and has become the objective of the owners of rights.
Cloudflare offers a CDN cloud service (content distribution network), which allows you to Several clients share the same resources; In this way, several websites can have the same IP address and use the same server. Thanks to this, the costs of maintaining a page or a service have plummeted, and users have access to various advantages, such as against DDOS attacks.
However, Cloudflare has also been accused of helping criminalshosting illegal services that share resources with the legal ones; Hence the blockades ordered by LaLiga are affecting so many pages that have nothing to do with football. And Spain is not the only one who is taking measures against Cloudflare.
Last week, a historical sentence in France ordered Cloudflare to block piracy in its servicesa measure that LaLiga has celebrated and will probably want to repeat in Spain. The judgment, issued by the Judicial Court of Paris, has recognized for the first time the role that Cloudflare has not only as CDN, but also as a DNS provider and inverse proxy service; Therefore, the company will be forced to implement blocking measures that go far beyond what it until now offered.
Actually, Cloudflare already blocks pirate content when it is informed of it, and the company declared it when the first LaLiga blocks began. In France, Cloudflare affirmed having blocked more than 400 piracy domains of sporting events only during the past year; However, from the beginning the company has tried to remove importance from its function as an executor of blocking measures, because it considers that this should be the role of other organizations and companies.
It is evident that Cloudflare does not want Its blockages are “limited efficacy”. If Cloudflare blocks a page, the creator of this only has to stop using its services to be available for the public, so these blockages are only temporary in most cases, with a high monetary and technical cost.
These arguments do not seem to be convinced to justice, neither the Spanish nor the French. The sentence will force Cloudflare to Implement the blocking of pages at various levelsboth at the level of DNS (name server) and the suspension of the CDN service and the deactivation of the reverse proxy. In addition, the sentence speaks of an “accelerated procedure” during the celebration of the football season, reminiscent of the Pivacy Shield of Italy and the obligation of the operators to block services in just 30 minutes.
The free android
France is not the only one who has given a hard blow to Cloudflare. In the United Kingdom, the Premier League has obtained a judicial citation that will force Cloudflare to reveal the identity of its clients; Specifically, Cloudflare must deliver the data of those responsible for 38 IPTV and streaming services that offer access to football matches.
The data that Cloudflare will share the name, the address, the IP address, the telephone number, email address, payment information, and the history. At the moment, this decision only requires the data of the owners of the websites, and there has been no talk of sharing data from the users of these pirate services; Although that is another measure that is already being considered, especially to finally implement the fines to see IPTV that many European countries have presented or are close to doing so.
