Since last February, Spanish Internet users are blocked from a part of the Internet during every weekend. It is the result of the mass blockages ordered by LaLiga and Telefónica, thanks to the judgment of the Commercial Court No. 6 of Barcelona, and that potentially affects thousands of websites and legal services.
The controversial sentence granted football rights owners the possibility of ordering IP address blockagesinstead of domain name as it was done until then; The justification was in the popularization of new technologies that improve the privacy of users by preventing the registration of the pages they visit, but that make traditional blocks more difficult.
However, it was soon evident why the blockages by IP address had not been made so far: today Many web services and pages share the same addressthanks to platforms such as Cloudflare that offer cloud services. Cloudflare itself was one of the most affected initially, with many blocked pages that had nothing to do with football, IPTV, or illegal retransmissions. And it is not the only one.
In recent days, the case of Vercel has gained notoriety, by the A large number of applications that have stopped working suddenly. Vercel is a web application service in the cloud, which allows its customers to develop and offer their own apps to end users, and seems to have become the new goal of LaLiga blockages, as they reveal in Torrentfreak.
Last week, many applications stopped working suddenly, and they all had in common that they used the Vercel platform and therefore, used the same IP addresses. Specifically, LaLiga ordered the blockade of two IP addresses owned by Vercel, which affected a multitude of apps, including some widely used in company environments such as Tinybird. The users of these applications published complaints on social networks, aimed at Movistar and the rest of Spanish operators, but it was soon evident that they were not going to obtain an answer.
In fact, users are not the only ones who are suffering from this lack of transparency. Matheus Fernandes, Vercel engineer, said in X that the platform has been blocked without anyone telling them why; Fernandes also clarified that Vercel is trying to contact those responsible for the blockade, but that “it is being difficult.” Finally, days later Vercel confirmed that he was in contact with LaLiga and “collaborating to eliminate illegal content.”
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In theory, blockades ordered by LaLiga affect IP addresses of servers that house pirate content, such as retransmissions of football matches; However, it is not clear if that means that the Vercel platform is or was hosting that type of content, taking into account that it is a platform to develop apps. Again, lack of transparency makes it difficult to clarify what the problem is and how it can be solved.
For a small startup that is using one of these platforms, a blockade like this can suppose death. And to see, it is a potential loss of customers. Therefore, perhaps it is not surprising that the CEO of Vercel, Guillermo Rauch, has published a statement in which he qualifies LaLiga’s blockages as “A form of internet censorship without accountable”. The manager criticizes that the blockages do not distinguish between the different domains housed in the same IP address, and therefore, “any page and service of a blocked IP is disconnected, regardless of their legitimacy.”
