Over 500,000 websites wrongly blocked in Spain as La Liga anti-piracy campaign backfires
The article reports that LaLiga’s aggressive anti-piracy campaign in Spain has unintentionally blocked access to more than 500,000 legitimate websites, according to a new report by the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI). The findings raise concerns that the league’s court-authorized IP blocking strategy is causing widespread collateral damage by disrupting unrelated online services while attempting to stop illegal football streams.
OONI analyzed internet measurements collected between January and June 2026 and found that at least 554,000 legitimate domains were affected during LaLiga match broadcasts. Because many websites share the same IP addresses through cloud hosting providers and content delivery networks (CDNs), blocking only 4 to 20 IP addresses during a match was enough to make more than 400,000 unrelated websites temporarily inaccessible.
The report found that the campaign affected 7,441 IP addresses across 36 infrastructure providers, with Cloudflare suffering the largest impact. Many of the blocked websites had no connection to piracy and included public-interest organizations such as Amnesty International and Greenpeace, highlighting the risks of using IP-based blocking against services hosted on shared infrastructure.
Researchers also identified a more serious issue involving TLS Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) interception on one Spanish ISP, Digi Mobil. This technique has the potential to intercept encrypted internet traffic, raising significant privacy and security concerns beyond the issue of website availability. The report argues that anti-piracy enforcement should not compromise the security of ordinary internet users.
The findings have prompted criticism from digital rights organizations and European internet service providers, who argue that rights holders should be held accountable when anti-piracy measures disrupt lawful online services. Critics contend that IP-based blocking is increasingly ineffective on today’s internet because modern hosting platforms allow thousands of unrelated websites to share the same infrastructure.
The article concludes that the report reignites the debate over balancing copyright enforcement with internet openness. While LaLiga remains committed to combating illegal football streaming, the scale of the unintended disruptions suggests that current IP-blocking practices may require significant revision to avoid harming legitimate websites and internet users.
