Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times (bandaancha.eu)

So what does this mean in english?

File "selling out your country's communication infrastructure to people filming other people kicking a ball around" under things science fiction writers failed to predict about capitalist dystopias.

Wtf? Just the other day I had chat about how stupid this is: they're blocking cloudflare to stop pirates!

So half the internet goes down, but pirates just.. Don't use cloudflare anymore.. Or use a proxy... Or use tor...

These policies cause nothing but collateral damage, and now apparently they've decided to cause some more of it!

Good job Spain.

This is incredibly stupid, but don't laugh at Spaniards: your (and my) lawmakers are equally likely to enact similarly stupid laws. It's mind-boggling how stupid the world can be sometimes.

Time to block your gov sites as well

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Should also block themselves from dubbing stuff into spanish, they are horrible, thanks god southamerica has many talented spanish dubbers

Too bad the article isn't paywalled, or it could be a moment to have a talk about HN's own standard-operating-procedure piracy.

When it comes to piracy and anti-piracy, there is greed and stupidity on all sides.

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Well, Spain was a dictatorship as recently as 1975.

I'm starting to thing the final goal is just to stop "the world" so watching the advertisements with a side of sports is the only thing left to do lmao, wonder how they'll justify banning reading during matches.

Now they only have to spread all games across the full week, to make it even better. /s

It's always hilarious to see HN users claim how the "quality of life" is so much better in the EU than the USA. When in reality most of them only ever visit a handful of EU first-tier cities for short vacations or business trips, and never have to deal with the reality of living and working under an oppressive bureaucratic state.

Assuming that "piracy is a service problem, not a pricing problem" is still the prevailing wisdom, what is Spain / La Liga doing wrong that sports piracy is so prevalent as to warrant this? It seems like a no-brainer to expand stream availability and charge appropriately for it vs. scheduling daily kneecaps of other economic activity.

This is what we call throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

At what point does spanish internet become too unreliable? There was a thread the other day about someone's CI jobs failing due too this.

Can Spaniards work around this with a VPN? I know that causes other issues though.

To what degree is it feasible for a startup to move around in Europe? This is the sort of heavy-handed, tech-illiterate, authoritarian activity that might make me seriously consider moving my infrastructure or headquarters if I was a Spanish startup.

Seems obvious at this point there needs to be EU-level regulations against individual countries, such as Spain and Italy, implementing these absurd restrictions. It would at least make lobbying from those sports companies more difficult. These same companies have been pushing for banning VPNs -- consumer VPNs -- as they easily circumvent half the internet going dark because of some dumb sports event, and they're going to be targeted next when everyone's using them. It doesn't help "piracy" always ends up being an excellent excuse to undermine everyone's privacy.

if they were serious about stopping piracy, they'd ban computers outright.

If I ever start watching football, I'll make sure to pirate every match. FIFA, La Liga, they all seem utterly rotten to me.

Just how much money is in all that?

Are people on the streets or is this some Franco-Pavlovian reflex kicking in?

Net neutrality used to be a pillar of the EU internet. 2026; the mind fucking boggles.

The page claims that the streaming of these sports events 'jams' the Internet in Spain. I am guessing that's just a bogus excuse, and that doesn't even happen; am I wrong?

Every time just around the time I forget how much I hate football, these fucks come up out of nowhere with something exceptionally corrupted and remind me that they still exist.

FWIW there are tools specifically to test the impact. I hope to read reports from https://ooni.org soon.