Discussion

Internet será irrespirable los días de fútbol y otros deportes. Telefónica extiende los bloqueos a Champions, tenis y golf.

shevy-java: So what does this mean in english?

mmh0000: Context, a few days ago, this was a very popular article on HN: Tell HN: Docker pull fails in Spain due to football Cloudflare block https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47738883 TL;DR: Spain blocks A LOT of CDNs during footy matches, including ALL of Cloudflare, thus breaking most of the internet. All in the name of stopping "pirates".

lamasery: I wonder how close they are in broad economic damage to it being cheaper to just pay FIFA or whomever for some kind of nationwide viewing license (which they'd surely be able to negotiate way lower than a simple "cost to view every match, times count of Spanish residents" since that's nowhere near as much as they're getting out of Spain now)

bombcar: It's La Liga - Spain should just nationalize them and make it a division of the government.

embedding-shape: [delayed]

neilv: 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.

lionkor: I can't feel bad when the subscription circumvention uses the same method they use to get their stuff to rank high in search results. News pages want their content indexed, so they can pull a bait and switch.

nradov: 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 under an oppressive bureaucratic state.

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

hollow-moe: 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.

cm2012: Well, Spain was a dictatorship as recently as 1975.

embedding-shape: > TL;DR: Spain blocks A LOT of CDNs during footy matches, including ALL of CloudflareAFAIK, I don't think it's "A LOT of CDNs", it's only Cloudflare, at least personally Cloudflare is the only CDN I can verify I lose access to during the football matches.

Tabular-Iceberg: It sounds like Spain is due for a new Franco.

YawningAngel: Movistar are paying a billion dollars a year, so probably a long way away

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

alfonsodev: there we go ... :D

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

0x_rs: Seems obvious at this point there need 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 -- yes, all 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.

tokai: In other news NY is working on banning air guns that are not transparent or brightly colored and have plugged barrels. Yes plugged, making them useless.Which oppressive bureaucratic state are we talking about again?

estebank: > never have to deal with the reality of living and working under an oppressive bureaucratic state.I see that you have never had to deal with the US government.

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

embedding-shape: I'd trade "not being able to access Cloudflare-websites for some hours per week" over "My neighbors can't afford healthcare, there is no public transport for anyone nor can I walk to a cafe on the other side of town", but we all have different priorities :)Don't get me wrong, it sucks, makes no sense and I hate the responsible people for it, but in the grand scheme of things, Spain does have a higher quality of life than so many other places out in the world, most important, way higher than the country you're comparing it to, on almost any useful metric.

applfanboysbgon: As stupid and terrible as this is, this is certainly a lesser evil compared to minimal worker's rights, non-existent public transportation, no legally guaranteed parental leave/vacation/sick time, paying tens of thousands of dollars for healthcare, a ~5x+ higher violent crime rate, wasting billions of taxpayer money on sending missiles into schools while infrastructure crumbles, etc. etc. A country does not need to be perfect to have higher quality of life than the US, that's for sure.

electronsoup: 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.

oytis: Conversely, most Europeans praising the USA have mostly been to California or New York, and rarely to Ohio or Alabama

InfraScaler: Yes, works with any VPN.Also, it takes 10 minutes to find a valid football stream, even without a VPN. Such is life.

alfonsodev: > This is the sort of heavy-handed, tech-illiterate, authoritarian.Totally agree with this, it's ridiculous and a shame.I personally don't use any infrastructure provider from Spain, but you wouldn't not solve any problem moving out, and also those providers are not the ones to blame or punish. Only customer connecting from Spain are affected where is the infrastructure does not solve the problem.

llbbdd: 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.

raincole: > "piracy is a service problem, not a pricing problem"I never buy into this. If copyright law doesn't exist, pirate sites will eventually always provide better service than the official channels.One example is scanlation manga. Chinese scanlation sites have reached the theoretical ceiling of service: just serve images fast with a little nonintrusive ad. No login required. No way the official Japanese apps can provide significant better service than that.

estebank: LaLiga has the same kind of attitude and culture as the RIAA. Interpret their words and actions accordingly.

llbbdd: That's kind of what I mean. From like 2000-2010 in the US, you could find Napster or Limewire icons on the desktops of people who would self-describe as not-a-computer-person. Conveniences like iTunes->iPod and streaming services like Spotify did a lot to depress the popularity of music piracy for a decade+ after that, though it seems to have made a bit of a comeback recently, apparently as a result of streaming services losing licensing rights and generally tightening the belts on their services. You could almost argue that the RIAA's (abhorrent, yes) behavior created the vacuum for new services that competed with piracy legally.I don't know much about them but it seems like part of the problem might be that LaLiga is acting both as the distributor and enforcer? e.g. Universal Music Group might be among the RIAA members, but that doesn't stop UMG from having a distribution relationship with Spotify if it benefits them more to capture those sales directly vs. depending on the RIAA to be a legal watchdog. If all LaLiga has to do is lean on existing infrastructure to block sites that bother them, they'd seem to have no similar incentive to provide better paid service.

embedding-shape: > From like 2000-2010 in the US, you could find Napster or Limewire icons on the desktops of people who would self-describe as not-a-computer-person.Which, just to add some context, is exactly how people/groups who want to watch football at home does with football streams today in 2026 in Spain, except now also with a VPN of course. Regular football fans who have no idea how/why these streams work or where they're coming from and couldn't tell you the difference between a website and a desktop application, know the website addresses and the know-to about how to access them. Which is why you're seeing the reaction from La Liga and the courts.> problem might be that LaLiga is acting both as the distributor and enforcer?Isn't this true in movies and other areas too? HBO and other distributors send DMCA requests left and right like everyone else, as far as I can tell, aren't they too then "the distributor and enforcer" or is that different somehow?

jwr: 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.

wahnfrieden: It describes hierarchy and power more than it does intelligence

petcat: > there need to be EU-level regulations against individual countries, such as Spain and Italy, implementing these absurd restrictionsWhy should other EU members care what websites Spain allows their citizens to access? Does the "EU" even have authority for such a thing?

0x_rs: There's a "European Declaration on Digital Rights and Principles", signed by the member states, and I believe the right to access internet freely, without companies being permitted to mandate entire IP addresses blocks being forbidden from routing and within 30 minutes from the request surely would fit within that one, or others, in some way or another. No company should hold that power and it's a serious precedent others states in the union would want to leverage for their own reasons too. Reading this recent TorrentFreak article, the regulations should probably align with the following thinktank's analysis, at the very least:>The report makes 12 formal recommendations. The most significant is that IP-based blocking should be avoided altogether, due to its inherent tendency to block large numbers of legitimate service sites. DNS-level or URL-level blocking should be used instead.https://torrentfreak.com/eu-pirate-site-blocking-is-broken-r...

rapnie: Once you dub, you can't stop. I'm glad Netherlands doesn't do dubbing. Helps general foreign language profiency, I suppose, and near every Dutch person speaks English quite reasonably.

Paratoner: I never understood this attitude from native speakers towards their own language. I am a fresh NL citizen, and have struggled SO MUCH to assimilate into society largely due to this prevalent mentality of "dutch sux actually, we can all speak english amirite guys??" its so bafflingly self-destructive to your own culture. But go off I guess.

tverbeure: You've probably never watched Indiana Jones speak French... It's unbearable.When I watch an American movie, I want to hear it the way the director intended it to be. I don't want every villain in every movie have the same voice. If I want to hear Dutch in a movie, I watch a Dutch movie. It's not that deep.

alfonsodev: IPs are blocked at Spanish internet provider level, the problem would be if you have customers in Spain, but it doesn't matter where you move your infra, if your ip is in one of the affected IP blocks, customers from Spain won't be able to reach no matter in what country is placed (what happened with docker pull )

ciberado: My Tailscale exit node disagrees ;)

avereveard: when connected health device cause a death I guess

em500: I sure hope connected health device makers include some generous tolerance for network outages.

lifestyleguru: 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.

adalacelove: Yes, it has the authority. There are plenty of EU regulations that states must obey, from fundamental rights to taxation.

em-bee: if it interferes with my ability to sell products and services in spain because my website gets blocked as a side-effect, then yes, the EU should care.

worldsayshi: What kind of health devices require reliable internet connection to prevent death?

loloquwowndueo: > I don't want every villain in every movie have the same voice.Sounds like your problem is with crappy, cheap dubbing, not dubbing in general.Look at Disney animation for dubbing done right (and more so in the 20th century - these days I’m not so sure).

hirako2000: Except that it isn't true.Candycrush had gained the love of the anime crowd. Until they started to "optimise" bandwidth. It wasn't a pricing error as subscription price didn't increase.They claim the degradation was perceptible. Except that it was.It was many years ago, and since then candycrush lost subscribers. It won't because illegal streaming platforms got better, simply because the illegal platform provided the choice to go all the way to lossless quality.For football, imo that's a pricing issue as well as a distribution issue. Basically I need to subscribe to a lock in plan even if I just desire to watch, say, the quarter to finals. Or simply the champions league.

falcor84: Candycrush? I suppose you mean Crunchyroll, right?

connorboyle: > The announcement speaks of blocking domains, URLs and IP addresses, the latter of which affects legitimate services if the addresses belong to CDN services such as Cloudflare.> La información habla tanto de bloqueos de dominios, URLs y de direcciones IP, caso este último que, cuando se produce, afecta a servicios legítimos si se trata de direcciones pertenecientes a servicios CDN como Cloudflare.Another casualty of the centralized internet of our time

isodev: I would say the root problem is not someone seeking to prevent piracy but rather the fact that so many services are clustered behind the same proxy / CDN service (e.g. Cloudflare).That in my view is what needs to be regulated and Cloudflare designated as a “gatekeeper” with all the responsibilities to go with that.La Liga would never be able to secure blanket bans if people and services were more decentralised

embedding-shape: Both are problems. In Spain we have laws that are supposed to give us reasonable access to internet websites, and no one should be able to block large swaths of the internet in order to block access to few websites, supposedly at least. Clearly this been compromised, and the judges themselves seems to go against the law, but I'm hopeful it'd be restored one day.> La Liga would never be able to secure blanket bans if people and services were more decentralisedThey technically haven't either. According to "ban-supporters", La Liga first reached out to Cloudflare asking them to shut down the pirate stream websites using Cloudflare. After Cloudflare rejected that, La Liga went to judges that approved forcing ISPs to ban specific IPs (related to the services) which happened to be Cloudflare IPs that other services uses too.End result is the same, it fucking sucks sometimes when shit unexplicitly breaks before you remember there is a football game, but at least I think that's a bit more accurate to what's practically happening :)

scotty79: Basically EU should step in whenever country level government doesn't do a good enough job for its citizens.It's not strong enough to do that yet but a lot of people with cheap governments wish it was.

Pay08: That would be an absolute disaster and basically destroy European democracy.

opengrass: Piracy is for teenagers and poor people.

bix6: How many middle class families can legitimately afford an extra $100/mo+ on multiple streaming services?

bot403: Or you can have all of those things but also not block cloudflare. Because blocking cloudflare is in the interest of just a few company's profits and is unrelated to everything else you mentioned.

embedding-shape: Yes, sure, as mentioned, I agree with that it's fucking stupid, but when someone complains about that, while referring to "quality of life" in a place which more depends on other things, it's worth to zoom out a bit and gain some perspective, which was frankly missing in the comment I was responding to.

nradov: Nah, I didn't miss anything. I've spent enough time in the EU (including the poorer parts that most tourists don't visit) to have a crystal clear perspective on the real situation.

fsniper: I read this as you are in fact in agreement with the statement. If that's the ceiling, provide the same level of service and gain more of the market. In which you have all the means to be faster, non-intrusive, and less faulty so that you can be always better.

oscarcp: There was a case two weeks ago about someone unable to locate their missing parent with a tracking application (I'm assuming the parent has some sort of dementia) because the application could not connect to the servers. Link in spanish https://hipertextual.com/actualidad/los-bloqueos-de-laliga-e...

Pay08: The question is about the authority to pass laws that only some countries need to obey. To my knowledge, the EU does not have the authority to do that.

roer: It doesn't have to be significantly better. If the service is stable, cheap and hassle-free, people will pay for it.

mihaelm: Subtitles all the way. Only advantages of dubbing I can see is accessibility for vision impaired and employment opportunities for local VA talent.But dubbed live action media is such a horrid experience for me.

loloquwowndueo: Dubbed content is ok for young children I guess.

Aaargh20318: I’m a Dutch native and if it were up to me we’d switch to English. I think it’s dumb that small country like us feels the need to maintain its own language.It is a massive disadvantage. It means that we’re always late with new stuff because the Dutch market is so small no one wants to make the effort of building Dutch versions.

Retr0id: But copyright law does exist?

themafia: The pirates still exist. The legitimate users are punished.Might as well abandon the law.

Retr0id: DRM is effective(ish) because of both technical and legal mechanisms. Without the legal mechanisms they'd ramp up the technical ones, which might end up even worse for legitimate users.

rwyinuse: Well, there are lots of EU countries where governments aren't as idiotic as that of Spain, and where bureaucracy is mostly under control as well.As a citizen of a Nordic country I would never want to live in America, except maybe if I was rich. Especially for people with children my country offers a superior quality of life in many ways.

calgoo: As a Swede living in Spain for over 30 years, i much prefer to stay down here. My personal feel is that the Nordic countries "nanny" their populations too much. Too much say in way you can or can't do, and the culture encourages it (O my why are they talking so loud, O my they are arguing outside in public!.... My own experiences when visiting). The governments also don't know how to deal with the ingress of immigration as well as having a extensively privatized system that does not work (healthcare, schools, transport - i think its slowly getting better). Now there are great things too... But i feel safer walking the streets of Barcelona then the streets of Malmo.Now Spain have their own issues - there are a lot of very light leaning people around still... there was no revolution when the dictator died. A lot of judges and military police officers that had murdered people under Franco continued in service. And of course, lets not forget how the countries plays everyone against Catalunya and Pais Vasco, everything is our fault if you ask people in the south and just like i mentioned above, all we hear about is the Vox and other ultra right people talking crap.I think one of the few good things we still have down here in Spain is that there is still a memory of Franco, of the dictatorship. If not you, then one of your parents or grandparents lived it.

bix6: Is it not a pricing problem? Spotify is relatively cheap and has all the music. For the same video coverage I need 5+ streaming services that all increase prices significantly faster than inflation. This is just private equity over squeezing?

mrtksn: This seems like they are aiming to increase profit margins instead of increasing the supply and decreasing the price. Considering that increasing the supply is trivial in digital products, maybe they are competing in a saturated market?Spaniards attitudes can be quite different from the American ones, Americans just pay for everything for convenience, in Spain you probably need to match the price of the IPTV to steal their customers.Apparently IPTV costs 20 to 60 Euros per year, the legal option is over 100 euros per month.To match the IPTV they need 20x price reduction. This would mean that they need sign in 20x more Spaniards to break even with the current situation. Are there 20x more Spaniards pirating the LaLiga than paying? Even in Spain I don’t think so.

Swizec: [delayed]

nslsm: They don't have to do anything like that. Just create a law that says no country in the EU is allowed to block sites.

alt227: When Spotify came along, music piracy all but vanished. It has already been proven in other media, it needs to happen with sports and streaming in general, then media piracy will be a thing of the past.

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

lostlogin: If you think FIFA is rotten, remember their Peace Prize.Rot isn’t a strong enough insult.

amarant: 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.

otterley: CloudFlare loves pirates so much that they disclose loss of DMCA safe harbor protections as a material business risk on all their SEC filings. Piracy friendliness is key to their business model. It’s a risky position that no other large-scale CDN is willing to take.Forcing piracy consumers to use Tor or other proxies is unlikely to be popular. They’ll still be used, for sure, but so long as CF makes pirated content easily accessible over the Internet, this is just going to keep happening. It’s just too damned convenient.I don’t believe CF is going to win here, long term. If Spain and other countries block their ASNs, enough of their legitimate paying customers may start abandoning ship, and CF will have to get serious about unplugging notorious proxy configurations for piracy origin servers.

calgoo: But cloudflare has no issue blocking the content if they receive a court order. The issue here is that La Liga wants to be able to get content blocked because they say so, and it has to be done right now.I also don't support these organizations that destroy the sports that people love, force you to subscribe to different services as each game and "liga" has made their own deals to make as much money as possible. Until we remove the stupid amount of money that is involved in these sport events nothing will change. And now they are talking about other events like movies, series and live entertainment show. Hopefully they come for the VPNs next and break every business VPN tunnel whenever they want. Hopefully that will cause enough backlash that they finally fix this BS once and for all.

embedding-shape: I'd probably say that most of my early English was learnt by reading subtitles and listening to American cartoons and shows on TV while eating breakfast before school. If it was dubbed, probably once I got my first computer I'd have a way harder time understanding at least the tiny bits I did understand.

loloquwowndueo: > reading subtitlesSo you were already reading. What about younger children?That said - I fully agree, I’m surprised I don’t speak with a Star Trek accent given where I had most of my early exposure to English.

embedding-shape: I dunno, younger than 5-6 I think most children don't really understand plot lines or whatever anyways so it matters less, a cartoon in English is probably as fun and engaging as one in the native language.

nslsm: Yes yes, Spain sucks a lot. Please stay in Venezuela, well away of our awfulness.

Aurornis: > Assuming that "piracy is a service problem, not a pricing problem" is still the prevailing wisdomI don't have experience with broadcast media (in Spain, especially) but I a little experience on the software side: I could not believe the lengths some people would go to in order to avoid paying even $5-10 for useful software. Hours of work, sketchy cracks, downloading things from websites likely to compromise their system. Some of them would become irate when the software was updated and broke their cracks, spending time complaining loudly on forums and social media or even trying to threaten developers. The strangest part is when they start posting from social media where you can see things like their $3,000 gaming PC build, but if they see a chance to avoid paying $10-20 for something they will take it.It becomes culturally embedded in some bubbles: If it's possible to find a way to avoid paying and there are no consequences for trying, some people will go for it.I don't even buy the "it's a service problem" argument either. I have a friend who loves to watch sports games but refused to pay for any services. He will spend 30 minutes jumping from one website to the next enduring crazy amounts of ads, pop-ups, and attempts to get him to install things on his computer until finally getting to a blocky stream that drops out every few minutes. He can easily afford to pay, but getting things without paying is basically a little game he likes to play.

quacked: It's a service problem. Every new service is a colossal headache to set up payment, remember to cancel payment if you only wanted to see the single event and have no need for the service the rest of the year, find what's playing on what when, deal with their bullshit when they add ads onto an ad-free plan that you bought only because it was ad-free, yadda yadda yadda. The suits could have had 10x as much money out of me if I could just pay one-time prices. "Sure, fork over $10 and you can have a temporary account to watch the US Open this year." I will do that. In a single month I'll pay twice the cost of a monthly NYT subscription to read online articles, maybe $0.50/pop.But they don't offer that, they offer difficult-to-cancel ad-laden plans that don't even get you access to the content you want to see reliably (edit: and as another commenters, signs you up to in some cases multiple mailing lists--thanks, The Athletic, for having a separate mailing list for every one of your terrible sub-orgs, I deeply regret paying you a dime). I'll be sailing the seven seas as long as it's viable.

Aurornis: > Every new service is a colossal headache to set up payment, remember to cancel payment if you only wanted to see the single event and have no need for the service the rest of the year, find what's playing on what whenI just don't find these arguments convincing after watching my friend spend cumulative hours upon hours jumping between pirate streaming services trying to find a stable feed for every game.This feels too much like a post-hoc rationalization. I know I'll never win this argument on Hacker News because every piracy conversation turns into an infinite game of moving goalposts, where there's always a new rationalization at every turn.I don't think it's worth discussing until we can be honest and admit that a lot of people pirate because they want free stuff. Every HN piracy conversation has a lot of words written to try to avoid admitting that "free stuff" is a big motivator for a lot of people

squigz: In my experience, people's reasons for piracy are a pretty even mix of all these issues (service problems, principles, and cost)I'd certainly pirate less if I could afford it, but even if I could, I'd still pirate a lot of stuff because I don't want to worry about what streaming service it's on this week, or because I don't want to contribute to monopolization of some industry. And sure, I'd still pirate some things because I find they're overpriced.> I know I'll never win this argument on Hacker News because every piracy conversation turns into an infinite game of moving goalposts, where there's always a new rationalization at every turn.What argument are you referring to, out of curiosity? That some people pirate things 'cause they're poor and make nice-sounding rationalizations about it? Okay, that definitely happens, you win. But I don't think that really takes away from the other valid arguments for piracy?

themafia: DRM is completely ineffective. It simply increases the cost of "piracy," as well as legitimate actions like home backup, to about $200 USD.The worse they make it for legitimate users the more likely they are to just buy the necessary device and move on. The technical battle is not some limitless option that IP owners get to use, it eventually impinges on their core interests.

nradov: DRM is somewhat effective. I'm lazy enough about entertainment that I don't even bother with piracy. If content providers don't want to make it cheap and easy for me to watch then fuck 'em, I'll watch something else. I have a zillion other options.

bjourne: Maybe he does not think he deserves it? The logic is as follows. If he has to pay $10 for 90 minutes of watching football then he must think he deserves that. But if he can get it for free then he does not need to think he deserves it. Similar to how fat people may feel less guilty about eating candy when it is given to them than when they have to buy it.

embedding-shape: I'm a native Swede and I've said the same about Swedish to, don't really care if it's Mandarin, English or Spanish, just that as many countries as possible go together and unify under one language. Obviously both for Netherlands and Sweden, English would be the way to go, but imagine if you could learn just 3 languages and speak with 90% of the world's population? I thought globalism would take us there eventually somehow, but seems the pendulum started swinging the other way instead.

bluecalm: Yup, there is a lot of value in having universal language and English is the only one with a chance (in Western world anyway). Imo EU should mandate English as 2nd official language for all business dealings and bureaucracy. Having many languages and obligatory translations is a huge disadvantage we have in comparison to USA (or China).

tverbeure: Yeah, because I totally have control over who’s dubbing movies in France.

lxgr: > if it interferes with my ability to sell products and services in spain because my website gets blocked as a side-effect, then yes, the EU should care.As long as you’re not disadvantaged compared to a Spanish seller of goods or services or Spain’s law is specifically violating an EU one, I don’t think so.> for example geo-blocking within the EU is also illegal. if you offer a service or product in any EU country, then anyone in the EU must be allowed to buy it.Definitely not. You’re not automatically obliged to sell to other EU countries just because you’re selling in one. There are some categories where you have to, but that explicitly excludes video streaming.There is another regulation for subscribers temporarily traveling to a different EU country not losing access to a service they subscribed to in their home country, but that’s also something else.

em-bee: You’re not automatically obliged to sell to other EU countries just because you’re selling in one.according to my understanding yes, you are:https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/geoblockin...i don't see mention of any exception for streaming there either. (maybe one exists, if you have a reference, i'd love to take a look)

anthk: Don't let me start on your 'neutral' dub where everything reminds me on either Cantinflas or El Chavo.

loloquwowndueo: Regional accents are a thing and stuff like Argentinian Candy Candy or Cuban Mazinger Z are totally childhood-defining.

anthk: Ironically I never watched Dragon Ball in Castillian Spanish but for the OVA's. I've watched the series in Basque long before the Spanish dub ever existed (the Basque one was from 1990) and yes, the manga was a perfect 100% translation, so most of the Latin American memes about dubs don't apply to me.

embedding-shape: Ironically, I live in Spain, and at this very minute, there is a football game going on (Atlético Madrid vs Barcelona) which I literally just learned about because I could just hear my neighbors scream about the 0-1 score, and with Vodafone ISP I'm not experiencing the block of Cloudflare right now. https://hayahora.futbol/ also shows "NO" incorrectly (if you're being strict about the title+domain). I'm guessing it's specifically because it isn't a La Liga game, it's UEFA Champions League. At least ISPs aren't indiscriminately blocking things without court orders, which seems to have been specifically about La Liga.

kakacik: You dont understand that there are other mentalities &#x2F; mindsets than yours. Well they are, and they can be rotten pretty badly.What OP describes is still very prevalent in eastern EU&#x2F;Europe too, people pirate and do stupid stuff just to save few bucks. But then if you earn <1000€ monthly you start looking at prices in very different optics. Mindset comes from the past and doesnt feel the need to change for 2026.I come from such an environment, partially still affected by it. I would blame it on communism and russian influence but then Spain never had one so there goes my cheap and usual way to push blame.Currently on vacation in Dominican republic and I can see hints of same mentality here and there... maybe its just 'undeveloped societies', for the lack of better term.

cik: It's absolutely a service problem. I can pay for the local sports rebroadcast packages.. but oh wait, you just don't feel like this week, playing the Raptors game, because there's a local thing you think people will watch? Fair enough, subscribe to DAZN, and pay there.. oh sorry, we've opted to stop carrying <insert all leagues>.Sigh, fine, I'll pay for NBA Leaguepass. I don't live in your country... great, random blackouts. Fine, I'll try and use a VPN (hell, I literally used tailscale to a friend's house for a bit).. but then those games are blacked out too, at random?I'm literally paying you for the service. So yeah, giving some insanely sketchy crypto website $5&#x2F;month for unlimited whatever that just always works, is worth it. 10&#x2F;10 will definitely do again. I'm sick and tired of fighting with the NBA, the CFL, or G-D only knows what just to try to watch the things I'm paying for.

Aerolfos: > I don't think it's worth discussing until we can be honest and admit that a lot of people pirate because they want free stuff. Every HN piracy conversation has a lot of words written to try to avoid admitting that "free stuff" is a big motivator for a lot of peopleWell, see, the thing is you're right, but the "service problem" quote actually addressed that. There's a percentage of people who will never pay, it's true - and by never pay, it means never pay. You can't get them to pay by blocking or adding DRM or whatever.But of the actually relevant group, people who are willing to pay for stuff, then some percentage of them will stop paying if it isn't convenient enough. Now it's a service problem. The trick is getting the full market potential and preventing them from jumping ship. But the service bit only ever applied to potential customers - the other group don't enter the discussion in the first place because they're hopeless.But yeah usually this argument is at least in part misrepresented.However however, no amount of blocking will stop that free stuff group, no amount of hoops will be too much, there is simply no way to extract blood from a stone the way that some media companies keep telling themselves is possible. So all the original blocking and shutting down of half the internet is completely counterproductive regardless.

nitrat3: This is partly good because it forces development of ways to bypass this censorship.Perhaps the frog is being boiled but the frog will learn to jump.

lxgr: Or somebody will put a lid on the pot.

Pay08: Language is the biggest thing that defines culture. Do you want the Netherlands to perform some sort of countrywide assimilation into British or American culture?

Aaargh20318: Yes, I’m a huge proponent of global unification. It’s ridiculous that we have different cultures, languages and laws based on between which imaginary lines on a map you live.Countries make no sense to me. Look at the current situation in Iran. Everyone on the planet is affected by the actions of a president we didn’t vote for. Earth should be a single country.

lxgr: They call it "audio-visual". From the page you linked:> [...] services in sectors currently fully excluded such as transport and audio-visual

plantain: For many users it's just not true. I run a subscription weather forecast service for pilots, with a free trial period. A significant number of users reset their device every week to avoid paying 10 euros a month. These are aircraft owners.

TeMPOraL: Just because you own an aircraft, doesn't mean you have a budget to pay random EUR 10&#x2F;month subscriptions.People save money to buy expensive stuff. Or take out loans. One cannot assume that everyone doesn't care about spending < X dollars, where X is = 1% of the most expensive asset they own (see e.g. $3000 gaming PC vs. $30 software, elsewhere in the thread).

walletdrainer: I’ve spend hundreds of thousands on just the hardware to store for all my pirated home theatre content.I’d gladly pay money for it, but that’s not actually possible. The main cost of not pirating would be time, which is unacceptable because I’m neither a teenager nor poor.Similarly, as a rich person who travels a lot, official sports streams just aren’t available for me.Just for fun, I tried to Google and find an official site to watch LaLiga games:“DAZN ISN'T AVAILABLE IN THIS COUNTRY”“The request is blocked.” -https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.laliga.com&#x2F;en-GB&#x2F;where-to-watch-laliga-easportsMovistar plus is in Spanish, probably not for meBut yeah, even fucking googling “laliga official stream” brings zero working paid alternatives for very very rich me.

londons_explore: I am part of this crowd. I have never paid a cent for software. I have spent many hours with Ida pro and Ghidra.That time was well spent for the knowledge I gained, even if it wasn't worth it to save a few bucks.

halJordan: But see you're making up reasons that are separate rationalizations. Which just proves the guys point, that even you don't think what you're doing is reasonable without some superfluous reason

pier25: > I'm guessing it's specifically because it isn't a La Liga game, it's UEFA Champions LeagueProbably just a matter of time. The article mentions:"Lo bloqueos aplicarán "todos los días de emisión de eventos deportivos en directo", arrancando por primera vez con el partido de eliminatoria de la Champions League entre el Atlético de Madrid y el Barcelona que se celebra hoy martes 14 de abril."

walletdrainer: It’s very easy to watch pirated streams, it’s insanely complicated to reliably watch the official streams.

akramachamarei: > I'd certainly pirate less if I could afford it

littlecranky67: Quick reminder, it is not LaLiga (the football association) taking court action, but Telefónica the telco provider. In Spain their brand is Movistar, in UK and Germany more commonly known as O2. So there is something we, the consumer, can do - avoid all products Telefónica, in Spain and elsewhere to express the want for a free and uncensored internet.

hirako2000: That's right. Pervasive games got into my head.As the other commenter, I also confirm the sub got worse.

dpoloncsak: Any word on if Starlink is being forced to comply? They have ISPs blocking DNS requests iirc, seems like Starlink may be a viable alternative?Not that you should have to find a new ISP due to soccer being pirated too much, just wondering really

lentil_soup: What a sad world where we all have the same culture and language. There's many concepts that don't translate from one language to the next, they form a way of looking at the world. What about foods, and stories and music, nah, sounds terrible.I also want one big world for all but definitely not a single culture or language

Manuel_D: People are willing to tolerate worse service to avoid paying. And people still private even when the legitimate service is extremely convenient.Take Steam, for instance. You get fast downloads, cloud saves, mod support, etc. Yet games released on steam are still pirated. Because people are willing to forego good service in order to avoid paying.I'm sure for some people piracy is a service problem. The example Gabe Newell gave when he said that quote is Russian localization. If the only way to get a Russian localization of a game is to pirate it, then sure that lack of service incentivizes piracy.But there will always people who want to consume media without paying, regardless of the convenience of legitimate options.

tracker1: You're welcome to walk to the cafe on the other side of town... however, if you're in a larger city in the southwest, you can expect that walk to take several hours. Just driving from one edge of the Phoenix metro area to the other corner can take upwards of over an hour and a half, and our traffic isn't nearly as bad as other cities.As for healthcare... that's a mixed bag... you can go to the ER and you will be treated, but the bill afterwards may or may not be impactful... There have been some improvements, but the healthcare lobby is massive, and pretty much stops most reasonable and some unreasonable improvements.On public transportation, it varies... you need to realize that the main part of the US is by itself about the size of Europe... I would assume there are plenty of areas of Europe where public transit is likely limited. Not even getting into Alaska, which is by itself massive and largely unpopulated. It's probably better to compare individual US States to EU nations in terms of transit.

svachalek: My last ER trip ended up over $1,000,000. Fortunately after out-of-pocket maximum it was all covered by insurance but this kind of debt would be life ending to the uninsured.

tracker1: I get it... I had an ER trip, pre ACA (Obamacare) where my health insurance max was 500k, and my bill was like $370k after all was said and done... I worked a lot the next 7 years to pay off&#x2F;down what I could, then at that point, I just stopped as it was off my credit score, and everyone that took reasonable payment arrangements or settled for an amount that fit in my tax return, bonus, etc.. had been paid.I definitely couldn't handle working that much today. I've also got some serious health issues that aren't being addressed. That said, I don't feel that the US can handle socialized medicine well, and the best that we could do is take the spend that is already in place with the govt and establish a first party option to compete with commercial providers that anyone can buy a plan from. I also think that there are single-payer approaches and fiduciary requirements for insurance carriers could go a long way combined with such an approach as opposed to a whole sale socialist takeover.

abirch: They pass stupid laws with impunity here in America.Sadly, an alien viewing our behavior would deduce a rule such as: as long as the voter is the same tribe as the candidate, the voter must vote for candidate no matter how corrupt.

keybored: If they pass laws “with impunity” you can’t blame the voters that hard.

b65e8bee43c2ed0: the voters don't vote on issues, and there are no consequences for breaking campaign promises. and direct democracy is le bad, of course (since Brexit).

mr_00ff00: I don’t know if just one instance means direct democracy is bad. For example, in the US referendums have been used a lot for issues that are popular for voters, but politicians won’t touch.(Weed legalization in many states, Abortion protection in Missouri I believe)You could also argue Brexit. Ultimately, most of the UK was okay with shooting themselves in the foot to feel more independent like the good olds days. Maybe was wrong long-term, but if it’s what the people wanted, then maybe it’s good. Politicians never would have done it despite the people wanting it.

wat10000: I'm anti-Brexit (not that it matters, not British) but also pro-referendum in general. One modification I'd like to see is higher thresholds for more significant actions, especially ones that are difficult to reverse like this was. I don't think something as huge as Brexit should be decided on the basis of 50%+1. There should be a bias towards the status quo, and this should require maybe 60% or 2&#x2F;3rds to overcome.

lamasery: $20&#x2F;yr per Spanish resident? That's very few wasted labor-hours per worker per year (on average).

calgoo: No thank you, i don't watch sports, why should i pay for that crap just so a corrupt judge can get another car or sit on some board of some company when they "retire"

lamasery: I'm not saying it's a good idea, I'm trying to get a handle on whether Spain is on track to de facto spend more than this per resident in lost economic productivity (to say nothing of whatever value we might like to place on sheer inconvenience for residents that doesn't have measurable GDP effects). Like just paying a tiny tax and calling it a day might be less crazy than the current path, which would highlight how nuts this is precisely because that's also nuts.

martin8412: The number will increase each year for sure. If all people are forced to pay, what’s to prevent them from charging 100€ a year or more?

swiftcoder: Look, I'd be more supportive of this sort of thing if it worked - pirated futbol streams are rampant despite the blocking.And the blast radius often is the entire devstack. Last weekend they blocked Cloudflare and GitHub simultaneously.

nitrat3: Does not seem like a good idea to a put a lid on a heavily boiling pot...

otterley: What are these "valid arguments for piracy" you refer to? Content isn't food, shelter, or clothing. It's a "nice to have" in one's life. It's literally entertainment.

necovek: I'd happily pay for DRM-free content, but it's rarely available in digital form in smaller markets like non-EU European country of Serbia: the only alternative is to look for BR or DVD or CD copies and then rip them myself, which is even more time consuming than finding a decent quality not-so-legal option.Even for music, I do spend time looking for DRM free options (eg. Apple only offers iTunes streaming in Serbia and I had to resort to options running a much smaller catalog like 7digital). I always try going first party first (eg. band's site for music), but it's increasingly not an option.And if I want local Serbian&#x2F;Croatian&#x2F;... content, no provider has it at all. As an example, one of local publishers recently started releasing "eBooks" readable only in their own mobile app for Android or iOS: none of my Kindle, Remarkable or Kobo can read them. I did let them know about my willingness to jump on their service if they actually made their books work on my eBook devices, but they did not even honour me with a reply :)For me at least, it is a service problem.

lode: See this story from 2 days ago: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=47738883Basically, to combat pirate streaming of football matches, La Liga (the Spanish football association) can compel Spanish ISPs to block wide ranges of IP blocks that are suspected of hosting those streams.This includes Cloudflare, which - due to lots of websites depending on them (see what happened when they went down last year: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.cloudflare.com&#x2F;18-november-2025-outage&#x2F; ) feels like half of the internet is unusable. This happens weekly when football is on.Now it looks like those bans are going to become even more frequent, which will have all kinds of unintended consequences.

gspr: I wonder when businesses will start suing ISPs for the losses they incur while they're cut off from half the internet.

embedding-shape: No one here is being "cut off from the internet" during the blocks, you grossly misunderstand what's happening here.If you're on a residential connection, during play of the matches, you can't access any of the Cloudflare IPs, but everything else keeps working as-is. Most businesses already migrated away from Cloudflare once these blocks started happening, so most of the affected people are the ones using services that rely on Cloudflare.As mentioned elsewhere, don't get me wrong, it sucks, makes no sense and I wish it went away, and I'll keep complaining to the ones I can about it, but "they're cut off from half the internet" isn't accurate unless somehow half the services you use happen to rely on Cloudflare (which, at least for me, isn't true, maybe 10% of what I use daily is affected by this).

gspr: Ok, I'm sorry for the hyperbole of saying "half the internet" if it's in fact 10%. But come on, that's still massive.It's not a stretch for small businesses to be reliant on residential connections either.

littlecranky67: No need to be sorry, it is a matter of how you define the percentage. If you would define it as "fraction of traffic generated by residential&#x2F;home endpoints" you probably wouldn't be off that far. Maybe because Netflix does not use cloudflare, but if you say "CDNs make more than 50% of traffic to residential" you would definitely be right

ronsor: Probably because resetting first is sufficiently easy for them, especially if they're not flying terribly often.