Those affected by the courts

Since mid-February, every day of Laliga has been accompanied by a nightmare for Spanish Internet users: the solid and blind block of web pages and services that have nothing to do with football or its hacking. And all, for a controversial judgment last December which gives Laliga the authorization to order massive blockages of IP addresses hosted in cloud services such as Cloudflare; Now this sentence has been disputed.

The part of the sentence that caused more dismay is the estimate of the judge that This blockade “does not harm third parties” And that is why he approved it. This is a surprising declaration, by the very nature of IP addresses blockages; Currently, IP addresses can be shared by dozens, even hundreds of pages and different web services, in what is known as “the cloud”. When a page hires a cloudflare service, share the IP address and servers with other customers' projects; So if you are blocked, everyone is too.

The result is obvious: each time Laliga orders operators to block a list of IP addresses used by pirates, all the legal services that share the same address are also blocked. Now, some of these touchdown have presented a Request for nullity of the sentence Before the commercial court number 6 of Barcelona, ​​through the lawyer specializing in the law applied to the Internet, Javier A. Maestre.

The request was submitted in collaboration with Rootedcon, a community specializing in cybersecurity organized by a congress of the same name and has already been very critical of the judicial decision. Rootedcon declares that “the righteous pays for sinners”, affecting “businesses and individuals” which are not linked to football or their hacking. Critics point out that Legal users have been more affected than hackerswhich generally use methods to avoid blockages and move on to other illegal services. With demand, an expert report has been provided which would demonstrate damage to third parties caused by the blockade.

The identity of the cancellations of the cancellation was not revealed, with the exception of Rootedcon, but the people affected by the blockages are numerous and very varied. Blogs with corporate pages, large and small, through Intelligent household services They use Cloudflare to adapt to functions such as remote connection with smart locks or security cameras. Many companies also use Cloudflare for their internal systems, which cease to operate when there is a game. It has also been stressed that certain media have been blocked, potentially affecting freedom of expression and the information collected in the Constitution.

Of the future, the nullity of the sentence would allow Spanish operators Ignore the blocking orders of the Laligawhich are now based on IP addresses and not on web addresses (URL) as has been traditionally done. This is the real reason why the blockages of hackers also affect legal content; A change that seems small, but has had consequences for all Spanish Internet users.

In his allegation before the judge, Laliga and Telefónica complained about the mass adoption of Ech, implemented in browsers such as Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, which Protects user confidentiality by assessing URLs They visit. This has reduced the effectiveness of traditional blockages based on URL addresses, according to the complainants, and that is why they asked for a new type of wider blocking, that of IP addresses, which could change dynamically to continue the pirate services.