Over 500,000 websites wrongly blocked in Spain as La Liga anti-piracy
campaign backfires

Date:
Thu, 02 Jul 2026 14:01:35 +0000

Description:
Spains aggressive anti-piracy campaign to protect La Liga football broadcasts has accidentally blocked over 500,000 legitimate websites. A new OONI report highlights the massive collateral damage, privacy concerns, and the dangers
of IP-based blocking.

FULL STORY ======================================================================Copy link Facebook X Whatsapp Reddit Pinterest Flipboard Threads Email Share this article 0 Join the conversation Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Subscribe to our newsletter Spain's LaLiga anti-piracy blocks disrupted at least 554,507 legitimate domains between January and June 2026, OONI reveals Blocking just 4 to 20 IP addresses during a one-hour match window knocked out over 400,000 unrelated websites Researchers also uncovered alarming TLS Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) interception tactics on one Spanish ISP Football fans in Spain aren't the only ones feeling the impact of LaLiga's aggressive war on illegal streaming. A staggering new report shows that the league's court-authorized anti-piracy campaign has accidentally disrupted access to more than 500,000 legitimate websites, taking down everything from human rights platforms to vital cloud infrastructure.

According to a June 2026 report published by the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) , Spain's IP-based blocking campaign caused widespread collateral damage between January and June 2026. The nonprofit organization, which specializes in measuring global internet censorship, found that at
least 5.8% of the 9.2 million most popular internet domains were blocked at least once during football match broadcasts.

The sheer scale of this collateral damage highlights a fundamental flaw in current anti-piracy tactics. Because much of the modern web relies on shared hosting and content delivery networks (CDNs), attempting to block a single illegal stream by banning its IP address often drags hundreds of thousands of innocent websites down with it.

If you want to bypass these broad regional blocks, using the best VPN s is increasingly becoming a necessity for Spanish internet users trying to maintain access to the open web. You may like NordVPN wins crucial legal battle in Spain over La Liga piracy fines From ISP to DNS and VPNs: Rightsholders must be liable for collateral damage in piracy blocking, European ISP group says Soccer leagues are using real-time AI tools to detect illegal streams and combat piracy The collateral damage of La Liga's anti-piracy blocking The collateral damage stems directly from how the internet is built. Providers like Cloudflare, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta use shared reverse-proxy architectures, meaning thousands of entirely unrelated domains sit behind a single IP address.

OONIs data shows that blocking as few as four to 20 IP addresses in a
typical one-hour LaLiga broadcast window was enough to make over 400,000 unique domains completely inaccessible.

Throughout the observation period, OONI discovered the enforcement impacted 7,441 unique IP addresses across 36 infrastructure providers. Cloudflare bore the brunt of the outages, with the report identifying over 501,000 impacted domains hosted behind just 2,218 blocked IPs.

Among the collateral damage were benign and critically important websites, including those belonging to Amnesty International and Greenpeace. New report: Collateral Damage of IP-Based Blocking During LALIGA Football Streaming in Spain: Evidence from OONI Measurementshttps://t.co/ybJ1BBpXlwOur latest research report presents OONI data documenting widespread collateral damage caused by IP blocking in #Spain during pic.twitter.com/vNirkfEKfZ June 30, 2026 Beyond the widespread outages, the anti-piracy tactics have introduced alarming security vulnerabilities. What to read next Nearly 400 illegal World Cup 2026 streaming sites taken offline by US DOJ 2025 was the worst year on record for internet shutdowns as censors move to more targeted blocks Popular free VPN, streaming apps bombard business networks with 'laundered' traffic

OONI researchers noted in a post on X that they "detected TLS Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attacks on Digi Mobil (AS57269), raising privacy and security concerns."

This privacy invasion affected 7,334 unique IPs hosting over 10,759 domain names, exposing Spanish users to potential data interception just to stop
them from streaming football matches.

As we covered on Tuesday, there is growing pushback against these reckless enforcement measures. European ISP groups have strongly argued that rightsholders must be liable for collateral damage in piracy blocking , as erroneous court orders from rightsholders like LaLiga are repeatedly breaking the internet.

While OONI admits its methodology has limitations and likely understates the true scale of the impact, the findings paint a bleak picture of IP-based blocking. When taking down a handful of pirate streams knocks out half a million legitimate websites, the cure may very well be worse than the
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Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/over-500-000-websites-wrong ly-blocked-in-spain-as-la-liga-anti-piracy-campaign-backfires


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