It's misleading title, not Spain as the government but LaLiga(a sports organization) abused its given powers and apparently demanded that ISPs block the site.
So it's very American style censorship in principle, that is it is censorship for profit reasons HOWEVER it is wrong in this particular instance because freedom.gov hadn't infringe copyrights. Nothing political despite that the title may make you believe so, purely internal issue. Italians are having similar problems with their football streaming organizations.
petcat 22 minutes ago [-]
I'm not aware of American ISPs and CDNs straight-up blocking websites. That is distinctly European-style censorship.
American style censorship would be more like going through the courts to get an order to have the domains seized.
The American censorship works by taking away your domain and lock you in prison but it is O.K. because your activities might have reduced shareholder value.
petcat 21 minutes ago [-]
Domain seized. Not blocked by my ISP.
It's a fundamentally different thing. In Europe, ISPs and CDNs just block websites willy-nilly at the request of La Liga, for instance. That doesn't happen in USA. It takes a court order and then the FBI seizes the domain.
maccard 11 minutes ago [-]
If you're going to be pedantic, you have to be correct.
> In Europe, ISPs and CDNs just block websites willy-nilly at the request of La Liga, for instance
There's so much wrong with this sentence. It's not Europe, it's _Spain_ specifically. La liga aren't just dropping emails to ISPs, they're gaining court orders (now, whether these court orders are warranted, or delivered correctly [0] or not is another question).
Isn't it even in the U.S. e.g. enough for some big music firm to claim copyright infringement on a YouTube video for it to be removed and the channel's owner get a copyright strike, no courts and no FBI involved? AFAIK this is what happens with so-called DMCA takedown requests.
petcat 8 minutes ago [-]
The difference is that content creator can put the video on their own website and that domain won't get blocked by my ISP. It might get seized later after some judicial review.
mrtksn 11 minutes ago [-]
Exactly, in USA they just remove your videos from YouTube and in Spain in Italy they just block your domains on the ISPs for the exact same reasons and both are sometimes fraudulent.
mrtksn 19 minutes ago [-]
Why do you care about ISPs that much? It's the exactly same thing as an outcome, just different concerns and methods.
Also, when you don't do anything illegal in USA just take away your company either by forcing you to sell it or forcing American companies not doing business with you.
TikTok was removed from Apple AppStore forcefully, then reinstated and forcefully sold.
Why ISP blocking is considered low morale but seizing your stuff high morale endeavor?
prosody 12 minutes ago [-]
There's positives and negatives to each. For government domain seizure, there's due process involved but working around it is harder (the service provider either has to acquire a new proper domain or onion domain, then disseminate it to the audience somehow). For ISP level blocking there's limited due process (at least in the cited case of LaLiga seemingly just issuing a complaint to the ISP), but the audience can easily work around with it with a VPN or sometimes just an alternate DNS server.
petcat 14 minutes ago [-]
> not Spain as the government but LaLiga(a sports organization) abused its given powers and apparently demanded that ISPs block the site.
Larrikin 15 minutes ago [-]
Why do you keep arguing a point you were wrong about
GauntletWizard 14 minutes ago [-]
Absolutely, America does seize domains with the assistance of local authorities[1] for crimes that are in prosecution. You may disagree with the reasoning for these crimes, or disagree that they are crimes at all, but US censorship works as a part of the legal system with well defined due process and remedies.
This is classic whataboutism compared to the outright corporateocracy of la liga's blocking and seizure.
It’s sad that most comments are just focusing on political bashing instead of the root problem here.
It’s the fact LaLiga and Spanish ISPs comply.
They’re “carpet” blocking entire IPs of Cloudflare.
Every weekend if I need to access some of my work websites which are affected by this (while there are football games) - I need to VPN to bypass the blocking.
I’m new in Spain so my ability of surfacing the Spanish law or the European is limited. But I really wish they’ll have to find a nicer approach instead of this aggressive approach.
embedding-shape 45 minutes ago [-]
FWIW, Vodafone ES still resolves freedom.gov fine via their own DNS resolver. They're usually very block happy, can't access Anna's, TBP and also not Cloudflare during La Liga games normally, as some examples. But freedom.gov still resolves seemingly.
Can any other Spaniards confirm if freedom.gov still resolves for them?
As a side-note, I don't know why anyone would want to block that website in the first place? Barely has any information about what it is, and doesn't seem to be able to be used for anything as of today either.
rock_artist 22 minutes ago [-]
It resolves now but also other websites that are blocked during games are available.
everdrive 50 minutes ago [-]
The most obvious outcome possible.I was never able to load the website myself, but if you centralize things to a specific website, it's trivial to block it. Since I could never load the site, I don't know if they had any plans outside of just putting up a website. If not, this was incredibly stupid.
mcny 35 minutes ago [-]
Pretty sure it is all performative and the actual audience is the voters in the US.
NooneAtAll3 15 minutes ago [-]
the goal was to publicly display european censorship and to take down its moral "high ground"
it succeeded
potatototoo99 8 minutes ago [-]
Maybe in the US. In Europe it never convinced anyone, as it never would since anything minimally related to Trump is discarded automatically.
SilverElfin 32 minutes ago [-]
I think it looks stupid on the surface. But maybe it is a purposeful way to goad European countries into taking increasingly authoritarian policy changes like banning VPNs. They will use it to generate outrage among Europeans and undermine the leadership, and try to either split the EU along these lines or place friendly leaders.
Maybe this is conspiracy theory. But I feel like the aggression they’ve shown - even people like Marco Rubio - suggests they’re acting with a purpose.
Just checked - not blocked, works just fine (Adamo and Vodafone).
13415 42 minutes ago [-]
That seems a bit fast since nothing is on that ridiculously looking website yet, but if this website is planning to host content that is illegal in the EU, then it will be blocked by many EU countries. Usually, these blocks aren't very effective. My country blocks most piratebay domains, for instance.
mocmoc 20 minutes ago [-]
Spain living in 2010’s tech
Hikikomori 55 minutes ago [-]
Are they restreaming football?
rvnx 44 minutes ago [-]
www.rt.com is blocked in a couple of countries in Europe, so it's not about football, rather to curb "disinformation" for the next elections or whatever.
It actually is, the IP it resolves to is Cloudflare.
rvnx 37 minutes ago [-]
Lucky you (this was not cynical) because for me there is no Cloudflare:
This site can’t be reached
Check if there is a typo in rt.com.
DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN
(just an empty A record)
stackghost 29 minutes ago [-]
Perhaps Europe should put up a portal to bypass American copyright restrictions. Free speech, and all that.
iamnothere 28 minutes ago [-]
As an American I accept your terms. More freedom for all.
helterskelter 24 minutes ago [-]
If Europe would set up a way to facilitate non-Europeans getting GDPR protections I'd pay them a good bit of money.
altairprime 19 minutes ago [-]
Portugal’s golden visa only costs a year’s salary!
diputsmonro 35 minutes ago [-]
I feel like this move is premature and playing directly into Trump's hands. "See how Europe flinched at even the suggestion of free speech, we haven't even started yet"
Surely whatever they eventually put up on there will be blatant and horrible propaganda, but I think judging the reactions are the purpose of the site, not the content itself.
XorNot 2 minutes ago [-]
The site was created for the express purpose of enabling bypass of sovereign policy decisions: so yeah, it's going to be blocked.
31 minutes ago [-]
jmclnx 48 minutes ago [-]
No surprise with that, I would thing other countries will do the same.
But as we all know, there are ways around that for people who really have to go there.
rvnx 45 minutes ago [-]
Until these workarounds are progressively made illegal or required to provide identification.
A lot of Cloudflare is netblocked during soccer games in Spain, this has been a thing for years now.
This is not a dedicated block against freedom.gov, it's just the ordinary collateral damage from the fight against sports piracy. Sigh.
The truly fun fact here rather is that the US government seems to be unable to host a website on its own these days but needs Cloudflare's protection. It's either a grift, a hack job / MVP demo or every last competent person in IT there has departed or been DOGE'd off. Ridiculous.
Symbiote 33 minutes ago [-]
This Reddit post [1] says the block 188.114.96.0/23 is blocked.
Wait that’s a thing? It sounds outright crazy to block people from going about their business and using the Internet to protect one particular industry. Especially sports, which is low priority to me and I am sure to many people.
potatototoo99 3 minutes ago [-]
Cloudflare could refuse to host illegal material or make it available in Spain. If they cannot or will not, this was the best solution the courts arrived at. Other Cloudflare clients could also decide to host elsewhere for Spanish traffic if they cared.
iamnothere 25 minutes ago [-]
Yes, it has caused major issues all across Spain, including interference with emergency services, but apparently the owner of the league has deep political connections or something. It’s also likely that the political class sees this as laying the groundwork for future censorship efforts, given their track record.
mschuster91 24 minutes ago [-]
Yes, for years now [1].
Sports is worth billions of dollars - La Liga makes 6.1 billion € from domestic rights alone [2]. UK's Premier League made 7.1 billion € during the Covid years [3].
Good. freedom.gov is a clear subversive political influence campaign that should be banned by all European countries.
JohnLocke4 40 minutes ago [-]
It is basically just a proxy. I don't see how censorship could be an antidote to a "subversive political influence campaign" - if anything you're describing censorship
tovej 36 minutes ago [-]
Censoring foreign political influence and misinformation campaigns is just sane policy.
US misinformation is no different from Russian misinformation. freedom.gov is specifically meant to spread this misinfo, freedom of speech is the stated purpose, but if you believe that, you are naive.
This is obviously an influence campaign.
JohnLocke4 28 minutes ago [-]
How exactly does a proxy spread misinfo? Also, the project isn't even functional yet and appears to have been blocked to avert piracy
AnimalMuppet 9 minutes ago [-]
Well, it certainly allows and enables the spread of misinformation.
That is, what's blocked? Things that people consider misinformation. Some of it really is, and some of it is just stuff that's politically unpopular with the powers that be (which they're also going to label misinformation). And then some of it falls afoul of various copyright laws or other such.
But certainly real misinformation is a significant chunk of that. The proxy enables that misinformation (and disinformation) to bypass the censorship/blocking. So in that sense, yes, it spreads misinformation.
The solution to disinformation is not censorship, it's education and to teach early people on how to critically think by themselves.
SpecialistK 26 minutes ago [-]
It's "thoughtcrime" and "censorship" when they do it. It's "stopping disinformation" and "protecting democracy" when we do it.
tovej 9 minutes ago [-]
Oh please. If a known bad actor is trying to influence your polity, the best solution is to block them.
This does not mean people should not also be educated. That critical thinking is also what leads me to the conclusion this should be blocked.
13415 23 minutes ago [-]
Believe it or not, removal of content is mandated on the basis of laws that have been passed by the majority of representatives elected by the people. For example, it is a crime in Germany to publicly glorify wars of aggression and use Nazi symbols or deny the Holocaust. It's also a crime to publish child abuse material.
On a side note, setting up a website deliberately designed to circumvent such laws will itself likely violate the law and might lead to criminal prosecution. While the US government will certainly be protected by diplomatic immunity, other people involved probably won't be protected.
rvnx 44 minutes ago [-]
Absolutely, the same way we should only use European technologies. We have the best bottle-caps in the world.
> Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
...
> Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
mschuster91 42 minutes ago [-]
> We have the best bottle-caps in the world.
Spoken like someone who never walked the Isar river beaches in the morning after a Saturday night in summer. Used to be full of plastic bottle caps from all the party goers, now it's just the metal beer caps that you can easily pick up with a magnet.
rvnx 40 minutes ago [-]
Fair enough, this is actually a positive regulation.
This was more to put on perspective that innovation and gaining market share are the main priority in US/China, whereas in Europe, priority is more on regulation.
For example, one of the priorities here in the EU is to regulate and tax AI companies, rather than to make the place attractive.
adithyareddy 31 minutes ago [-]
The chip on the server hosting this comment was almost certainly printed with an ASML lithography machine. I get the sentiment but the bottle-cap meme needs to die. Innovation and regulation are not opposite ends of a slider where you have to pick one or the other.
rvnx 5 minutes ago [-]
I'm totally on your side that ASML, Airbus and a couple of pharmaceutical companies are great innovators and very special (in a positive way) companies in this world.
But still, this is where I slightly disagree, because I feel the more regulation, the less innovation is possible.
Here just feeling frustrated when I see that freedom.gov getting censorship of that overall tendency to regulate, rather than to actively promote freedom of entrepreneurship, of expression, of thinking out-of-the-box etc, and this freedom.gov thing is just a symptom of that whole system.
Rumple22Stilk 27 minutes ago [-]
Innovation is not correct.
Extracting maximum profit is correct.
mjorgers 49 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
Rendered at 21:44:10 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
So it's very American style censorship in principle, that is it is censorship for profit reasons HOWEVER it is wrong in this particular instance because freedom.gov hadn't infringe copyrights. Nothing political despite that the title may make you believe so, purely internal issue. Italians are having similar problems with their football streaming organizations.
American style censorship would be more like going through the courts to get an order to have the domains seized.
The American censorship works by taking away your domain and lock you in prison but it is O.K. because your activities might have reduced shareholder value.
It's a fundamentally different thing. In Europe, ISPs and CDNs just block websites willy-nilly at the request of La Liga, for instance. That doesn't happen in USA. It takes a court order and then the FBI seizes the domain.
> In Europe, ISPs and CDNs just block websites willy-nilly at the request of La Liga, for instance
There's so much wrong with this sentence. It's not Europe, it's _Spain_ specifically. La liga aren't just dropping emails to ISPs, they're gaining court orders (now, whether these court orders are warranted, or delivered correctly [0] or not is another question).
> That doesn't happen in USA
It doesn't happen in "Europe" either.
[0] https://www.pcmag.com/news/nordvpn-protonvpn-ordered-block-p...
Also, when you don't do anything illegal in USA just take away your company either by forcing you to sell it or forcing American companies not doing business with you.
TikTok was removed from Apple AppStore forcefully, then reinstated and forcefully sold.
Why ISP blocking is considered low morale but seizing your stuff high morale endeavor?
This is classic whataboutism compared to the outright corporateocracy of la liga's blocking and seizure.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/us-law-enforcement-assists-bu...
It’s the fact LaLiga and Spanish ISPs comply.
They’re “carpet” blocking entire IPs of Cloudflare.
Every weekend if I need to access some of my work websites which are affected by this (while there are football games) - I need to VPN to bypass the blocking.
I’m new in Spain so my ability of surfacing the Spanish law or the European is limited. But I really wish they’ll have to find a nicer approach instead of this aggressive approach.
Can any other Spaniards confirm if freedom.gov still resolves for them?
As a side-note, I don't know why anyone would want to block that website in the first place? Barely has any information about what it is, and doesn't seem to be able to be used for anything as of today either.
it succeeded
Maybe this is conspiracy theory. But I feel like the aggression they’ve shown - even people like Marco Rubio - suggests they’re acting with a purpose.
https://www.isdglobal.org/digital-dispatch/the-achilles-heel...
So, freedom.gov is also blocked to protect you from fake news I guess.
Sad.
Surely whatever they eventually put up on there will be blatant and horrible propaganda, but I think judging the reactions are the purpose of the site, not the content itself.
But as we all know, there are ways around that for people who really have to go there.
https://www.generation-nt.com/actualites/vpn-age-mineurs-roy...
It's not ok at all, because such operators will get punished if they don't.
Therefore they will more and more respect the law to block sites, etc.
This is not a dedicated block against freedom.gov, it's just the ordinary collateral damage from the fight against sports piracy. Sigh.
The truly fun fact here rather is that the US government seems to be unable to host a website on its own these days but needs Cloudflare's protection. It's either a grift, a hack job / MVP demo or every last competent person in IT there has departed or been DOGE'd off. Ridiculous.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1ravua8/psa_if_...
Sports is worth billions of dollars - La Liga makes 6.1 billion € from domestic rights alone [2]. UK's Premier League made 7.1 billion € during the Covid years [3].
[1] https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/la-liga-w...
[2] https://www.laliga.com/en-GB/news/laliga-secures-over-euro61...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/football/2025/mar/06/premier-lea...
US misinformation is no different from Russian misinformation. freedom.gov is specifically meant to spread this misinfo, freedom of speech is the stated purpose, but if you believe that, you are naive.
This is obviously an influence campaign.
That is, what's blocked? Things that people consider misinformation. Some of it really is, and some of it is just stuff that's politically unpopular with the powers that be (which they're also going to label misinformation). And then some of it falls afoul of various copyright laws or other such.
But certainly real misinformation is a significant chunk of that. The proxy enables that misinformation (and disinformation) to bypass the censorship/blocking. So in that sense, yes, it spreads misinformation.
The solution to disinformation is not censorship, it's education and to teach early people on how to critically think by themselves.
This does not mean people should not also be educated. That critical thinking is also what leads me to the conclusion this should be blocked.
On a side note, setting up a website deliberately designed to circumvent such laws will itself likely violate the law and might lead to criminal prosecution. While the US government will certainly be protected by diplomatic immunity, other people involved probably won't be protected.
> Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
...
> Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
Spoken like someone who never walked the Isar river beaches in the morning after a Saturday night in summer. Used to be full of plastic bottle caps from all the party goers, now it's just the metal beer caps that you can easily pick up with a magnet.
This was more to put on perspective that innovation and gaining market share are the main priority in US/China, whereas in Europe, priority is more on regulation.
For example, one of the priorities here in the EU is to regulate and tax AI companies, rather than to make the place attractive.
But still, this is where I slightly disagree, because I feel the more regulation, the less innovation is possible.
Here just feeling frustrated when I see that freedom.gov getting censorship of that overall tendency to regulate, rather than to actively promote freedom of entrepreneurship, of expression, of thinking out-of-the-box etc, and this freedom.gov thing is just a symptom of that whole system.
Extracting maximum profit is correct.