For much of this year, Spanish internet users have lost access to huge parts of the web on match days. Not pirate streams, but human rights groups, climate charities and business tools. A new report puts hard numbers on the damage, and they are staggering.
The culprit is Spain’s football league, LALIGA, and its court-backed war on illegal streams. To kill pirate broadcasts, it has internet providers block the IP addresses serving them. The catch is that modern websites share those addresses. Block one, and you can take thousands of innocent sites down with it.
The Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI), a nonprofit that measures internet censorship, spent six months tracking the fallout. Its verdict: the blocks hit more than 500,000 legitimate domains between January and June.
Half a million sites, a handful of addresses
The maths is brutal. On a match day, blocking just 4 to 20 IP addresses knocked out more than 400,000 unrelated domains. The outage lasted as long as the game.
