When the Fight Against Piracy Breaks the Internet: What OONI’s Report Teaches Us About LaLiga’s Blocking Measures
On June 30, the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) published a comprehensive report on the collateral effects of the blocking measures applied during LaLiga broadcasts in Spain. The conclusions are striking: more than half a million legitimate domains were affected, at least temporarily, by measures intended to prevent access to illegal football streams.
For the community that defends an open, neutral, and distributed Internet, these findings are more than a technical anecdote. They are a warning about the risks of governing shared infrastructures with overly blunt tools.
The Background: From Protecting Audiovisual Rights to Mass Blocking
At the end of 2024, a commercial court in Barcelona authorized LaLiga to require telecommunications operators to block IP addresses linked to illegal streaming services. The first blocks began in February 2025 and, according to public statements by the organization itself, may affect thousands of IP addresses every weekend.
The problem is that the Internet of 2026 does not work like the Internet of 1996.
Most digital services today share infrastructure: content delivery networks, cloud platforms, and multi-tenant hosting systems. A single IP address can serve thousands or even tens of thousands of different domains. Blocking that IP inevitably means blocking services that have no connection whatsoever to the targeted infringement.
This phenomenon, known as overblocking, was already well understood by experts and had even been identified by the European Union in documents outlining best practices for combating live-streaming piracy.
The Numbers: Half a Million Domains Affected
OONI’s study analyzed 9.2 million domains and concluded that 554,000 became inaccessible at some point during the blocking windows associated with LaLiga matches. This represents approximately 5.8% of the Internet’s most popular domains.
The impacts include:
- Human rights organizations, such as Amnesty International.
- Independent media outlets.
- Environmental organizations.
- Public institutions and universities.
- Messaging platforms and communication tools.
- Humanitarian and social organizations.
The most emblematic case is Cloudflare: just 2,218 blocked IP addresses affected more than 500,000 different domains, demonstrating the extent to which today’s infrastructure is shared and interdependent.
When Shared Infrastructure Becomes Collateral Damage
From the perspective of community networks, this episode reveals a fundamental tension: centralized control mechanisms collide with the distributed reality of the Internet.
Measures designed to act against a specific service end up harming innocent third parties because the infrastructure itself is shared. It is comparable to shutting down an entire highway because one vehicle traveling on it violates the rules.
Net neutrality is not only a legal or political principle; it is also a technical necessity for preserving the functioning of a shared ecosystem.
OONI’s report also documents particularly concerning cases of traffic manipulation through TLS Man-in-the-Middle techniques observed among certain operators, a practice that introduces additional risks to trust and the security of digital communications.
What Lessons Can We Learn?
1. Technical Measures Must Reflect Technical Reality
Blocking IP addresses may have made sense in an Internet built around dedicated servers and isolated services. In today’s ecosystem of CDNs, distributed clouds, and shared infrastructures, this approach inevitably produces massive collateral effects.
2. Transparency Is Essential
Judicial decisions and their technical implementation should be subject to public oversight and auditing mechanisms. Without open data and independent observatories such as OONI, these impacts would remain virtually invisible.
3. Digital Commons Require Democratic Governance
The Internet is a shared infrastructure. Decisions affecting its accessibility cannot consider only the economic interests of a specific sector; they must also take into account the rights of citizens, social organizations, and all other actors that depend on it.
4. Community Networks Offer a Different Perspective
Projects such as guifi.net have historically defended a vision of the Internet based on openness, participation, and the shared management of infrastructure. This culture emphasizes proportionality, transparency, and minimizing harm to third parties.
The facts documented by OONI remind us that Internet governance is not merely a technological issue, but also a social and democratic one.
An Issue That Goes Beyond Football
The debate is not about whether piracy should be fought. It is clear that copyright and the economic models that sustain cultural creation deserve protection.
The real question is this: can we do so without jeopardizing the integrity of the Internet’s shared infrastructure?
OONI’s report suggests that, at least in this case, the current answer is no. This compels us to rethink the mechanisms being used, incorporating principles of proportionality, transparency, and respect for the digital rights of society as a whole.
Because when more than half a million innocent websites stop working so that a football match can be protected, the problem is no longer just piracy. The problem lies in the very architecture of Internet governance that we are building.