LaLiga carries months at war with Cloudflare. Avoid the illegal emissions From soccer matches via services IPTV has led LaLiga to launch the controversial and criticized IPS indiscriminate blocks series. In that battle, however, LaLiga has ended up launching an unique offensive.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend. What LaLiga has done is basically ally with several of Cloudflare competitorsthat have become entities that do present to specifically block domains that are violating the audiovisual rights that they try to protect LaLiga.
Vercel, the great prominent. The case of Vercel is paradigmatic. On April 15, in full IPS block fever, the CTO de Vercel, Malte UBL, He published an article In the official blog of the company criticizing the IPS blockages that had also affected their customers.
“Users in Spain now face indiscriminate internet block with legitimate websites ceasing to be accessible due to their association with shared IP addresses (…) What began as a measure against piracy has become an irresponsible form of censorship on the Internet.”
Where I said I say Diego. That criticism in the blog was accompanied by A message in x of the company’s CEO, Guillermo Rauch, who confirmed how those blockages were already affecting their customers. Three days later the blog article was updated with a singular note: “We are working closely with LaLiga to quickly eliminate the illegal streaming contents.”
The blockages were indiscriminate. What we have lived these months has sudo a constant indiscriminate block of IPS that made not only access to illegal broadcasts of football matches, but also thousands of legitimate websites, including companies that companies that They are suffering economic and reputational damage. One of the key questions was if selective and specific blockages could be made. The answer seems to be totally affirmative.
But it may not be (if you are not in cloudflare). In LaLiga’s press release, a phrase stood out especially. In it those responsible for LaLiga explained that “collaboration prevents dynamic IPS blockages from being carried out may affect third parties“. That means that theoretically in Vercel, Akamai or CDN77 will be able to make these selective blockages and prohibit access only to domains that infringe Adiovisual rights, and not to all others who share IP with the offending domain. The question is, of course, how they do it.
No technical details. We have contacted LaLiga, which did not have the technical details. We have also tried to contact Vercel to try to know how they perform that filtering, but for now we have not obtained an answer. A priori that selective block is feasible, but companies such as Cloudflare defend that they protect the privacy of their customers Thanks to technologies like ECH.
Some collaborate in blockages, others do not. That extension of the TLS protocol The name of the domain masks and makes it basically impossible for the operators to know which concrete website the user is accessing when asking for an IP. In Cloudflare and Vercel (for example) the same IP is shared between hundreds or thousands of domains, but while Cloudflare does not collaborate with LaLiga when specifically blocking those domains, Vercel and others do seem that they will begin to do it according to Laliga’s press release.
Another setback for cloudflare. This DNS, CDN and Proxy inverse provider has become a valuable ally for thousands of companies worldwide, but His obsession with protecting privacy of his clients he is putting in trouble. French justice – which already acted Against her, Cisco and Google Recently in its fight against piracy – it has recently forced it to Block illegal MotoGP retransmissions. That now its competitors reach agreements with LaLiga raises new difficulties. It is the application of a simple philosophy.
Divide and win. With this tactic, LaLiga converts to Vercel, Akamai or CDN77 – in addition to other entities – in “collaborationists” of its cause, leaving cloudflare more and more alone. That can cause a domino effect: if users and companies confirm that “if we use Cloudflare we have problems with the blockages, but if we use Vercel, there can be no potential migration of those users and companies to the services of Cloudflare competitors.
But. After these agreements there are still economic interests, and those users and companies end up sacrificing the protection of privacy offered by Cloudflare and other companies to avoid being harmed economic, reputationally or functionally. The problem with this sacrifice is that now the requested blockages are theoretically to protect illegal soccer broadcasts, but a probable threat arises.
BLOCKS WITHOUT JUDICIAL GUARDIAN. As Román Ramírez explained (@patowc), cybersecurity expert and creator of Rootedconthis fulfilled in the legal battle against LaLiga. According to him, this “is a way of pressing and extorting.” If LaLiga achieves that collaboration, he adds, the entity has direct access to these suppliers to “cut whatever you want. It is easy to imagine that instead of being an IPTV it is a critical website with Thebes. Without judicial protection and without democratic control.”
Image | Tourettes
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