Article illustration 1

When indie developer eirexeph noticed his rhythm game Project Heartbeat kept dropping connections for Spanish players at specific times, he initially suspected server issues. But logs showed no problems. The culprit? Spain’s football league, La Liga, wielding court-granted powers to force ISPs into blanket IP blocking during matches—a censorship tool snaring legitimate services like his in its net.

The Unintended Casualty: How Cloudflare Became a Target

Spain’s Supreme Court recently empowered La Liga to request real-time ISP blocks against IPs suspected of hosting illegal football streams. Crucially, this isn’t DNS-based filtering—it’s network-level IP blocking. When eirexeph correlated his server outages with match schedules, he pinpointed the cause: La Liga’s dragnet frequently blacklists entire Cloudflare IP ranges where his game’s traffic is routed.

"This is not a DNS block, otherwise my game wouldn’t be affected. It’s an IP block. When there’s a football match on, they randomly ban Cloudflare IP ranges."
— eirexeph, developer of Project Heartbeat (source)

Cloudflare’s architecture—where thousands of domains share IPs via reverse proxy—makes it efficient for CDN and DDoS protection. But it also turns these IPs into high-value targets for piracy crackdowns. La Liga’s approach sacrifices precision for expediency, gambling that blocking swaths of IPs will disrupt pirates. Legitimate services become collateral damage.

Why This Is a Technical & Legal Quagmire

  1. No Whitelisting Mechanism: Affected businesses can’t petition for exemptions. As eirexeph notes, granular whitelisting would undermine La Liga’s goal since Cloudflare IPs host both legal and illegal endpoints.
  2. Protocol Evasion Tactics Fail: Modern encryption (e.g., DoH/DoT) prevents ISP-level DNS manipulation, forcing blunt IP blocks as the only "effective" option.
  3. Judicial Overreach: Critics highlight disturbing parallels to internet censorship in Russia and Belarus, where initial "targeted" blocks snowballed into widespread restrictions. One Redditor warned: "Bash the fuckers while they haven’t grown strong."

The Broader Impact: A Dangerous Precedent

This case exemplifies how copyright enforcement increasingly clashes with internet infrastructure:
- Developers face unreliable service for EU users without viable workarounds (e.g., migrating from Cloudflare sacrifices security).
- ISPs become enforcement arms with minimal oversight.
- Legal Systems prioritize rights-holders over due process. A judge reportedly dismissed concerns as "only sad nerds would care about this."

What’s Next?

Short-term fixes are scarce. Developers could:
- Avoid Cloudflare (impractical for security/performance).
- Use non-Spanish hosting (doesn’t solve Spanish access issues).
- Lobby for technical/legal reform.

The deeper issue remains: sacrificing internet reliability for piracy deterrence sets a perilous precedent. As rights-holders globally push for similar powers, Spain’s experiment risks normalizing network-level censorship—where football goals trump digital rights.

Source: Reddit r/gamedev