Spain has blocked access to freedom.gov
twitter.com82 points by akyuu 3 hours ago
82 points by akyuu 3 hours ago
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 what the title may make you believe so, purely internal issue. Italians are having similar problems with their football streaming organizations.
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.
Check out: https://zamunda.net
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.
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.
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. 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...
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.
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.
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.
Is this not a symptom of where ICANN sits? Subject to American jurisdiction, so domain seizures make more sense for American litigants. In Europe, litigants must chase down ISPs who are the local gatekeepers. It makes sense that it works differently.
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?
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.
ISP level blocking is for the mainstream, anyone slightly tech literate can overcome it.
The domain seizure, forced service shut downs like app store distribution ban or payment processing ban or forcing hosting providers not to serve you and physically taking you into custody for spreading unlicensed content is the real deal and it’s actually effective.
Though even if there is a way to circumvent, if there is no audience or ad revenues, there is no motivation. Look at Twitch streamers or YouTubers who are banned:
-> No revenue
-> No audience
-> No reason to continue
-> "Problem" solved> not Spain as the government but LaLiga(a sports organization) abused its given powers and apparently demanded that ISPs block the site.
What was the content of the website?
It seems to be a Bulgarian torrent website
https://web.archive.org/web/20230207190846/https://zamunda.n...
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.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/us-law-enforcement-assists-bu...
Videos from platforms like YouTube are taken down for copyright reasons all the time without any due process, often wrongfully.
The same thing happened but instead of some copyrights organization taking down YouTube/Twitter etc content, Italian copyrights organization blocked some Cloudflare IP addresses without due process for copyright reasons.
The implementations differ slightly but it is exactly the same thing.
In that case, European-style censorship is preferable, because you can just use another DNS server.
What are the odds that the Cloudflare CEO will have a twitter meltdown about this?
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.
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.
Pretty sure it is all performative and the actual audience is the voters in the US.
It's the same administration that stated that they sent a hospital ship to a country with public healthcare to take care of the sick people there.
Boy, I will miss this administration for their sense of humor and ingenuity. They always find something new. A firework of performance art.
the goal was to publicly display european censorship and to take down its moral "high ground"
it succeeded
Maybe in the US. In Europe it never convinced anyone, as it never would since anything minimally related to Trump is discarded automatically.
Also because internet censorship and censorship in general has largely become normalized in Europe.
No it isn't. For example in my EU country I can see the list of all websites blocked, and all of them are for piracy/copyright infringement and illegal betting (legal betting is allowed, but must register and pay taxes). That and rt.com. I can also say/post whatever I want in social media except stalk and harass individual people. There is no "censorship" at all compared to virtually anywhere else in the world, US included.
US is infinitely worse than EU but selectively based on what ruling party wants you to both see and post. try to get some coverage from gaza or west bank and/or post something slightly critical of israel and see how that works out for you. EU, China… are at least up front about what they want to censor and why, US censors every fucking imaginable thing while people are too stupid to see it and go “oh my, look how bad EU/China are…”
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.
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.
It resolves now but also other websites that are blocked during games are available.
For those wondering what is this freedom.gov thing, it was discussed here a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47067270
The situation in Spain with laligua is becoming crazy, completely crazy.
Perhaps Europe should put up a portal to bypass American copyright restrictions. Free speech, and all that.
If Europe would set up a way to facilitate non-Europeans getting GDPR protections I'd pay them a good bit of money.
Just checked - not blocked, works just fine (Adamo and Vodafone).
Spain living in 2010’s tech
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.
Are they restreaming football?
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.
https://www.isdglobal.org/digital-dispatch/the-achilles-heel...
So, freedom.gov is also blocked to protect you from fake news I guess.
Sad.
RT is blocked in the entire EU as part of a sanctions round due to the invasion of Ukraine: https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2022...
It actually is, the IP it resolves to is Cloudflare.
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
rt.com does not use Cloudflare, they are a customer of DDOS Guard:
$ drill -Q rt.com | tee $(tty) | xargs whois | grep org-name
91.215.41.4
org-name: DDOS-GUARD LTD
$ curl --silent https://www.rt.com | grep '<title>[^<]\*</title>' | head -1
<title>RT - Breaking News, Russia News, World News and Video</title>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.
The site was created for the express purpose of enabling bypass of sovereign policy decisions: so yeah, it's going to be blocked.
Good. freedom.gov is a clear subversive political influence campaign that should be banned by all European countries.
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
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.
How exactly does a proxy spread misinfo? Also, the project isn't even functional yet and appears to have been blocked to avert piracy
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.
I agree. I just don't agree with misinformation not being protected as free speech. Surely having an INGSOC decide what is truthful enough to be shared is detrimental to free expression and thought. Heliocentrism was also misinformation at one point.
Ok, let's use the more accurate term: disinformation.
This is what this site is built for. Even the premise of the site is disinformation. Europe does not currently censor much of anything on the internet very strictly. We can still access X, 4chan, 8kun, kick, etc., and all the absolutely vile discourse on them. Not to mention our homegrown nazi breeding grounds.
But a site which will presumably be used to curate a selected list of far-right propaganda? By the US govt? That propably needs to see pushback.
It has a name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughtcrime
The solution to disinformation is not censorship, it's education and to teach early people on how to critically think by themselves.
It's "thoughtcrime" and "censorship" when they do it. It's "stopping disinformation" and "protecting democracy" when we do it.
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.
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.
Absolutely, the same way we should only use European technologies. We have the best bottle-caps in the world.
Please make sure to review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
No surprise with that, I would think other countries will do the same.
But as we all know, there are ways around that for people who really have to go there.
Until these workarounds are progressively made illegal or required to provide identification.
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.
No surprise, it's Cloudflare:
$ host freedom.gov
freedom.gov has address 172.67.219.106
$ whois 172.67.219.106
NetRange: 172.64.0.0 - 172.71.255.255
CIDR: 172.64.0.0/13
NetName: CLOUDFLARENET
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.
This Reddit post [1] says the block 188.114.96.0/23 is blocked.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1ravua8/psa_if_...
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.
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.
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.
I assume court orders against Cloudflare have been tried. How come they are not effective?
Edit: according to this article, Cloudflare have not been ordered to block the sites. Very odd.
https://cybernews.com/news/cloudflare-spain-laliga-piracy-bl...
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].
[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...
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