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.
Cloudflare has become so ubiquitous that they've become a major vulnerability for non-U.S. governments. The recent outages offered a small taste of what might happen if the U.S. government, on one of their random whims, ordered Cloudflare to block everyone and every site within a target country.
This in no way excuses what Spain is doing, but its important to recognize that the internet is becoming more of a battlefield every day.
I also see another side of the problem - too many services are proxied via CloudFlare making it easy to disrupt at the same time. Folks really need to try and choose alternatives instead of feeding the “world firewall”
How is that a bad thing? Our goal should be to maximize the amount of collateral damage that any censorship causes, with the ideal case being that the only two choices available to the censors are "no censorship at all" or "completely air gap yourself like North Korea".
That extreme centralization makes the single choke-point vulnerable to all kinds of other problems. The web is supposed to be decentralized and distributed.
Sure, I agree there are bad things about extreme centralization. I'm just saying that the increased collateral damage of censorship is a silver lining of it, not one of the bad things about it.
Some people genuinely believe the european copyright system (and La Liga and the Spanish judiciary) has more than 0% legitimacy… is it truly that hard to imagine?
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.
It failed. The outcome was europeans see “yet another nonsense” coming from the US. Also, it barely made the news because of other nonsense coming from the US and generally that’s limited to “international news”.
Also, we don’t actually have censorship in Europe, not in the way the US is trying to suggest.
Yet, your ISPs don't give you access to the full Internet. First it's porn (age verification), then it's soccer, then it's social media (ID verification), then it's libraries. Soon, you even stuff that you take for granted, such as playing an online game, may require age/ID verification. At this rate, all you will be able to access soon will be center-left Euro propaganda.
Are you forgetting how the Americans blocked Stormfront and Silk Road? They don't have full access to the Internet either, they're just not so obviously totalitarian about it as the Europeans.
The ISPs do what our elected governments direct them to do. It’s how democracy works. If you don’t like what people are voting for, get into politics and talk to your community. Or at least email your MEP. There is no conspiracy here.
Cute that you think that's how it works. I guess you're also thinking everyone that voted for the current administration agrees with them on everything they do and voted them in exactly for that. I am at least glad you didn't say if you don't like how it works, move elsewhere.
I know that’s how it works and I also know it’s not a zero sum game. That’s why every law or policy gets time for comments and debate and sometimes policy gets revised. It’s how governance works.
But if you feel you have the perfect solutions, then by all means get yourself on the ballot so we can finally see the light.
There was a comma, after which it said "not in the way the US is trying to suggest." You evidently missed that part, or are you saying that it is in exactly the way the US is trying to suggest?
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.
> all of them are for piracy/copyright infringement and illegal betting
Does that include all of the sites that share the same IP addresses as those sites?
For that matter, you're posting a reply to an article about a European country blocking the website of a generic US government VPN service, and the service isn't even operating yet. So not only have they graduated to censoring VPNs, they're now censoring a website whose only content is political criticism of their other censorship.
> 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.
You provided a counter-example that disproves your claim in the next sentence. I'm just flabbergasted.
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 mean there are an increasing number of states that are requiring age gating for pornography access for sites like PornHub. It's only a matter of time before that age gating expands to non-pornographic entities, which is the ultimate goal of the plan.
Another lie. The government has the same right to politely request sites to remove disinformation as you and I do. No one "made sure" of any such thing.
Eh. Asking sites to remove information while concurrently litigating against them is very "nice site you have there, shame if something were to happen to it."
The real issue here is that accusations of hypocrisy are misdirection. Two wrongs don't make a right and it's not a competition to see which government can screw people worse.
If your murder rate is up 300% and your defense is "well what about the murder rate in <other country>", the most conspicuous thing about that response is that it contains zero absolution from your murder rate being up 300%. The same is true of the censorship rate.
If you're not in the US, you probably don't understand how our system of federalism works. We have 50 different states, some of which are basically run by the Christian equivalent of the Taliban or the Shiite mullahs of Iran. These state governments often come up with goofy, performative laws such as age verification that are normally set aside by higher courts as First Amendment violations.
I say "normally" because the same religious factions are rapidly expanding their dominance over those very courts. Absolutely no historical freedoms can be taken for granted in the US right now. Nevertheless, the fact is, there is no national Internet censorship regime including age verification. No such laws are currently under consideration at the national level.
(Yes, you can be prosecuted for downloading or distributing child pornography, but that is not an Internet-specific issue, and there is no other country I'm aware of where such laws are not also on the books.)
Edit: if you are willing to move the goalposts that far, there is probably no way to convince you that the facts are as stated. Nevertheless... those are the facts. For further reading, look up the term "prior restraint." That's what's actually different in the US versus other countries that use technical means to enforce legal restrictions on Internet speech.
What are you smoking? Access to porn has been legally restricted in every state to 18+ for decades. Adding the Internet only made things easier because nobody enforced it the same way they were already enforcing brick and mortar stores that had the exact same materials.
Likewise, there are plenty of rules and regulations around adult content on broadcast airwaves managed by the FCC.
Challenging adult content as "free speech" has happened and already settled precedent at the Supreme Court.
Yes, individual states are still trying to figure out how to actually best enforce the laws on the books at the Internet level, but there's no pretending that it is just a few states that actually have those laws.
I AM in the USA. And yes, we are heavily censored, but not simply in content. Its a financial censorship, or cut off from banking, or payment processing. And being the "Home of the (everything costs so damned much) Free", starves all initiatives that threaten companies or government.
Wikileaks is one such. Operation chokepoint, another. OFAC sanctions. Holder v Humanitarian Law Project. Knight First Amendment Institute.
But thats the point - USA speech says you can say "Hitler did nothing wrong" and its legal. But you infringe on Powers that Be, and money is involved, your speech via money will quickly be eliminated.
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.
Ignoring the disastrous policies of the Spanish government, I find it telling that this was the year when it finally became worth it to pay to VPN out of the US, and also the year when this freedom.gov propaganda thing launched.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Copyright was invented in England and was globalized by France by a treaty signed in Switzerland. The US didn’t join the treaty until 102 years later. Up until 1989 the Berne Convention was stronger than US copyright law.
That's a neat factoid, but my point was about repudiating the current boneheaded US foreign policy rather than anything to do with where copyright was invented.
The foreign policy of calling out silly censorship in Europe and violations of fundamental freedoms and making European countries implicitly acknowledge it by blocking a US site?
Seems great. Wish Europe didn't censor free speech.
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.
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.
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).
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.
The USA does not remove your videos from YouTube, Google does because they don't have the resources to evaluate all copyright claims and they are afraid of getting sued. You're welcome to host your own videos.
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
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.
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.
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.
The vast majority of YouTube takedowns are done through voluntarily moderation, not via copyright takedown. They require no more due process than moderation of posts on this or any other website.
A lot of Cloudflare is netblocked during soccer games in Spain, this has been a thing for years now.
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.
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.
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].
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.
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.
That is unfortunately the truth of it. There are distressingly few people in the US these days who actually have a principled belief in freedom of speech. Both the left and the right talk up freedom of speech when they are out of power, but are quite willing to destroy it when they are in power. I would give my left proverbial for a political party that actually protects freedom of speech.
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.
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.
Cloudflare has become so ubiquitous that they've become a major vulnerability for non-U.S. governments. The recent outages offered a small taste of what might happen if the U.S. government, on one of their random whims, ordered Cloudflare to block everyone and every site within a target country.
This in no way excuses what Spain is doing, but its important to recognize that the internet is becoming more of a battlefield every day.
I also see another side of the problem - too many services are proxied via CloudFlare making it easy to disrupt at the same time. Folks really need to try and choose alternatives instead of feeding the “world firewall”
How is that a bad thing? Our goal should be to maximize the amount of collateral damage that any censorship causes, with the ideal case being that the only two choices available to the censors are "no censorship at all" or "completely air gap yourself like North Korea".
That extreme centralization makes the single choke-point vulnerable to all kinds of other problems. The web is supposed to be decentralized and distributed.
In theory. It’s strange to argue about hypothetical issues with something currently defending against actual problems. One battle at a time.
Sure, I agree there are bad things about extreme centralization. I'm just saying that the increased collateral damage of censorship is a silver lining of it, not one of the bad things about it.
why? so La Liga can more easily target smaller providers?
if anything the "world firewall" here has a redeeming feature, making this nonsense a lot more costly
Some people genuinely believe the european copyright system (and La Liga and the Spanish judiciary) has more than 0% legitimacy… is it truly that hard to imagine?
Collective punishment is such overreach that it's a violation of the Geneva conventions. You do that and you no longer have more than 0% legitimacy.
I meant even after the fact they still believe to some degree of legitimacy.
Believing that an action is legitimate when it isn't simply means that they're in error.
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
It failed. The outcome was europeans see “yet another nonsense” coming from the US. Also, it barely made the news because of other nonsense coming from the US and generally that’s limited to “international news”.
Also, we don’t actually have censorship in Europe, not in the way the US is trying to suggest.
Yet, your ISPs don't give you access to the full Internet. First it's porn (age verification), then it's soccer, then it's social media (ID verification), then it's libraries. Soon, you even stuff that you take for granted, such as playing an online game, may require age/ID verification. At this rate, all you will be able to access soon will be center-left Euro propaganda.
Are you forgetting how the Americans blocked Stormfront and Silk Road? They don't have full access to the Internet either, they're just not so obviously totalitarian about it as the Europeans.
Stormfront was deplatformed, not blocked by ISPs. Silk Road wasn't deplatformed or blocked, the owner got his ass arrested and thrown in prison.
Many parts of the US require age verification for porn as well.
The ISPs do what our elected governments direct them to do. It’s how democracy works. If you don’t like what people are voting for, get into politics and talk to your community. Or at least email your MEP. There is no conspiracy here.
Cute that you think that's how it works. I guess you're also thinking everyone that voted for the current administration agrees with them on everything they do and voted them in exactly for that. I am at least glad you didn't say if you don't like how it works, move elsewhere.
I know that’s how it works and I also know it’s not a zero sum game. That’s why every law or policy gets time for comments and debate and sometimes policy gets revised. It’s how governance works.
But if you feel you have the perfect solutions, then by all means get yourself on the ballot so we can finally see the light.
Sorry you have to deal with our culture warriors, cheers. It's funny to watch someone get a 1st grade instruction in civics while raving.
"The situation for free speech in Europe is even worse than I thought"
https://eternallyradicalidea.com/p/the-situation-for-free-sp...
> Also, we don’t actually have censorship in Europe
Of course you do. If you think it does not exist the brainwashing has worked on you.
There was a comma, after which it said "not in the way the US is trying to suggest." You evidently missed that part, or are you saying that it is in exactly the way the US is trying to suggest?
Do Europeans see "yet another nonsense" coming from the US or coming from the EU?
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.
> all of them are for piracy/copyright infringement and illegal betting
Does that include all of the sites that share the same IP addresses as those sites?
For that matter, you're posting a reply to an article about a European country blocking the website of a generic US government VPN service, and the service isn't even operating yet. So not only have they graduated to censoring VPNs, they're now censoring a website whose only content is political criticism of their other censorship.
I'd love to see the link to your country's blocklist.
> No it isn't.
Yes it is.
> 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.
You provided a counter-example that disproves your claim in the next sentence. I'm just flabbergasted.
> That and ...
lenta.ru ? (aha, management personnel has been replaced 2014 [1])
[1] https://t.me/systemasystema/89 [RU]
Blocking RT is not censorship?
Nor is sanctioning your own journalists? Or a former intelligence agent, a Swiss national who worked for NATO, and now lives in Belgium?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46969722
That's normalization.
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…”
> 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.
On a US ISP aljazeera.com loads right up, as does The Guardian and RT.
US censors every fucking imaginable thing while people are too stupid to see it and go “oh my, look how bad EU/China are
No, we do not. You've been lied to. You should go back to whoever told you that, ask them why, and ask them not to do it again.
no one told me silly :)
I mean there are an increasing number of states that are requiring age gating for pornography access for sites like PornHub. It's only a matter of time before that age gating expands to non-pornographic entities, which is the ultimate goal of the plan.
Unfortunately you're probably not wrong, but the fact remains, none of this is happening at a national level. Yet.
Not since the Biden administration, anyway. During covid they made sure social media site black-holed information they didn't want people to see.
Another lie. The government has the same right to politely request sites to remove disinformation as you and I do. No one "made sure" of any such thing.
Eh. Asking sites to remove information while concurrently litigating against them is very "nice site you have there, shame if something were to happen to it."
The real issue here is that accusations of hypocrisy are misdirection. Two wrongs don't make a right and it's not a competition to see which government can screw people worse.
If your murder rate is up 300% and your defense is "well what about the murder rate in <other country>", the most conspicuous thing about that response is that it contains zero absolution from your murder rate being up 300%. The same is true of the censorship rate.
shit is and has been happening at the national level for a while. gave you an example you can take for a spin (would not advise you do though)
If you're not in the US, you probably don't understand how our system of federalism works. We have 50 different states, some of which are basically run by the Christian equivalent of the Taliban or the Shiite mullahs of Iran. These state governments often come up with goofy, performative laws such as age verification that are normally set aside by higher courts as First Amendment violations.
I say "normally" because the same religious factions are rapidly expanding their dominance over those very courts. Absolutely no historical freedoms can be taken for granted in the US right now. Nevertheless, the fact is, there is no national Internet censorship regime including age verification. No such laws are currently under consideration at the national level.
(Yes, you can be prosecuted for downloading or distributing child pornography, but that is not an Internet-specific issue, and there is no other country I'm aware of where such laws are not also on the books.)
Edit: if you are willing to move the goalposts that far, there is probably no way to convince you that the facts are as stated. Nevertheless... those are the facts. For further reading, look up the term "prior restraint." That's what's actually different in the US versus other countries that use technical means to enforce legal restrictions on Internet speech.
What are you smoking? Access to porn has been legally restricted in every state to 18+ for decades. Adding the Internet only made things easier because nobody enforced it the same way they were already enforcing brick and mortar stores that had the exact same materials.
Likewise, there are plenty of rules and regulations around adult content on broadcast airwaves managed by the FCC.
Challenging adult content as "free speech" has happened and already settled precedent at the Supreme Court.
Yes, individual states are still trying to figure out how to actually best enforce the laws on the books at the Internet level, but there's no pretending that it is just a few states that actually have those laws.
I AM in the USA. And yes, we are heavily censored, but not simply in content. Its a financial censorship, or cut off from banking, or payment processing. And being the "Home of the (everything costs so damned much) Free", starves all initiatives that threaten companies or government.
Wikileaks is one such. Operation chokepoint, another. OFAC sanctions. Holder v Humanitarian Law Project. Knight First Amendment Institute.
But thats the point - USA speech says you can say "Hitler did nothing wrong" and its legal. But you infringe on Powers that Be, and money is involved, your speech via money will quickly be eliminated.
While conveniently ignoring or gaslighting everyone about this admins own censorship.
>ignoring or gaslighting everyone
Where's the "gaslighting"?
implying that the EU is currently worse on censorship when this admin is utilizing their power to silence critics.
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.
For those wondering what is this freedom.gov thing, it was discussed here a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47067270
Ignoring the disastrous policies of the Spanish government, I find it telling that this was the year when it finally became worth it to pay to VPN out of the US, and also the year when this freedom.gov propaganda thing launched.
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.
It's sad to see that, in Spain, the soccer mafia controls the country.
The situation in Spain with laligua is becoming crazy, completely crazy.
freedom is not coming
Just checked - not blocked, works just fine (Adamo and Vodafone).
Adamo never blocks, at least for me. Vodafone does.
Spain living in 2010’s tech
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.
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...
RT is not blocked in the entire EU, I can access it just fine.
Sad? Have you watched RT. It is the motherload of disinformation, lies and stupidity.
It actually is, the IP it resolves to is Cloudflare.
Lucky you (this was not cynical) because for me there is no Cloudflare:
(just an empty A record)rt.com does not use Cloudflare, they are a customer of DDOS Guard:
Perhaps Europe should put up a portal to bypass American copyright restrictions. Free speech, and all that.
Copyright was invented in England and was globalized by France by a treaty signed in Switzerland. The US didn’t join the treaty until 102 years later. Up until 1989 the Berne Convention was stronger than US copyright law.
That's a neat factoid, but my point was about repudiating the current boneheaded US foreign policy rather than anything to do with where copyright was invented.
The foreign policy of calling out silly censorship in Europe and violations of fundamental freedoms and making European countries implicitly acknowledge it by blocking a US site?
Seems great. Wish Europe didn't censor free speech.
And my point is I don’t know why “Europe” would want to evade law that was their entire idea to begin with… and that they widely continue to enforce.
Copyright in Spain is automatic and life plus 70 years. Same as the US and every country in Europe except for Monaco and San Marino where it’s 50.
As an American I accept your terms. More freedom for all.
If Europe would set up a way to facilitate non-Europeans getting GDPR protections I'd pay them a good bit of money.
Portugal’s golden visa only costs a year’s salary!
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.
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...
I am not an expert here, but I have spent many vacations in Spain as it is one of my favorite countries, and I distinctly remember it being in Europe.
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.
The USA does not remove your videos from YouTube, Google does because they don't have the resources to evaluate all copyright claims and they are afraid of getting sued. You're welcome to host your own videos.
Neither Spain is blocking freedom.gov, what is your point?
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:
> not Spain as the government but LaLiga(a sports organization) abused its given powers and apparently demanded that ISPs block the site.
Why do you keep arguing a point you were wrong about
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.
Not that I agree with that but the bar to seize the domain (and all that comes with it) is much higher than carpet-blocking IPs and domains.
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.
The vast majority of YouTube takedowns are done through voluntarily moderation, not via copyright takedown. They require no more due process than moderation of posts on this or any other website.
Well we came pretty close with TikTok[1], which I guess is somewhat analogous.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efforts_to_ban_TikTok_in_the_U...
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?
No surprise, it's Cloudflare:
A lot of Cloudflare is netblocked during soccer games in Spain, this has been a thing for years now.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...
laughable on both sides.
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.
I'd rather have the US government allowing me to access X and 4chan than have the likes of you blocking me from doing so.
Things that allow and enable the spread of misinformation:
- pen and paper
- the printing press
- the telegraph
- radio
- television
- the internet
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.
That is unfortunately the truth of it. There are distressingly few people in the US these days who actually have a principled belief in freedom of speech. Both the left and the right talk up freedom of speech when they are out of power, but are quite willing to destroy it when they are in power. I would give my left proverbial for a political party that actually protects freedom of speech.
I think the people blocking content in Europe and those "protecting democracy" in the US share most of the same political beliefs.
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.
This is of course an influence campaign, just like government ads to get people not to smoke are influence campaigns, but where's the misinformation?
Should the Spanish government decide what is "misinformation"? Should it be forbidden to read false or misleading statements on the Internet?
> Censoring foreign political influence and misinformation campaigns is just sane policy.
That would be true if there were objective definitions of "foreign political influence" and "misinformation campaigns".
But there isn't. One can wave their hands and say any information falls into those categories.