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Comment by the_gipsy | Hacker News Reader

It's ridiculous and wrong what LaLiga does. But it's also a weakeup call to consider ditching cloudflare's centralization.

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The companies relying on cloudflare won't be in Spain. If you buy a GPS tracker by a Canadian company, developed in India, manufactured in China, they are unlikely to know, even it they cared, that a single country that accounts for a tiny percentage of their sales breaks fundamental internet infrastructure on the regular "because fútbol y dinero".

And when purchasing a product, there's no "bill of materials" telling you about the services it relies on, beyond "internet connection" at best.

>fundamental internet infrastructure

I'm not saying this situation isn't bullshit, but the bigger problem is that CloudFlare is now "fundamental internet infrastructure". This is precisely the situation that the internet was designed to prevent.

Yesterday I got stuck in endless CloudFlare CAPTCHA's, trying to access theretroweb.com. I had to give up. Many such cases. I hate CloudFlare so much, it's unreal.

> This is precisely the situation that the internet was designed to prevent

Right, but on the other hand, our constitution and laws are supposed to give us the rights to access a internet where the government cannot block entire companies who host websites, because a few bad websites are hosted there.

Not to mention all us freelancers, contractors and just in general computing users, who sometimes want to continue working although 90% of the country is watching football, we should be able to do so even if pirates use Cloudflare for shitty stuff.

I agree that Cloudflare sucks, people should avoid defaulting to putting Cloudflare in front of absolutely everything they do and I too get stuck at the CAPTCHAs sometimes. But that doesn't remove the fact that Cloudflare, just like every other lawful company, should be allowed to be visited during La Liga matches.

I’d love for a way to put all my sites behind Cloudflare only during La Liga matches.

Why?

Because if everyone did it, the absurdity of La Liga being able to Iran the entirety of the Spanish internet might become apparent.

Easier to boycott La liga matches. They are the root problem.

The LaLiga post seem to accuse Cloudflare of unlawful activity directly by protecting criminals, not just the illegal streamers. At least my reading (of Google translation) is that they target Cloudflare here and it works "as expected" since Cloudflare is the bad guys.

It takes very little money to rent massive botnet capacity to perform crippling DDOS attacks. Unfortunately there are only very few CDNs capable of absorbing that kind of attack.

I’d happily use anything else, but it (with CF Tunnels and its DDoS and caching systems) is what lets me self host on my little home server on today’s internet. Would gladly move to some other system (or systems)

> This is precisely the situation that the internet was designed to prevent.

Geoff Huston discuss this a few months back. The economic incentives helps shape centralized internet, to the point that most of today's traffic is cache push and private peering between major providers, rather than network transit.

https://blog.apnic.net/2025/08/21/podcast-the-inevitability-...

Which kind of make sense, since with peering both end of the infra (if separate entity) can negotiate for better terms upfront. While the latter is basically unpredictable opex based on traffic shape and routing algorithm.

> breaks fundamental internet infrastructure

I think lots of countries block Cloudflare whole-sale.

Laundering IP addresses for (or against) shady purposes is, in fact, Cloudflare's whole business. It's a wonder Cloudflare isn't being blocked more often.

Cloudflare has nothing to do with it. Actually you should further insist on using Cloudflare in Spain to increase the collateral cost of this ridiculous government decision as much as possible. Make it so not a single website works during football, and see if the government changes their tune.

If cloudflare is providing services to illegal websites, they very much are in full control of the situation. They knowingly choose to keep hosting that content, and have legal customers exposed to that risk.

You may like that the platform is open by default to everybody, but that's the obvious consequence.

Does cloudflare refuse a court order to take down a site? I don't think so.

Are blocking unlawful? I don't think so. Their country their rules.

Business-wise it's risky to deliver your service from IPs that also serves dirty content. Technical solutions exists, even if you want to stay on Cloudflare.

But it also highlights the fact that the idea of blocking “dirty IPs” is at best a blunt instrument. Every ISP has abusers. Some are worse than others at self-policing their customers. Cloudflare is reputable and better than most. Given the huge breadth of sites sitting behind Cloudflare, it’s crazy, IMO, to block all of Cloudflare.

In other countries, like Italy, they made a system where domain names are fast-tracked for blocking within minutes. I hate to say it but Spain managed to do something even worse.

It does not block all of cloudflare, it blocks their shared IPs. If you are doing serious business you may not want to do it on IPs that are also used for shady content. IP reputation is a well known strategy, used by emails and other firewalls.

Okay, so they aren’t blocking whole ranges. Yea, you definitely don’t want to share an IP with a spammer or malware site. I thought they were blocking whole ranges.

Country-wise it's risky to block the entire internet when football is on.

1 - Cloudflare is not the entire internet. 2 - They close people who decide to go with a cheap/free shared host.

Solutions exist if this market is important to your business.

Just a small 30% of the top 10k sites.

Needing to find solutions to a problem completely manufactured by sports and television is the problem.

Cloudflare is a private company, they might (unwillingly) benefit from hosting illegal services. They don't implement a quick or proactive process to take down content that is obviously illegal. The money made by illegal streaming websites doesn't end in good pockets, which raises further concerns. Such streaming is quickly spawn for the event, then disappear. Even if you fight them legally after the event, they operate from countries that won't cooperate.

Cloudflare could change their policy to take down quickly obvious abuse during live events. They could proactively check new customers before allowing public traffic.

People can vote against protecting property if they think it creates unreasonable effects.

Not sure where you got your stats but top website owners can easily deploy technical solutions to this issue.

We live in a complex word. This problem is not completely manufactured by bad people at sports and television companies. What should right owners do? Accept that content they own is streamed illegally, for profit, and not use recourses the law provides?

The only reason this happens is because Cloudflare's centralization makes precise censorship impossible. That's bad in this particular case (as it results in over-broad censorship), but good in general, as it makes censorship harder.

Without Cloudflare, you can censor whatever you want. If you have the support of an (undemocratic) government on your side, you can even DeDoS them, making sure that information critical of you cannot see the light of day.

That's actually an interesting argument for centralization, when it comes to interoperability concerns. I have never thought about it.

Of course, the standard response against centralization is that the centralized entity can sneak backdoors and turn at the drop of a hat.

Maybe something like a signal-like model might be good, in that regard, as opposed to mesh networks.

I agree with this take (that it’s a wake up call). Makes one question their entire app design and if using Cloudflare is “good enough” for managing CDN, tunnels, etc. for their apps.

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