Why Spain's National Football League Bans Me From the Internet on Sundays
La Liga, Telefónica, and the court order that took down my tabletop RPG app.
I don’t watch football.
Neither the grabby nor kicky kinds. But as you know, sometimes the grabby kind gets kicky, and the kicky kind gets grabby. It just depends.
And as if I didn’t have enough reasons to trivialize sports: La Liga — Spain’s national football league — disables a core feature of a hobbyist website I maintain within the country. But only on certain days. And just what does my hyper-illegal, super-illicit website for criminal crimes of criminality do? Why, the worst thing you can possibly imagine: helping people share and synchronize virtual torches for a role-playing game called Shadowdark. (It’s like D&D but better.)
You can learn more about this at my nerd blog, Lodes & Lanterns. 😉
Anyway, so it turns out that the “live sync” part of my app, Torchtimer, is only blocked on “matchdays.” I’m not kidding. This is not a joke. April Fool’s has passed. Testing has confirmed that the following (translated) error message is only received on matchdays:
Access to this IP address has been blocked in compliance with the Judgment of December 18, 2024, issued by the Commercial Court No. 6 of Barcelona within the framework of ordinary proceedings (Commercial matters, art. 249.1.4)-1005/2024-H, initiated by the National Professional Football League and Telefónica Audiovisual Digital, S.L.U.
At first I thought, “OH SHIT WHAT DID I DO?”
But this is nothing I caused. For once.
What the fuck happened
Although I have one, you don’t need a computer science degree to understand what transpired.
See, I had committed the heinous act of having part of my nerd hobby app automatically assigned to the “wrong” IP address. An IP address, by the way, is like a house number. La Liga, apparently, determined that an address my app happens to use, or that of a neighbor in the same “area code” perhaps, had at some point infringed upon their copyright, presumably streaming an unlicensed broadcast.
So the only rational course of action is to shut off services having nothing to do with it, right? On Sundays or whatever. Right?
Thus, without certain workarounds, my app’s live sync feature breaks once a week within Spain as collateral damage, despite the fact that it has no streaming video component. It never has. And it never will, because it’s just used to do nerd stuff that couldn’t be any further from copyright-infringing sports appreciation.
It should be obvious to any judge that vesting the jocks at a football league with the authority to turn the Internet on and off, whenever they want, would be spectacularly counterproductive. Yet, it happened. La Liga can direct Spain’s big telecorpo, Telefónica, to do so without any oversight I’m aware of. If I’m being generous, internalizing the full extent of how stupid this is may require some — minimal in my opinion — specialized knowledge. Still, granting unilateral power to a private institution in dictating which Internet services can and cannot be accessed is… well, this isn’t the United States, okay?
Look, I’m not here to give my two cents on copyrights. It’s a foregone conclusion to me — and anybody else with a tangy brainstem — that intellectual property law has been completely broken since the inception of the Internet, if not before. I’ll refrain from going on a tangent, though. I’m just a guy trying to help people enjoy their tabletop role-playing game.
And by the way, what’s the deal, Telefónica? What the hell, man? You had something to do with this? Despite your troubled past, I distinctly recall glazing you in my post about how awesome the fiber internet here is in Spain…
But all of a sudden, new shit has come to light, man. Is this how you want to be remembered by Bebop Libre’s horde of juggalos, Telefónica? Do you even comprehend the gravity of what your unholy alliance with La Liga has unleashed upon my tabletop role-playing game experience? You will never be forgiven for slightly inconveniencing a manchild who writes America’s favorite blog about his move abroad to Spain.
It’s beside the point that his special interest happens to involve pretending to be a dwarven cleric — who is very smart and attractive — in a fantasy world.
How dare you. How goddamned dare you, and how dare La Liga for treading upon muh freedum (which accompanies me anywhere I go because I’m American). This blog is literally called Bebop Libre. You thought taking away my right to reappropriate culture, fictional or otherwise — and present that as freedom — wouldn’t mobilize a mass protest? Despicable. Disgusting, in fact.
Godzilla, Mothra, King Kong & your Internet
Other outlets have written much about this shit, such as this recent piece by Chiara Castro at TechRadar. Quoting her:
Spanish [Internet service providers] are increasingly blocking content by restricting access to specific IP addresses. Because multiple websites often share the same root IP address — particularly when hosted on a Content Delivery Network (CDN) like Cloudflare — this method is “highly likely to have collateral effects," [according to] Alissa Starzak, Cloudflare’s Vice President and Global Head of Public Policy . . .
While I’m reappropriating cultures, there’s a Japanese word for what’s going down: kaiju, or basically “giant movie monster.” La Liga and Telefónica picking a fight with Cloudflare is pure kaiju cinema. It’s the equivalent of Godzilla firing his laser at Mothra while King Kong watches from a skyscraper converted into a cuck throne.
Love or hate big corpos like Cloudflare, there’s no universe in which playing indiscriminate whack-a-mole with Internet services like mine will achieve anything but more problems (if this strongly-worded letter of a blog post is any indication). Castro’s article even reports that the Madrid City Council website had been taken down as a result. I just don’t think pissing off municipal governments within Spain, or monied interests that are absolutely sustaining financial damages because of this bullshittery, is ideal in the long term.
Now, it occurred to me that maybe this boils down to indirect legal activism against monopolies that I’m misreading but… court orders aren’t laws. They’re rulings. Laws ostensibly involve planned implementations and guidelines for relevant parties with support of the public (haha). I repeat: ostensibly. Say what you will about laws, but they are at least more sensible than ordering La Liga to be the king of Spain’s Internet for one day per week.
Incidentally, if you’ve read my fiber article, you can probably surmise that I’m the kind of person who was quite entertained watching Lina Khan terrify the monopolies — in the administration preceding the one that rolled over for Live Nation and Ticketmaster. When in one moment the state works for its people, but does the exact opposite in the next, I’m not terribly enthusiastic about the assumptions underlying the concept.
That’s why you won’t find me cheering for Team Godzilla or Team Mothra when states and corporations duke it out. Nonetheless, we hoi polloi are King Kong on the cuck throne, and who can’t appreciate watching the other monsters beat the shit out of each other? I suppose that’s one thing sports fans and I have in common.
Reese here from Bebop Libre: What are we even doing here if you don’t like this post and subscribe? And go ahead and enjoy the complimentary music video below from the Viagra Boys… before it’s banned in your country. When that happens, you bring the pitchforks. I’ll bring the (virtual) torches.
So sorry! Hope the mofos get the message and see the light!
Telefónica, La liga, the Adams family, Vito Corleone, Al Capone, la mafia (the mob), Godzilla, Frankenstein (not the monster)... You know what I mean, I hope.