Hello,
Today, OONI published a new research report documenting widespread collateral damage caused by IP blocking in Spain during LALIGA football broadcasts over the past 6 months.
Key findings include:
* At least 5.8% of the internet’s most popular domains were found to be blocked in Spain. Out of 9.2 million domains tested, we found at least 554,510 domains blocked at some point in time in Spain during the LALIGA football match broadcasts.
* Affected domains include benign and important websites, such as those of Amnesty International and Greenpeace.
* During most LALIGA broadcasts on multiple networks in Spain, blocking just 4–20 IP addresses in a 1-hour window led to significant collateral damage, affecting over 400,000 unique domains.
* During LALIGA match broadcasts in Spain, IP-level blocking affected at least 36 infrastructure and hosting providers, with OONI data identifying 7,441 unique blocked IP addresses associated with major providers including Amazon, Cloudflare, Alibaba Cloud, Akamai, Meta, and Microsoft.
* We detected TLS Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attacks on Digi Mobil (AS57269), raising privacy and security concerns. OONI data reveals that a total of 7,334 unique IPs in 14 ASNs, hosting a total of 10,759 domain names, were affected by TLS MitM attacks during the LALIGA broadcasts.
* Blocking implementation varied across ISPs, with Telefonica among the most consistently observed operators applying the blocking.
* Blocking by most ISPs was largely confined to LALIGA match time windows, with minimal evidence of spillover outside broadcast periods.
Although the impact estimated in our study is already substantial, our methodology is a lower bound, meaning that the true extent of the impact is likely higher than our reported figures.
We believe this raises questions about the necessity and proportionality of blocking such a large portion of the web in the context of copyright enforcement against unauthorized football streams.
We thank OONI Probe users in Spain for contributing measurements.
~ OONI team.