Spain’s internet landscape is about to become considerably more turbulent. A new court ruling has empowered Telefónica, the country’s dominant telecommunications provider, to extend its controversial live-event internet blocking regime well beyond football, sweeping in tennis, golf, and even movies and television series.
Sources state that Telefónica Audiovisual Digital, the operator’s division that runs the Movistar Plus+ platform, secured a new court resolution on March 23 that authorizes fresh blocks tied not only to football but to other sports and entertainment content. The order comes from Barcelona’s Commercial Court and covers dynamic blocking of websites broadcasting content illegally that is owned by Telefónica.
Spain has been dealing with recurring internet disruptions since February 2025, every time a significant La Liga match takes place. La Liga, working alongside Telefónica, obtained judicial authorization to dynamically block IP addresses detected as participating in the unauthorized distribution of its content. The comparison offered by critics is apt: just as one street address contains many homes, a single IP address hosts thousands of websites, all of which become inaccessible when that address is blocked. Every weekend, the system orchestrated by La Liga president Javier Tebas has interfered with access to numerous legitimate websites, something the Spanish government itself has acknowledged.
Until now, those disruptions were largely confined to La Liga match windows. Outside those hours, Spanish internet users could browse without issue. That window of normalcy is closing.
The new authorization takes effect immediately, applying “every day of live sports event broadcasts,” beginning with the Champions League elimination round match between Atlético de Madrid and Barcelona on Tuesday, April 14. The blocking continues Wednesday for Bayern Munich vs. Real Madrid, and, according to reports, will repeat “in other sporting events, such as tennis or golf tournaments, both in live broadcasts and in movies and series.”
The scope of the new order is also notably broader than previous rulings. Rather than targeting only major carriers, the authorization extends beyond Movistar, MásOrange, Vodafone, and Digi to include “the rest of small and medium operators offering network access services at national, regional and local level.” These smaller providers will receive lists of IP addresses, URLs, and domain names from Telefónica for enforcement purposes.
That expanded reach raises the stakes considerably for collateral disruption. The blocking mechanism targets IP addresses, and when those addresses belong to large content delivery networks like Cloudflare, entire ranges of the network get blocked rather than individual unauthorized sites. The result is that legitimate businesses, developers running automated build pipelines, travelers checking in for flights, and ordinary users trying to access government services can find themselves locked out without warning. Reports of failed deployment jobs and inaccessible critical services have circulated widely among Spanish developers, and at least one missing persons tracking application reportedly went dark during a blocking window.
Critics have pointed to a sharp irony at the center of the arrangement: the people who actively seek out unauthorized broadcasts are the least affected by the blocks. Anyone with a functioning VPN or basic technical knowledge can navigate around them with minimal effort. The people left without service are ordinary users who happen to need internet access during a match, often for reasons that have nothing to do with football.
There is also a significant conflict of interest embedded in the arrangement. Telefónica pays roughly one billion euros per year for sports broadcasting rights in Spain, making the company both the financial engine behind live sports content and the enforcer of that content’s exclusivity. It also operates its own content delivery network, which competes directly with Cloudflare, the service whose infrastructure repeatedly absorbs the brunt of the blocking activity.
The economic gap between legal and unauthorized options helps explain why the piracy market persists despite aggressive enforcement. Legal sports packages in Spain can run anywhere from 79 to 200 euros per month, in a country where average take-home pay hovers around 1,700 euros monthly. Unauthorized IPTV services, by contrast, often cost between 20 and 60 euros per year.
That difference, roughly a 20-to-1 ratio in annual cost, creates a persistent demand that IP blocking alone cannot resolve. La Liga reported 5.4 billion euros in revenue in 2025, yet the legal viewing experience continues to frustrate many paying customers, who must juggle multiple platform subscriptions to watch all available matches and often encounter blackouts and geographic restrictions even after paying.
European Union Regulation 2015/2120, which requires internet service providers to treat all traffic equally, would appear to conflict with the practice of selectively blocking IP addresses during live events. The blocks operate through a court-ordered exemption from those net neutrality requirements, meaning no new legislation was passed. Judges are applying existing law in ways that have alarmed digital rights advocates across the continent.
Spain’s Supreme Court has previously ruled that football broadcasts do not qualify as copyrighted works under the protected categories of art, literature, or science. La Liga and Telefónica have worked around that limitation by pursuing internet service providers on the grounds of participation in unlawful activity rather than direct copyright claims, and by deliberately avoiding legal action against Cloudflare itself, which would produce binding legal precedent.
Italy has pursued similar approaches, and observers warn that if Spain’s model proves durable, other EU member states may adopt comparable frameworks.
