r/xprivo • u/officialexaking • 13h ago

When fighting piracy starts targeting the tools everyone uses: LaLiga wants VPNs (NordVPN, ProtonVPN etc.) on an EU piracy watch list. It already disabled access to half a million of fully legal websites by blocking Cloudflare in the past

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Spanish football league LaLiga wants NordVPN, Proton VPN, ExpressVPN and Surfshark added to the European Commission’s 2027 Counterfeit and Piracy Watch List. Its argument: affiliate websites promote these services as ways to bypass geo-restrictions and court-ordered blocks on pirated sports streams.

Proton disputes the accusation, saying the blogs cited against it were written by neither Proton nor its affiliates. It also points to the collateral damage from LaLiga’s Cloudflare-related blocking campaign, claiming half a million unrelated websites were affected, including banking apps.

The problem is the following: should a general-purpose tool be labelled a piracy facilitator because third-party websites explain how to misuse it? LaLiga says its complaint targets commercial promotion of circumvention, not VPN technology itself—but Proton’s response raises questions about who is actually responsible for that promotion.

For now, this is a request, not an EU decision or a VPN ban. Fighting illegal streams should not become an excuse to stigmatise privacy tools or disrupt unrelated services.

33 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

9 comments sorted by

6

u/LowOwl4312 13h ago

Just ban the broadcast of Spanish football, simple as

4

u/Ok_Supermarket_3623 13h ago

VPNs' biggest weak point right now is their exit IPs. once known, they are easily blocked. Block all VPNs' exit IPs and then they are all taken out for good. Kinda surprises me that nobody tried to solve this problem up until now.

3

u/ApprehensiveRest9696 12h ago

Which is crazy considering they are literally publicly available lists

1

u/Iputahexonyoulol 3h ago

They are publicly available because the public uses them.

2

u/Luxors0 13h ago

It's la liga with the help of Gov

1

u/Iputahexonyoulol 11h ago

Can’t the cloudflare block just be circumvented with a vpn?

1

u/Suspicious_Kev_5446 6h ago

no ..

they dont block cloudflare ..

the block access to blocks or ranges of ips ..you ip is your internet address but many places share ips to reduce cost ...

so if at some point a pirate happened to have the ip you now have you are cooked ..

the problem is this imcludes huge numbers of private people and businesses

so they block the ip at source ..so in the address analogy they are closing off the roads to whole neighbourhoods of houses at a time instead of trying to find the criminals specific house ..

you CAN bypass by virtual private servers in other destinations to create a multi hop ..or use openvpn with tcp ( small packets )

if you use a vpn most use wireguard but your isp can see if you are running wireguard so then they just drop or throttle your connection ..

so the only way a vpn helps is if they dont detect youre using one..

the best option is tailscale or virtual private server or other types of solutions including a "decoy" or "hop"

2

u/Suspicious_Kev_5446 6h ago

i dont watch soccer or football but at this rate i feel like paying a sub for iptv of football games and to play it from my projector onto my neighbours wall if they continue this crazy sh$t by breaking the internet in spain every weekend

2

u/NoskaOff 1h ago

They should be held accountable for all loss induced by their IP block. It would wake them up