It's misleading title, not Spain as the government but LaLiga(a sports organization) abused its given powers and apparently demanded that ISPs block the site.

So it's very American style censorship in principle, that is it is censorship for profit reasons HOWEVER it is wrong in this particular instance because freedom.gov hadn't infringe copyrights. Nothing political despite that the title may make you believe so, purely internal issue. Italians are having similar problems with their football streaming organizations.

I'm not aware of American ISPs and CDNs straight-up blocking websites. That is distinctly European-style censorship.

American style censorship would be more like going through the courts to get an order to have the domains seized.

It’s sad that most comments are just focusing on political bashing instead of the root problem here.

It’s the fact LaLiga and Spanish ISPs comply.

They’re “carpet” blocking entire IPs of Cloudflare.

Every weekend if I need to access some of my work websites which are affected by this (while there are football games) - I need to VPN to bypass the blocking.

I’m new in Spain so my ability of surfacing the Spanish law or the European is limited. But I really wish they’ll have to find a nicer approach instead of this aggressive approach.

The most obvious outcome possible.I was never able to load the website myself, but if you centralize things to a specific website, it's trivial to block it. Since I could never load the site, I don't know if they had any plans outside of just putting up a website. If not, this was incredibly stupid.

Pretty sure it is all performative and the actual audience is the voters in the US.

I think it looks stupid on the surface. But maybe it is a purposeful way to goad European countries into taking increasingly authoritarian policy changes like banning VPNs. They will use it to generate outrage among Europeans and undermine the leadership, and try to either split the EU along these lines or place friendly leaders.

Maybe this is conspiracy theory. But I feel like the aggression they’ve shown - even people like Marco Rubio - suggests they’re acting with a purpose.

FWIW, Vodafone ES still resolves freedom.gov fine via their own DNS resolver. They're usually very block happy, can't access Anna's, TBP and also not Cloudflare during La Liga games normally, as some examples. But freedom.gov still resolves seemingly.

Can any other Spaniards confirm if freedom.gov still resolves for them?

As a side-note, I don't know why anyone would want to block that website in the first place? Barely has any information about what it is, and doesn't seem to be able to be used for anything as of today either.

It resolves now but also other websites that are blocked during games are available.

Perhaps Europe should put up a portal to bypass American copyright restrictions. Free speech, and all that.

As an American I accept your terms. More freedom for all.

If Europe would set up a way to facilitate non-Europeans getting GDPR protections I'd pay them a good bit of money.

Anyone else here who thinks that the design of freedom.gov has a dystopian vibe to it? And is that guy on the horse holding a gun?

That seems a bit fast since nothing is on that ridiculously looking website yet, but if this website is planning to host content that is illegal in the EU, then it will be blocked by many EU countries. Usually, these blocks aren't very effective. My country blocks most piratebay domains, for instance.

I feel like this move is premature and playing directly into Trump's hands. "See how Europe flinched at even the suggestion of free speech, we haven't even started yet"

Surely whatever they eventually put up on there will be blatant and horrible propaganda, but I think judging the reactions are the purpose of the site, not the content itself.

Are they restreaming football?

www.rt.com is blocked in a couple of countries in Europe, so it's not about football, rather to curb "disinformation" for the next elections or whatever.

https://www.isdglobal.org/digital-dispatch/the-achilles-heel...

So, freedom.gov is also blocked to protect you from fake news I guess.

Sad.

Lucky you (this was not cynical) because for me there is no Cloudflare:

    This site can’t be reached
    Check if there is a typo in rt.com.

    DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN

(just an empty A record)

No surprise with that, I would thing other countries will do the same.

But as we all know, there are ways around that for people who really have to go there.

Until these workarounds are progressively made illegal or required to provide identification.

https://www.generation-nt.com/actualites/vpn-age-mineurs-roy...

It's not ok at all, because such operators will get punished if they don't.

Therefore they will more and more respect the law to block sites, etc.

No surprise, it's Cloudflare:

    $ host freedom.gov
    freedom.gov has address 172.67.219.106
    $ whois 172.67.219.106
    NetRange:       172.64.0.0 - 172.71.255.255
    CIDR:           172.64.0.0/13
    NetName:        CLOUDFLARENET

A lot of Cloudflare is netblocked during soccer games in Spain, this has been a thing for years now.

This is not a dedicated block against freedom.gov, it's just the ordinary collateral damage from the fight against sports piracy. Sigh.

The truly fun fact here rather is that the US government seems to be unable to host a website on its own these days but needs Cloudflare's protection. It's either a grift, a hack job / MVP demo or every last competent person in IT there has departed or been DOGE'd off. Ridiculous.

This Reddit post [1] says the block 188.114.96.0/23 is blocked.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1ravua8/psa_if_...

Wait that’s a thing? It sounds outright crazy to block people from going about their business and using the Internet to protect one particular industry. Especially sports, which is low priority to me and I am sure to many people.

Yes, it has caused major issues all across Spain, including interference with emergency services, but apparently the owner of the league has deep political connections or something. It’s also likely that the political class sees this as laying the groundwork for future censorship efforts, given their track record.

Yes, for years now [1].

Sports is worth billions of dollars - La Liga makes 6.1 billion € from domestic rights alone [2]. UK's Premier League made 7.1 billion € during the Covid years [3].

[1] https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/la-liga-w...

[2] https://www.laliga.com/en-GB/news/laliga-secures-over-euro61...

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/football/2025/mar/06/premier-lea...

Good. freedom.gov is a clear subversive political influence campaign that should be banned by all European countries.

It is basically just a proxy. I don't see how censorship could be an antidote to a "subversive political influence campaign" - if anything you're describing censorship

How exactly does a proxy spread misinfo? Also, the project isn't even functional yet and appears to have been blocked to avert piracy

It has a name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughtcrime

The solution to disinformation is not censorship, it's education and to teach early people on how to critically think by themselves.

It's "thoughtcrime" and "censorship" when they do it. It's "stopping disinformation" and "protecting democracy" when we do it.

Believe it or not, removal of content is mandated on the basis of laws that have been passed by the majority of representatives elected by the people. For example, it is a crime in Germany to publicly glorify wars of aggression and use Nazi symbols or deny the Holocaust. It's also a crime to publish child abuse material.

Absolutely, the same way we should only use European technologies. We have the best bottle-caps in the world.

> We have the best bottle-caps in the world.

Spoken like someone who never walked the Isar river beaches in the morning after a Saturday night in summer. Used to be full of plastic bottle caps from all the party goers, now it's just the metal beer caps that you can easily pick up with a magnet.

Fair enough, this is actually a positive regulation.

This was more to put on perspective that innovation and gaining market share are the main priority in US/China, whereas in Europe, priority is more on regulation.

For example, one of the priorities here in the EU is to regulate and tax AI companies, rather than to make the place attractive.

The chip on the server hosting this comment was almost certainly printed with an ASML lithography machine. I get the sentiment but the bottle-cap meme needs to die. Innovation and regulation are not opposite ends of a slider where you have to pick one or the other.

Innovation is not correct.

Extracting maximum profit is correct.