A situation that has been unfolding in Spain since February is affecting our customers.
LaLiga, an association responsible for administering Spain’s professional football leagues, has obtained a court’s permission to block pirate IPTV services by targeting specific IP addresses used by said services. However, in some cases, these IP addresses belong to CDN nodes, and when you block a CDN node’s IP, you reject traffic to every domain that is going through that CDN node.
As such, LaLiga is barring traffic from identified pirate sites and hundreds of innocent sites, too. Possibly thousands. There is some dispute as to the actual number of domains that have been caught in the crossfire, but the number is significant, and our customers are among those affected.
Our response
We are committed to uptime, and have been working to mitigate these heavy-handed blockages:
- We’ve taken down our blocked nodes for the time being, in order to force a re-route to non-blocked nodes and provide temporary relief for our affected customers
- We have attempted contact with LaLiga, so that we may discuss the situation, but we have not been successful, as yet.
- We are actively working on other strategies which may or may not prove to be successful. We’ll update later when we have more useful details about those.
As long as our customers continue to be blocked unilaterally without cause, we will continue to look for ways to get around the blockages.
We’re not alone
This is not only a QUIC.cloud problem. Any CDN that proxies traffic through a node in Spain potentially has customers experiencing the same issue. We would all like to see LaLiga employ some precision in this fight against football piracy, instead of this heavy-handed approach that cripples a large number of innocent domains. Thus far, protests have fallen on deaf ears.
Any reputable CDN has a mechanism available for reporting abuse. It should be possible for LaLiga to cease blocking a CDN’s IPs and instead use the reporting mechanism provided. We’d like to see them take this approach.
QUIC.cloud takes abuse seriously. If IPTV piracy is happening on our network, one email to abusereport@quic.cloud is all it takes to stop it. We work hard to keep our network free of illegal or pirated content, as we’ve stated in our Service Agreement, and we respond quickly to such reports.
We’ll continue to keep an eye on the situation, and do what we can on our end to make game days less painful for our customers.
