Spain has been trying for years to position itself as a major digital hub in Southern Europe: data centers in Madrid, submarine cables, interconnection, renewables, cloud, edge computing, and artificial intelligence. The narrative sounds promising. The problem is that infrastructure alone isn’t enough; it’s not just about land, fiber, and energy. It also requires a less glamorous but crucial element: trust. And the IP blockades linked to the fight against football piracy are precisely eroding that trust.
The case published by a technical user on BandaAncha.eu, where Vercel is serving traffic from France and BunnyCDN limits access to its POPs in Spain to certain clients, should not be dismissed as just another forum anecdote. It’s a warning signal. When a developer chooses a global platform to deploy an application and discovers that Spain is no longer a reliable location, the damage is no longer measured only in milliseconds. It manifests in architectural decisions, projects deployed abroad, and providers concluding that operating here demands more effort than it’s worth.
Football cannot govern the internet
Video piracy exists and harms those who pay for broadcasting rights, including operators. Denying this would be foolish. LaLiga has the right to defend its product, and courts have supported blocking measures against IP addresses associated with unauthorized broadcasts. But the issue isn’t the existence of a legal response—it’s the technical approach taken to implement that response.
Blocking shared IP addresses in 2026 is akin to using an outdated tool on an internet that no longer functions as it did before. A single IP can serve dozens, hundreds, or thousands of legitimate domains through Cloudflare, Vercel, AWS, BunnyCDN, or other networks. If that IP is cut during a match, the impact doesn’t only fall on a pirated signal. It can also affect an online store, an API, an institutional website, a SaaS dashboard, or an independent developer’s project with no relation to football.
Vercel was clear in April 2025, reporting that a court order in Spain allowed ISP-level blocking of IPs associated with unauthorized streams without properly distinguishing between infringing and legitimate services. The company highlighted that sites unrelated to piracy were becoming inaccessible from Spain. Meanwhile, LaLiga argues that its actions target IPs used for illegal access to its content and criticized Cloudflare for supposedly protecting infringing services technically.
This is the core clash. LaLiga sees an IP as a vector of piracy. The tech sector sees the same IP as shared infrastructure. If regulators, judges, and operators do not recognize this difference, the expected outcome is predictable: collateral damage, loss of trust, and providers beginning to protect themselves by removing capacity, restricting nodes, or rerouting traffic through neighboring countries.
The damage is not just technical; it’s economic
It’s important to emphasize: latency is only the visible part. Serving an application from France, Italy, or Portugal might add 10, 20, or 30 milliseconds. In many cases, this won’t bring down the service. But it does change the equation for interactive apps, gaming, sensitive APIs, real-time tools, video platforms, monitoring systems, e-commerce, or services that rely on many sequential requests.
The most serious consequence is uncertainty. A developer might contract a CDN for its presence in Spain and later find they cannot use that POP unless they are an Enterprise client. A startup might design a local architecture to reduce response times and be pushed to another country. A company might invest in performance improvements only to find that, every weekend, a part of the internet behaves unpredictably.
The response from BunnyCDN in the cited thread is especially revealing. According to the user, support explained that since December 2025, there’s a policy limiting access to its Spanish POPs to certain tiers of clients, partly due to football. Though not an official corporate statement, the logic is clear: if blocks turn a country into a risky market, the provider reserves local capacity for large clients and excludes the rest.
This penalizes precisely those who most need a country that claims to be a tech hub: developers, SMEs, startups, product projects, agencies, digital media, and independent services. Big companies will always find alternatives—signing Enterprise contracts, deploying in multiple regions, or hiring legal advisors. The small project will instead turn to Paris, Milan, Frankfurt, Lisbon, or other locations that won’t expose it to absurd blocks.
Spain cannot aspire to attract digital infrastructure while raising doubts about its network’s stability. A country aiming to compete in edge computing, sovereign cloud, data centers, and artificial intelligence cannot allow an ill-tuned anti-piracy policy to turn its POPs into liabilities. Connectivity is a competitive advantage only if it’s reliable and predictable.
Protect rights, but don’t break the internet
Intellectual property protection should not become a license to degrade legitimate infrastructure. Proportionality is not just a decorative word in this debate: it’s the boundary that separates a reasonable measure from a harmful one. If blocking an illegal stream involves dragging services unrelated to that broadcast, the system is failing.
The Congress has already initiated a political move toward greater proportionality in IP blocking. On April 29, 2026, the Committee on Economy, Commerce, and Digital Transformation approved a Non-Legislative Proposal agreed upon by ERC and PSOE. It advocates incorporating principles such as technological proportionality, graduated measures, and third-party considerations. While it doesn’t change the law by itself, it recognizes that blocks cannot be executed as if the internet were just a list of isolated addresses.
This step comes late for many affected, but it points in a necessary direction. Rights holders need tools against piracy, but those tools must be precise, auditable, and reversible. There should be quick mechanisms to remove an IP from blocklists when it affects legitimate services, minimal transparency obligations, technical traceability, and independent reviews of the impact.
It’s also crucial to recognize that Cloudflare, Vercel, BunnyCDN, AWS, and similar providers are not just safe havens for pirates—they form the backbone of internet infrastructure. Collaboration, abuse procedures, and response mechanisms are essential. The problem lies in treating an entire distribution network as suspicious by default and passing the costs of conflicts between rights holders, intermediaries, and operators onto innocent users.
The paradox is obvious. Spain wants to attract data centers, promote itself as Southern Europe’s digital gateway, and increase influence within European markets. Yet, it permits a blocking policy tied to football to undermine legitimate services and push technical capacity out of the country. There’s no need to be alarmist; simply listening to daily application deployments reveals this contradiction.
Portugal, France, or Italy don’t need elaborate campaigns to attract that traffic—they just need to be more predictable. If a provider can serve Spain from Marseille or Milan with acceptable latency and lower operational risk, the business choice is straightforward. Spain loses nodes, investment, technical activity, and credibility.
The fight against piracy must not become a permanent externality for the digital sector. Football has the right to defend its business, but not to shape the architecture of Spain’s internet to the extent that global platforms turn their gaze elsewhere. When content protection measures end up penalizing online innovation, development, or sales, the country faces a much deeper problem than a pirate link.
The debate is no longer about watching free matches. It’s about whether Spain wants a network prepared to compete or a network that caves every weekend to broad blocking measures. A tech hub is not built on fear that your CDN provider might decide tomorrow that Spain no longer warrants the risk.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why can LaLiga blocks affect legitimate websites?
Because many legitimate sites share IP addresses with other services within CDNs and cloud platforms. Blocking an IP for an illegal stream could inadvertently take down services unrelated to piracy.
What’s the drawback of Vercel or BunnyCDN routing traffic from outside Spain?
It increases latency, reduces control over local deployment, and sends a negative signal to developers and companies that rely on stable infrastructure in Spain.
Is the fight against piracy illegitimate?
No. Video piracy causes real harm. The issue lies in using broad, imprecise measures that affect legitimate third parties and turn shared infrastructure into collateral damage.
Can this situation be changed?
Yes, but it requires adopting more proportional technical rules, independent oversight, transparency, and rapid mechanisms to correct blocking actions that impact legitimate services.
via: Redes Sociales