This weekend in Spain the national soccer league (La Liga) began. At the end of last season, the organiser decided that they could break the internet across the country, affecting thousands of citizens and businesses, to try (and fail) to close illegal soccer webpages. In this scenario, many Spaniards start to feel that they are living in a country like China or any other dictatorship, where the internet is not free and is censored.
The cause of this problem is that they are trying to block streaming webpage blocking their IPs; however, if you block like this, you are going to break the internet, because there is a thing called shared hosting. This kind of hosting is called shared because the IP address is shared with many other businesses, including small businesses or even newspapers. Normally, shared hosting is the cheapest one; therefore, many small blogs and projects use this kind of hosting to reduce their costs.
Anyway, as far as I know, because I don’t care about Spanish soccer, the people who wanna watch the soccer for free still can do it, as those kinds of websites managed to avoid the blocks. But putting this aside, the situation is quite serious, as a Spanish judge gave the power to a private entity (La Liga) to censor what they don’t like, with any excuse. This is a direct attack to the internet and, therefore, on freedom of speech and ultimately a threat to democracy.
If contundent actions are not taken (even from outside the country, from the EU), we can lose control of the situation. And remember, if you are a foreigner who is considering working in Spain and you have a remote position, or you are considering opening an online business in Spain, I strongly recommend you not do it until this situation is resolved, if this ever happens. Take that into consideration, and if you still wanna go to Spain, remember that you will have to use a good VPN to have internet with freedom.
Source: Xataka.com (in Spanish)
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