Rufián is going after Tebas: Goodbye to LaLiga's massive blockages of pirate IPTVs for watching football?

The ERC party led by Gabriel Rufián has submitted a series of questions to the government in Congress, to which Europa Press has had access, seeking written explanations from the executive branch following the recent IP address blocking carried out by LaLiga, which was legally endorsed to combat piracy of sports broadcasts.

Since last year, LaLiga has been carrying out a vigorous campaign against football piracy . However, its actions are not entirely legal, despite having the support of the courts. In its efforts to block pirated broadcasts , it is targeting all kinds of legitimate websites that have nothing to do with the competition.

The Catalan nationalist party has warned of LaLiga's anti-piracy strategy, which, in its opinion, has had a "massive" collateral effect that has affected legitimate services such as Steam, X (Twitter) and institutional websites, putting network neutrality and freedom of information at risk , as reflected in hundreds of complaints from technology associations and network users themselves.

ERC warns that this phenomenon, known as 'LaLigaGate,' sets a "worrying" precedent, as they point out that a private company has the power to order massive blockades "without sufficient democratic oversight or guarantees for fundamental rights."

Therefore, they consider it urgent that the State intervene to establish clear, proportionate, and judicially supervised criteria for any content blocking, avoiding collateral damage and protecting digital freedom.

For its part, LaLiga maintains that " it is false that massive blocks of legitimate websites are occurring" in its battle against audiovisual piracy and asserts that all the measures it takes "are part of an authorized and supervised judicial procedure."

And in response to the complaints they receive online, they claim that there are "multiple complaints on social media about alleged blocks on nonexistent websites, with no real traffic or only a few dozen users per month. " "These types of complaints have no real impact on users and only seek to create a narrative of social alarm to discredit the fight against piracy," lamented the organization headed by Javier Tebas.

But even if these businesses aren't the largest or most visited, it's clear that if they're not doing anything wrong, no one has the right to shut down or block their website as a side effect of blocking a pirate broadcast.

This blockage could mean a small business losing a €50 sale, and this will likely affect the owner much more than the losses Javier Tebas and his multimillion-dollar salary could incur . For this reason, ERC is asking the government what measures it plans to ensure that the blocks respect the principle of proportionality and do not violate users' fundamental rights.