The basis of the ruling is straightforward. The order required us to block a list of IP addresses said to be hosting unauthorized LaLiga streams. Our experts demonstrated two things to the court. First, those IP addresses change constantly, often within hours, so the lists supplied no longer matched the actual addresses by the time blocking could be carried out. Second, the type of blanket IP-level blocking demanded would have rendered thousands of entirely lawful websites inaccessible to users in Spain and beyond. The judge weighed our report against LaLiga's, found a genuine technical dispute, and ruled that fines were not warranted.
It is important to note that this is a procedural decision at the preliminary stage, not a final judgment on the merits of the evidence. The main proceedings still lie ahead, and we will continue to engage with the Spanish courts in good faith. What the ruling does is confirm something we said openly from day one — the technical concerns are real and evidenced, and a Spanish court has now recognized that.
The ruling also does not arrive in isolation. The case for restraint has been building across Europe for a while, and the broader picture has shifted noticeably since the February injunction was issued.
Inside Spain, the consequences of indiscriminate IP blocking have become almost impossible to ignore. Cloudflare, Vercel, GitHub, Docker, and many smaller services have been intermittently inaccessible to Spanish users during match windows, with civil society groups, developers, and small businesses documenting the disruption week after week. On April 29, 2026, the Spanish Congress passed a non-binding initiative, agreed between PSOE and ERC and backed by a parliamentary majority, urging the government to reform Spain's Digital Services Law to introduce a principle of technological proportionality and prevent court rulings from enabling this kind of indiscriminate blocking. Cloudflare continues to pursue its own appeals through the Spanish courts on overblocking grounds.
Outside Spain, EU policy analysts have begun citing the Spanish experience as a cautionary example, drawing direct comparisons with Italy's troubled Piracy Shield system. The question of whether VPN, DNS, and CDN service providers should be conscripted into IP-level blocking is now being debated seriously at the European level, not only as a copyright issue but as a question of how the internet itself is governed.
Our position has not changed. Protecting intellectual property is a legitimate goal, and rights holders are entitled to effective remedies. But the means used to achieve those remedies must be proportionate, technically sound, and respectful of everyone who depends on the same shared infrastructure. Blanket IP blocking imposed on VPN providers fails on each of those counts. It does not stop determined infringers, who adapt within minutes, and it imposes real costs on users, businesses, and lawful services that have nothing to do with the underlying dispute.
We thank the Córdoba court for engaging with the technical evidence on its merits. That is the standard we have asked for from the beginning, and it is the standard the wider conversation in Spain and across Europe is now starting to demand as well.
