It’s not a tongue twister, but it’s a puzzle built within the recent battleground between the fighters, pirate sites, VPNs, broadcasting rights holders and even a new US government site that wants to give freedom to everyone.

The Spanish football league LaLiga has made the site inaccessible to users nationwide Freedom.gov. This is the official portal of the United States government, which has been talked about in recent days, which will allow you to unlock content subject to restrictions in various jurisdictions, including those protected by anti-piracy systems such as Piracy Shield in Italy.

Therefore the block ordered by LaLiga has created a singular entanglement, such that the tool designed precisely to circumvent blocks of this type finds itself blocked by the measures adopted by the league against the unauthorized broadcasting of football matches.

What is this Freedom.gov?

But let’s go in order. Freedom.gov is an initiative launched by the American authorities to allow users from different countries, with particular attention to Europe, to consult materials that local rules make difficult to reach. For example, IPs blocked by the Italian Piracy Shield.

The home page shows an image of a ghostly horse galloping above the Earth. The text accompanying the image says: “Information is power. Reclaim your human right to free expression. Get ready”.

The administrative management of the domain it’s up to to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, a federal agency of the Department of Homeland Security that deals with the protection of critical infrastructures. The project takes up aspects of previous programs dedicated to freedom on the internet, programs which for more than ten years have financed with over 500 million dollars the development of open source technologies created by experts in various countries to overcome forms of censorship.

Unlike those tools that were distributed and verifiable in code, which also protected user privacy, however, the new portal seems to be configured as a centralized solution controlled by a US government body. The restrictions it intends to address primarily concern European rules on hate speech and regulated content, rather than the total internet blackouts seen in other countries such as Iran.

LaLiga blocked the unlocker

Following LaLiga’s intervention, the portal became unreachable for many Spanish users. The block did not result from a specific assessment of material hosted by the US government site, but it was a side effect of anti-piracy measures; we also saw it in Italy with the Piracy Shield blocks that hit innocent IPs.

As of late 2024, courts have authorized the league to require internet service providers to block certain IP addresses, but many sites that broadcast games without authorization rely on CDNs that simultaneously host thousands of different websites, both legitimate and unauthorized, on the same pool of IP addresses, for reasons of efficiency, loading speed and network resilience.

IP addresses are therefore shared between very heterogeneous resources, because a single numerical range can serve hundreds or thousands of different domains through the same CDN platform. As a result, the measures end up affecting larger ranges of shared addresses. A dynamic that produces interference on legitimate resources completely unrelated to the world of football, and which also affected DDay.it a few months ago.

David Peterson, general manager of Proton VPN, publicly reported the incident. He noted that the US government website it has effectively been treated as a source of unauthorized broadcasts of sporting events.

In this game of puzzles, Peterson’s exit is linked to the most recent judicial decisions which have extended similar obligations to VPNs.

As we reported a few days ago, the Spanish courts have classified providers as ProtonVPN and NordVPN as intermediaries required to limit access to specific IP addresses linked to pirated streams.