When pirate sports streaming sites use Cloudflare, Spain’s LaLiga has a choice between blocking pirate sites and countless innocent sites using the same IP addresses, or walking away having blocked nothing at all. Having opted for the former since February, sites blocked as collateral damage have had no viable opportunity to fight back. The Immutable Domain Monitor, a new blockchain-powered platform designed to empower victims of over-blocking, aims to change that.
For top-tier football clubs around Europe, the start of a new season means the resumption of match-day anti-piracy measures and a prime opportunity to remind errant fans that piracy isn’t risk-free. Warnings usually appear in the media, often timed to coincide with real-life examples of why piracy should be avoided.
In Ireland, reports claimed that Sky and FACT had begun targeting retailers for selling pirate set-top boxes, a first according to FACT. Those reports coincided with an announcement from ACE revealing the closure of Streameast, a very large live sports streaming network that hijacked the branding of the original to gain traffic.
Spain’s LaLiga opted for a campaign highlighting the dangers of piracy, warning that “You Get Pirated Football, They Get You.”
This is a reference to identity theft, financial fraud, malware, and privacy risks. Unfortunately, an illustrative screenshot is not available below due to YouTube’s tightening response to VPN use.
Yet, as Spaniards are by now well aware, the effects of LaLiga’s fight against piracy are not just real, but visibly so when match blocking takes place several times each week.
Under the authority of an order issued by a judge, LaLiga continues to block IP addresses belonging to companies including Cloudflare, on the basis they’re used by pirate sites. However, the same IP addresses are also shared with entirely legal websites which, through no fault of their own, also find themselves blocked.
LaLiga’s has a difficult choice when IP addresses are shared; it can block pirate sites and risk blocking any number of innocent sites at the same time, or protect innocent sites by walking away, having blocked no pirate sites at all. Having decided that the law protects its position, the league points towards Cloudflare as the source of the problem, while insisting that nothing of value gets blocked anyway.
LaLiga says that if anyone falls victim to over-blocking, they are free to file a complaint. Since it has received no complaints thus far, that’s interpreted as a clear sign that over-blocking doesn’t exist. In practical terms, however, attributing a website failure to over-blocking is extremely difficult for anyone other than the tech-savvy; proving it in the face of an insistence that over-blocking doesn’t even exist, is all but impossible without expensive, expert help.
Yet, if a new service lives up to its claims, that might be about to change. Operating from estalapagas.com (translated: ‘You Pay For This’) the Immutable Domain Monitor claims to offer a domain monitoring system. The system will monitor domains registered by users, check for any ISP blocking that affects those domains and, if any is detected, begin logging evidence. According to a notice on its front page, demand appears to be brisk.
“We are a community of net lovers documenting every attack on online freedom,” text on the site notes. “Who gave La Liga the right to make their content worth more than yours? Why can they trample on your freedom every weekend? The internet belongs to everyone and we all defend it.”
According to the team behind the service, match days are automatically certified and immutable logs (that cannot be modified or deleted) are cryptographically linked and stored on the blockchain, signed in BTC and ETH.
“With blockchain we leave an eternal record: no court, company, or power can erase the evidence. Each record is signed in time with OpenTimestamps and OriginStamp, ensuring its validity and authenticity. What we document today will still be there tomorrow, and a hundred years from now too,” the team add.
There’s no doubt that to have any chance of success, a challenge to the status quo must be supported by robust evidence. In that respect, using the blockchain makes perfect sense. Ensuring that the evidence is validated before entry is vital.
That might mean verifying the existence of an IP address block with a third party, input from Cloudflare, for example. In any event, a time-stamped notification to Cloudflare advising that blocking is underway might prove useful.
The system as described has the potential to play a very important role, but the team may also face additional issues, sooner rather than later, that aren’t directly addressed on the site.
On the service’s website, Immutable Domain Monitor describes itself as a “community of web lovers made up of developers, users, and activists committed to internet freedom.”
They state they are not a commercial company, but a “community initiative that uses blockchain technology as a tool for documentation and transparency.” The team’s mission is outlined in a series of bullet points.
We document attacks on digital freedom because we believe in:
From a community perspective the team clearly understands the critical issues. Yet total anonymity for the developers is both prudent on one hand, and a potential problem on the other.
If nobody is obviously accountable, the quality of the evidence could be vulnerable to a determined attack. Whether a mechanism exists to preserve anonymity, especially in the event that data needs to be presented in court, isn’t clear. A known and trusted “middle man” may be useful to confirm authenticity, build up trust in the media, also to protect the interests of the people intending to sign up.
One issue briefly raised by the team itself is the GDPR which may need to be addressed quite quickly. If there’s one thing that large corporations are mostly good at it’s compliance with regulations; noncompliance by a legal rival is likely to be spotted very quickly and could develop into an unwanted distraction.
Overall it’s good to see any initiative that genuinely aims to solve a really serious problem that isn’t getting the attention, or indeed the support, that it very obviously deserves.
