alt Hacker News> there need to be EU-level regulations against individual countries, such as Spain and Italy, implementing these absurd restrictions
Why should other EU members care what websites Spain allows their citizens to access? Does the "EU" even have authority for such a thing?
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if it interferes with my ability to sell products and services in spain because my website gets blocked as a side-effect, then yes, the EU should care.
for example geo-blocking within the EU is also illegal. if you offer a service or product in any EU country, then anyone in the EU must be allowed to buy it.
among other things this also means that if there is any country in the EU where these sports broadcasts are accessible legally, then spain would not be allowed to block them either.
Surely EU members should care if Spain blocks the access to government services offered by EU members. In Finland various government services (like Police's website) do use Cloudflare.
And Spain is not blocking access to Spain's citizens, it's blocking access people in Spain. These could be citizens of other EU members who need to access their government's website for reason or another (e.g. renewing passport) while they visit Spain or reside in Spain.
Yes, it has the authority. There are plenty of EU regulations that states must obey, from fundamental rights to taxation.
Basically EU should step in whenever country level government doesn't do a good enough job for its citizens.
It's not strong enough to do that yet but a lot of people with cheap governments wish it was.
There's a "European Declaration on Digital Rights and Principles", signed by the member states, and I believe the right to access internet freely, without companies being permitted to mandate entire IP addresses blocks being forbidden from routing and within 30 minutes from the request surely would fit within that one, or others, in some way or another. No company should hold that power and it's a serious precedent others states in the union would want to leverage for their own reasons too. Reading this recent TorrentFreak article, the regulations should probably align with the following thinktank's analysis, at the very least:
>The report makes 12 formal recommendations. The most significant is that IP-based blocking should be avoided altogether, due to its inherent tendency to block large numbers of legitimate service sites. DNS-level or URL-level blocking should be used instead.
https://torrentfreak.com/eu-pirate-site-blocking-is-broken-r...