A judge from Córdoba has issued a precautionary measure at LaLiga's request, ordering NordVPN and ProtonVPN to block specific IP addresses from which illegal sports broadcasts are streamed. The order, issued without prior hearing from the companies, seeks to prevent access from Spain to those specific servers. The judicial resolution acknowledges that its application depends on the technical feasibility of discriminating traffic, a point that raises doubts about its real effectiveness.
The Technical Dilemma of Granular Filtering in a VPN 🤔
The judicial order poses a complex technical challenge: blocking only the traffic directed to specific IPs that host illegal streams, without affecting the rest of legitimate connections that pass through the same VPN servers. This would require deep packet inspection (DPI) to identify the final destination of each data flow. Since a VPN encrypts user traffic, the provider only sees the IP of the exit server, not the final destination. Filtering by destination would imply breaking the privacy model they offer.
The Judge Who Asked to Separate the Wheat from the Chaff... Inside a Dark Tunnel 😅
The situation has an involuntary humorous point. It's like a judge ordering a car wash tunnel company to, among all the cars that pass, stop only those carrying a pirated DVD in the glove compartment, but without being able to open the doors or trunks. The VPN staff, from their booth, only see a line of identical waxed vehicles speeding by. The order is clear, but the tool to comply with it, without breaking the service, seems more like something from a science fiction episode.