Spain's culture ministry orders ISPs to block archive.today and its mirrors

Spain's largest internet providers have begun blocking archive.today, the anonymous web-archiving service that keeps snapshots of pages even when they sit behind paywalls, on the order of the culture ministry. The block comes from the Sección Segunda of the Intellectual Property Commission, the administrative body that has been shutting down "pirate" sites since 2012; it started at some operators in mid-August and spread in the past days to every provider signed up to the industry's blocking protocol, which covers 98% of Spanish broadband lines. On O2 the address now returns the ministry's page "You are trying to access an illegal website"; Vodafone shows a blank "not available"; Digi still lets it through. The ministry has not announced the decision, but its own blocklist, updated on 18 September, now carries archive.today, archive.is, archive.ph, archive.li, archive.md, archive.fo and archive.vn among the domains with a final resolution. For Spanish users the way in is the same as for a blocked football stream: a DNS resolver outside the provider, encrypted client hello in the browser, or a VPN.

What was blocked and how

Archive.today has taken "snapshots" of web pages since 2012: a user pastes a URL, the service stores a copy of the page as it looked at that moment, and the copy stays reachable under a short archive.ph or archive.is link. It is a smaller, stranger cousin of the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. Its operator has never been identified, it does not honour robots.txt exclusions, and it captures articles behind paywalls, which made it a fixture of newsrooms, courts and Wikipedia citations, and a target for publishers. The Spanish block surfaced on Thursday when the technology site Bandaancha traced user complaints to the Sección Segunda de la Comisión de Propiedad Intelectual, the culture ministry unit that runs Spain's administrative anti-piracy procedure. Xataka's own tests showed how uneven the enforcement is: O2 customers get the ministry's official warning page, Vodafone customers get a message that the site "is not available for reasons beyond Vodafone's control", and Digi customers still reach archive.ph without trouble; on some networks the encrypted HTTPS version fails while plain HTTP redirects to the government page, on others the reverse. That pattern is the signature of Spain's blocking protocol, under which each operator implements the same list with its own filters. Bandaancha and Xataka both noted on Thursday that the domains were not yet on the ministry's public list of blocked sites. By Friday they were: the list of "domains subject to a final resolution of the S2CPI, 2012-2026", updated on 18 September, includes all seven archive.* names, and the weekly list of new domains from the safeguard procedure files them under the second quarter of 2026.

Where the judge is in this procedure

Spain's system is often described as blocking "without a court", and the description is close enough to be worth spelling out. The Sección Segunda is a ministry body, not a tribunal. A rights holder files a complaint; the section notifies the site, gives it a chance to remove the content, and if it does not, issues a resolution ordering removal and, when the site is unreachable or refuses, ordering Spanish operators to block it. The law then requires the section to ask the Juzgado Central de lo Contencioso-Administrativo for authorisation to execute the block, but the judge's role is deliberately narrow: a ruling within 24 hours, after hearing the prosecutor, limited to checking that the measure does not violate the constitutional rights to privacy and to information. Whether the site is actually infringing is not the judge's question. A 2019 amendment, article 195.6 of the intellectual property law, removed even that step for repeat targets established outside the EU and the European Economic Area, and archive.today, with no known operator or address, fits that description better than most. On top of the statutory procedure sits the 2021 protocol signed at the Prado by the operators' association and the rights-holder coalition: once a site is on the list, its new domains are added weekly without any further decision, which is how 441 addresses joined the blocklist this year against 95 through formal resolutions. Bandaancha's guess about the complainant, the digital press, matches the one thing archive.today does that most archives do not: it stores the text of paywalled articles and serves it to anyone with the link. That is a copyright complaint by design, and the Spanish procedure is built to answer copyright complaints in weeks. What it is not built for is the question a court would have to ask, which is whether a general-purpose archive used for evidence, fact-checking and citation is a "pirate site" because some of what it holds is paywalled journalism. Germany's private blocking clearinghouse at least set a threshold, 81.5% infringing content, before it would touch a domain. Spain's list does not say what the threshold was here, or whether there was one.

What it means for users in Spain

The block is domain-based and applied at the provider, so it fails in the same ways every Spanish copyright block fails. Xataka's own guide to getting past the operators' filters recommends enabling encrypted client hello in Chrome, which hides the domain name from the ISP's filter; a DNS resolver outside the provider defeats the DNS variant of the block; and a VPN moves the connection outside Spain altogether, which is legal, and which a Córdoba court in May refused to let LaLiga punish a VPN provider for. None of that should be necessary to read a snapshot of a public web page, and the fact that it is now needed in Spain for one of the few working archives of the internet is the story. The procedure that produced the block was designed for MP3 converters and torrent proxies, which make up almost all of the 402 domains on the resolution list; it has now been pointed, without a published decision, at a service that libraries, journalists and courts rely on to prove what a page said on a given day. The publishers who most likely filed the complaint are also the ones whose own corrections and deletions archive.today makes visible. That is why the block matters beyond Spain: every EU country has a copyright directive to implement, and Spain has just shown that an administrative section, a weekly list and a complainant who prefers not to be named are enough to remove a piece of the web's memory from a country of 49 million.