Online betting: Blocking is not enough

On September 21, Chile’s Undersecretariat of Telecommunications ordered six internet service providers to block 37 domains, the second batch following 42 others on September 1. Three days earlier, Brazilian President Lula da Silva said he intended to put an end to bets in Brazil and responded to football clubs that had warned about the cost of that promise. In August, the Argentine government added gambling addiction to its public health priorities by decree, while bills introduced by the executive branch and the Chamber of Deputies remain stalled in the Senate. Ecuador announced new regulations authorizing the blocking of unauthorized platforms. And in Colombia, where shutting down websites has been routine administrative practice for years, Coljuegos reported in July that it had taken down more than 46,000 sites in four years.

A technical directive, a presidential announcement, new regulations, a public health decree, new taxes, and a wave of website blocking. All in response to risks attributed to the online betting industry and its impact on the public. Concern has spread across the region, but no common response has emerged. Online betting arrived in Latin America as an advertising operation before becoming a regulated economic activity, and the institutional response has been both fragmented and delayed.

Raising the stakes

Online betting advertising has become ubiquitous in men’s professional football across the region and around the world, extending to direct sponsorship deals with countless teams. In Brazil, betting companies sponsor nine out of ten Série A clubs; in Argentina, betting is the second most common sponsorship category on football shirts, after banks; and in Chile, all 16 First Division teams have sponsorship agreements with betting companies.

This exposure is massive. A study by the universities of Bristol and Oxford examining all 104 matches of the most recent World Cup found one advertisement for “harmful” products every seven seconds, including thousands of ads for sports betting sites and even more for prediction markets. The Premier League agreed to remove betting companies’ logos from the front of football shirts, and clubs moved the logos to their training kits. In Uruguay, where a ban on sports betting advertising is already in force, the upcoming Copa Libertadores final on November 28 poses a major challenge. The regional confederation has an official sponsor from the betting industry, most teams display betting brands on their shirts, and the lucrative final could result in fines.

These international events are a sensitive issue. During the World Cup, the Brazilian organization Ctrl+Z reviewed the 98 betting ads featuring predictions aired during the first fifteen days of CazéTV’s YouTube broadcasts and found that only 35 were accurate. ICL Notícias reviewed 48 matches and found that 61% of the predictions were wrong. In June, the National Consumer Secretariat opened an investigation, which it expanded days later to include Globo, SBT, N Sports, and Amazon, and subsequently signed an agreement with the self-regulatory authority to monitor misleading advertising in the sector. The response, however, extends beyond major tournaments. In Argentina, the Secretariat of Industry and Trade required health warnings in all betting advertisements and set up a channel for reporting influencers who failed to include them. In Colombia, Coljuegos initiated 35 sanction proceedings against influencers and companies. In Chile, Polla Chilena filed a complaint with the advertising self-regulatory body against four advertising agencies and production companies for creating campaigns for platforms operating without legal authorization.

But concerns extend beyond excessive advertising to public health matters. In Peru, the Ministry of Health reported more than 11,000 cases of pathological gambling treated in 2024 and more than 14,000 cases of gambling addiction treated in 2025. In Argentina, calls to the national helpline regarding compulsive gambling rose by 27% during 2025, and in August, a decree placed gambling addiction on par with other addictive disorders in terms of their mechanisms of development and therapeutic approach.

A particular concern is the vulnerability of children and adolescents. In Peru, cases of pathological gambling among under-18s rose by 18%, nearly twice the overall rate. A national survey by the Argentine Red Cross found that six in ten adolescents are exposed to online betting sites, 16% have placed a bet at least once, and half of those who did so received help from an adult. A 2025 study by Argentina’s Drug Observatory found that more than a quarter of secondary school students had placed bets in the previous year. The Ombudsman’s Office of the City of Buenos Aires reported a similar finding, noting that one in four students had first learned about online betting sites through influencers. In Brazil, the Alana Institute filed a complaint against Meta in 2024 for allowing influencers aged 6 to 17 to promote gambling on Instagram. Months later, it found that four of the nine profiles it had identified were still promoting gambling. The Federal Supreme Court subsequently suspended all betting advertising targeting children and adolescents.

Closing the casino doors

In response to what several countries consider an illegal activity, website blocking has been the preferred approach. While some in the Chilean industry have raised concerns about violations of the principle of net neutrality—which prohibits the blocking of legal content, applications, or services—the Supreme Court declared both the illegality and the blocking, granting a constitutional protection action filed by the Lotería de Concepción in September 2025 and ordering access to unauthorized gambling sites to be blocked. Of course, a popular measure is not necessarily an appropriate one. Since the 2011 Joint Declaration, special rapporteurs on freedom of expression have considered mandatory blocking of entire websites an extreme measure, “analogous to banning a newspaper,” and therefore justified only if it complies with international standards.

Two paradoxes arise from this measure. First, DNS blocking is not difficult to circumvent: users can switch to another DNS resolver, use a VPN, or access a new domain. This has increased the number of sites that need to be blocked. The court ruling requires internet service providers to block access, while the procedure it establishes requires the telecommunications authority to notify these providers of new lists of domains to block. As a result, a competitor (Lotería de Concepción) can add each new domain to the list without a new court order specifically identifying it, and with the approval of a body that, according to the Office of the Comptroller General, lacks the authority to oversee online betting. On the very day the latest order was issued, the platforms’ industry association complained that the newly added domains were not included in either the Supreme Court’s ruling or the resolution that initiated the procedure. The second paradox concerns the state itself. The very platforms whose activities the Supreme Court considers illegal are registered to pay VAT, to the point that even lawmakers from the governing coalition demanded that the government resolve this contradiction.

The situation becomes more serious when no court is involved, and the scope of the restriction is defined by a circular or regulation, contrary to the Inter-American standard that restrictions on rights must be established by laws in the formal sense. In Colombia, a 2025 MinTIC circular set out the procedure by which Coljuegos submits blocking requests, the ministry validates them, and internet service providers implement them. The procedure covers mobile apps, social media profiles, and video channels. In Peru, Mincetur blocked 36 platforms on its own initiative. Ecuador granted this authority by regulation in June, while the Argentine government’s bill would distribute it among various agencies. Meanwhile, in Brazil, Anatel has blocked nearly 50,000 websites at the direction of the Ministry of Finance, using the same mechanism in April against 27 prediction market platforms, including Polymarket and Kalshi. On these platforms, betting extends beyond sports and has prompted attempts to place bets worth millions on the outcome of Brazil’s next presidential election. Polymarket remained accessible in several states without a VPN, and its Instagram account published more than 100 posts about the Brazilian elections between April and August.

The house always wins

State intervention is clearly necessary when problems are reported, but questions remain about whether the mechanisms in place are appropriate and whether institutions have the capacity to implement them effectively. Brazil, despite having had a law in place since 2023 and having blocked tens of thousands of websites, needed an additional decree to target financial flows. In November 2025, websites ordered blocked in Chile were still operating, despite companies’ claims that they had complied.

Regulating by limiting access and replacing blocking with more extensive identification requirements is not enough. Almost all of the protective measures being called for, such as age verification, deposit limits, self-exclusion, and early detection of problem gambling, require identifying each person who places a bet and monitoring their activity on the platform. This means increasing surveillance. The infrastructure that enables identification is precisely the same infrastructure that enables profiling, as the DraftKings case showed. Who controls it, and under what oversight? Today, it is in the hands of operators whose business depends on people continuing to gamble, with oversight varying from country to country.

Shifting enforcement to the payments layer, as a bill in Chile proposes, may offer a way forward, but it comes with costs and raises its own questions. Transferring control to banks and payment processors reproduces a model of delegated compliance through intermediaries, raising further questions about errors, opacity, and review. Nor does it address excessive advertising or other risks affecting vulnerable populations.

While governments pursue domains and debate the role of intermediaries, the industry continues to sponsor entire leagues, operate platforms with manipulative interfaces, and collect data on millions of people without effective oversight. We don’t have time to wait for the perfect tool. States must act now to support those who have been exposed to harm through self-exclusion measures, healthcare services, and school-based prevention. They must move beyond relying on codes of conduct and domain lists and instead impose enforceable obligations on companies and their entire commercial chain, including restrictions on advertising and sponsorship, design requirements, data protection subject to oversight by competent authorities, and effective sanctions.

These obligations must be established by law, and any restrictions imposed must comply with Inter-American standards of legality, necessity, and proportionality. This is not an obstacle to regulation, but a condition for its effectiveness and its ability to withstand legal challenges. Until these conditions are met, at this table, the house still wins.