France Orders ISPs to Block Polymarket

France's national gambling regulator ordered internet service providers to block access to Polymarket on 17 July, extending a restriction that had previously covered only payments. The Autorité nationale des jeux, the public authority that licenses and supervises gambling operators in France, treats the prediction market as an unauthorized gambling service. Its earlier measure in November 2024 went after financial transactions from France and left the site itself alone. That approach "led to workarounds in practice," the regulator said, while the platform's homepage kept showing live odds to French users, something it treats as promotion of unauthorized gambling. The new order covers access to the Polymarket website for users connecting through French providers.

A licensing regulator, not a court

The ANJ is the administrative body that authorizes gambling operators in France and polices the ones operating without authorization. Its jurisdiction is territorial. It decides what may lawfully be offered to people in France, and an operator that has not been licensed there falls outside the permitted market regardless of where it is incorporated or how it describes its product. Blocking orders directed at service providers are a standard instrument in that toolkit, not an exceptional one; French authorities blocked 1,290 gambling-related URLs in 2025. The classification question is the one that matters, because the finding that a market in event contracts is gambling, rather than anything about the platform's technology, is what triggers the powers the ANJ used. National authorities elsewhere have taken the same line, deciding for themselves what may be offered to their own residents, and coverage of the order noted that 12 European jurisdictions have restricted or blocked prediction markets, among them Germany, Belgium, Spain and Italy.

578,751 visits from France in June

The ANJ cited traffic data from Similarweb to establish that the earlier, narrower measure had not worked. France produced 578,751 visits and 205,057 unique visitors to Polymarket in June 2026, more than eighteen months after transactions from the country were supposed to have been cut off. The regulator's reading is that a payment-level restriction leaves the service reachable and its odds on display, and that users found ways around the transaction geofence.

What a provider-level block interrupts

An order aimed at internet service providers acts on the path between a subscriber and a site, not on the site. In its usual form the provider stops resolving the domain for its own customers, so a French subscriber typing the address gets an error or a notice page instead of the platform. What that achieves is friction at scale and a clear legal line: the ordinary user does not arrive, and the operator is formally outside the permitted market in France. What it does not achieve is removal. The platform keeps running, its contracts keep trading, funds already deposited are untouched, and anyone using a different resolver or routing traffic through another country reaches it as before. The precedent here is the ANJ's own account of the 2024 measure, which says that restriction produced workarounds; an access block raises the effort required without eliminating the route. For the platform this is a different order of problem from the front-end compromise it dealt with earlier, a technical failure with an immediate cost, where this one is a jurisdictional exclusion.

The test the regulator has set itself

The ANJ's stated reason for escalating was that its first intervention was circumvented, and the second acts on a different layer while leaving the same underlying service reachable to anyone who changes how they connect. The open question is durability. Whether measured French traffic falls after the order, and by how much, is the test the regulator has set for itself by putting Similarweb figures at the center of its reasoning. The wider pattern is decided market by market: a dozen European jurisdictions restricting such venues on national grounds, with no common framework behind them.