France’s gambling regulator ANJ has ordered internet service providers to block access to Polymarket — the world’s largest prediction market platform. The July 16 decision is notable less for the block itself than for its wording: ANJ classifies Polymarket not as an unlicensed trading venue, but as an illegal gambling operator — the same category it uses for rogue casinos and bookmakers.
What happened: ISPs ordered to block access
The Autorité Nationale des Jeux — France’s gambling regulator — ordered the country’s internet service providers to block access to Polymarket at the DNS level. The formal grounds: no gambling license in France, no self-exclusion tools, and, in the regulator’s assessment, addictive product mechanics.
Why the previous ban didn’t work
This isn’t France’s first attempt to restrict access to the platform. In November 2024, ANJ had already introduced a ban on financial transactions with Polymarket — at the time, that measure was considered sufficient without moving to a full domain block. The regulator’s own data shows why the measure had to be tightened: in June 2026 alone, the platform logged 578,751 visits from French IP addresses across 205,057 unique users. Blocking transactions limited withdrawals through French bank cards, but didn’t stop the traffic itself — users kept accessing the platform and trading through alternative funding methods.
The industry has long recognized this pattern: partial restrictions (blocking payments rather than access itself) almost never stop traffic to unlicensed platforms as long as the product remains technically reachable. Regulators eventually end up moving to provider-level blocking — the same tool used against unlicensed casinos and bookmakers.
Weather market manipulation was the last straw
An additional trigger for the crackdown was a complaint from Météo-France, the national weather service. According to the regulator, someone tampered with a temperature sensor that was used as a data source for weather-prediction markets on Polymarket. The Paris prosecutor’s cybercrime unit opened an investigation back on May 4. For the regulator, this was a clear-cut argument: if a market can be manipulated through physical interference with its data source, the mechanism isn’t fundamentally different from fixing a bet’s outcome.
The key ruling: this is gambling, not an exchange
What matters most in this case isn’t the block itself, but the classification precedent. ANJ flatly refused to treat Polymarket as an unregulated financial exchange and placed the platform in the same category as unlicensed casinos and bookmakers. That decision matters well beyond France: if even a handful of major EU jurisdictions follow the same logic, the prediction-market industry will have to either obtain gambling licenses country by country or technically block users from those jurisdictions — the same fork in the road offshore casino operators have lived with for years.
In our experience covering the market, the regulatory uncertainty around prediction markets held up for so long precisely because no major regulator had issued a clear classification of the product. ANJ’s decision removes that uncertainty — at least for France — and creates a ready-made precedent other jurisdictions can point to.
What it means for the industry
For licensed bookmakers and casino operators, the precedent is broadly positive: it closes off part of the gray zone where prediction markets were competing for the same user base without comparable regulatory costs (licensing, responsible-gambling tools, taxes). For prediction-market platforms themselves, it’s a signal that further growth in regulated jurisdictions will require either full gambling-product licensing or readiness for a country-by-country string of blocks.
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