Polymarket Vows to Fight France’s Gambling Regulator Over Nationwide Website Block

Polymarket says it will fight back in French court after the country’s gambling regulator ordered internet providers to block the platform nationwide. The New York-based prediction market operator argues that the Autorité Nationale des Jeux (ANJ) overstepped by shutting down access entirely, rather than limiting the block to actual wagering activity.

The ANJ directed French internet service providers on July 16 to block Polymarket’s domain outright, escalating a fight that started back in November 2024. At that time, the regulator had classified Polymarket’s offerings as unauthorized gambling and games of chance, prompting the platform to voluntarily geoblock trading functionality for users in France. The homepage and live market data, however, remained visible to French visitors until this month’s order changed that.

Polymarket’s Argument: Information, Not Gambling

Polymarket’s central claim is that most visitors to its site in France were never placing trades in the first place. The company said in its statement that “most people come to Polymarket solely to learn the probability of future events relevant to their everyday life with no intention to trade,” framing the platform as a data and information resource rather than a betting operator. It added that “prediction markets help source truth” and called the ANJ’s decision to fully block the domain a move that “targets people going to Polymarket purely for information, not to trade.”

The ANJ sees it differently. The regulator determined that displaying real-time odds and event probabilities to French users — even without allowing them to place bets — effectively amounted to advertising an unauthorized gambling product, which carries criminal penalties of up to 100,000 euros under French law. The agency also pointed to Similarweb data showing Polymarket drew nearly 580,000 visits from more than 205,000 unique French visitors in June alone, despite the standing transaction ban, arguing that a VPN was all it took to get around the existing restrictions.

A Broader European Crackdown

France is far from alone. Polymarket has now been blocked or restricted in more than a dozen European countries, including Germany, Belgium, Romania, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Poland, Greece, Portugal, and Ukraine, with regulators in each country citing unlicensed gambling activity. The Czech Republic became the latest addition in mid-July, giving ISPs 15 days to cut off access after the country’s finance ministry added Polymarket to its blacklist of unauthorized internet games.

The patchwork of rulings shows just how fragmented Europe’s approach to prediction markets remains. Some countries, like Germany, allow existing positions to resolve while barring new trades. Others, like Poland, have moved to a close-only status that lets users exit positions but not open new ones. France and Portugal have gone furthest, ordering full ISP-level domain blocks that cut off even passive access to market data. With no unified EU framework specifically covering prediction markets, each national regulator has been left to decide for itself whether platforms like Polymarket count as gambling operators, financial instruments, or something in between.

The regulatory pressure isn’t limited to gambling authorities, either. The European Securities and Markets Authority stated in early July that event contracts with binary payout structures can qualify as financial instruments under MiFID II, which would subject them to the same retail marketing prohibitions the EU applied to binary options in 2018. That creates a second enforcement track for platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi — even if a national gambling regulator doesn’t act, the products themselves could still be barred from retail distribution across all 27 EU member states. Fans looking to track how these prediction markets stack up against traditional sportsbooks can find reviews and comparisons on sites like Bettors Insider.

What Comes Next

Polymarket says it intends to challenge the ANJ’s decision through France’s legal process, and the company has indicated it remains in dialogue with the cybercrime unit of the Paris Public Prosecutor’s Office while pursuing formal remedies. The case could set an important precedent for how European regulators treat decentralized, peer-to-peer prediction platforms that argue they function more like data engines than traditional bookmakers.

For now, the practical reality for French users hasn’t changed much — trading was already unavailable, and the new order just closes off the last bit of visible market data. But the outcome of Polymarket’s court challenge could shape how aggressively other regulators pursue full domain blocks versus narrower transaction restrictions going forward, particularly as more countries weigh in on where prediction markets fall between gambling law and financial regulation.