Chile court sets DNS blocking process for unlicensed gambling sites

The Court of Appeals of Santiago has set out the technical mechanism Chilean telecoms companies must use to block access to unauthorised gambling websites. For PSPs and operators watching Chile, the useful part is not the court poetry but the enforcement model: a standing process for adding new domains, subdomains, redirects, and mirror sites as they are identified.

1. The ruling applies to Claro, Entel, GTD Manquehue, Movistar, WOM, and VTR. The court said they must use Domain Name System (DNS) blocking against domains that are identified and then validated as illegal gaming platforms.
2. The case was brought by Lotería de Concepción, which operates alongside Polla Chilena de Beneficencia in Chile’s duopoly over regulated public lotteries. The lottery operator argued that telecoms were allowing access to unauthorised online gambling platforms and therefore creating unfair competition. Polla Chilena de Beneficencia later joined the case.
3. The court adopted the technical measures proposed by Chile’s Undersecretariat of Telecommunications (Subtel). Under that procedure, appellants or third parties must first notify the Superintendencia de Casinos de Juego (SCJ) of domains, subdomains, redirects, or derivative sites they believe are linked to the affected platforms. The SCJ then validates whether they are in fact betting or gambling platforms before passing the list to Subtel and, from there, to the telecoms companies for DNS blocking.
4. The companies must implement blocking within the timeframe set by Subtel and then provide proof of implementation to the court. The procedure can be updated to include new domains, subdomains, or mirror sites, and it also includes mechanisms to correct errors and avoid disrupting legitimate services.
5. The enforcement path has already moved through several reversals. In April 2025, the Court of Appeals rejected the lottery operators’ action, but the Supreme Court reversed that decision. In March 2026, the Court of Appeals treated the ruling as fulfilled, only for the Supreme Court to overturn that outcome in April and order the enforcement proceedings reopened.

The ruling lands while Chile’s online gambling regulation bill is still stuck in legislative delays, and two months after the introduction of a mechanism to tax offshore gambling operators in Chile. For operators and PSPs, that means the market is still being shaped by court enforcement and tax tools rather than a clean licensing framework.