Chile’s online gambling regulation faces a constitutional challenge over equal treatment and VAT

As Chile’s Senate moves ahead with a bill to regulate online betting platforms, a new Instituto Res Publica report has pushed the debate into constitutional territory: equal treatment under the law, freedom to do business, and whether the state is applying different rules to different gambling formats without a solid basis. For PSPs and operators, the practical issue is simple enough: Chile is still deciding not just whether to regulate, but what kind of legal and tax treatment online gambling will get.

1. The report, titled “Igualdad ante la ley, libertad de emprendimiento y no discriminación arbitraria: análisis del tratamiento regulatorio de las casas de apuestas en Chile”, was published by Instituto Res Publica (IRP). It examines whether the different treatment of land-based casinos and online betting platforms meets the standards set by Chile’s Constitutional Court.
2. On paper, the split is straightforward. Physical casinos operate under Law No. 19.995, with licenses, oversight from the Superintendencia de Casinos de Juego, and responsible gambling obligations. Online platforms, by contrast, do not have a specific legal framework that authorizes and regulates their activity, even though they continue operating in Chile.
3. IRP argues that this creates an asymmetry that has to be tested against constitutional standards. Under the Constitutional Court’s case law, differences in economic treatment need an objective basis, a legitimate purpose, and a proportionate relationship between the means used and the goal pursued. In other words, if the state wants to treat online and offline gambling differently, it has to explain why in a way that survives constitutional review.
4. The report goes one step further: leaving the current legal uncertainty in place is itself a state decision, and it should meet the same constitutional threshold. That matters for operators and payment providers because “no decision” is not treated here as a neutral option; it is still a regulatory posture with legal consequences.
5. Taxation is the other pressure point. The report highlights a resolution from Chile’s Servicio de Impuestos Internos (SII) dated 2 June 2026, which enabled a registry for online casinos and betting platforms to declare and pay VAT in Chile. The tension, as IRP frames it, is that one branch of the state is recognizing tax effects from the activity while other branches are pushing to restrict or block these same platforms on the basis that they lack legal authorization.

For high-risk payment firms, this is the usual Chilean regulatory two-step: tax authorities can move first, licensing can lag behind, and the legal status of the underlying merchant remains contested. That tends to matter a lot when deciding whether a market is merely unlicensed, formally prohibited, or somewhere in the much messier middle.