France Orders ISPs to Block Access to Polymarket

France’s gambling regulator, the Autorité Nationale des Jeux (ANJ), has told Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to block access to Polymarket from French territory. For payment providers and other high-risk operators, the point is straightforward: France is treating the platform as an unauthorized gambling site, and it is also warning that promoting it can trigger criminal penalties.

1. The ANJ said on Friday that it had ordered ISPs to limit access to Polymarket’s website from France, arguing that the platform violates gambling laws. Polymarket denies that position, but the regulator has already made its enforcement stance clear.
2. The regulator also reminded the market that advertising an unauthorized betting or gambling site is a criminal offense in France, carrying a fine of up to $114,000. In other words, this is not just about access blocking; it is also about promotion, affiliates, and anyone helping the platform reach French users.
3. The order comes despite meaningful demand from France: Polymarket recorded as many as 578,751 visits from the country in June alone. So the block may be legally simple on paper, but the traffic numbers show why enforcement matters in practice.
4. France is not moving alone. Germany, Italy, and Spain have also taken similar steps recently, which tells high-risk PSPs and acquiring teams that European pressure on unregulated prediction markets is becoming a pattern rather than an isolated case.
5. The broader issue here is that prediction markets have spread across Europe and are being used not only for political bets, but also for sports event contracts and other highly contentious markets. That creates familiar risk questions for PSPs: regulatory classification, advertising exposure, and whether a merchant sits inside or outside the local gambling perimeter.

Polymarket’s rise has also sharpened concerns around insider-trading-style behavior, with one reported case involving a teleprompter operator linked to US President Donald Trump and talks with the Commodity Futures and Trading Commission to settle a case over “trading” on the president’s speeches. For PSPs, the immediate takeaway is less about the spectacle and more about the compliance profile: prediction markets are now squarely in the crosshairs of regulators on both sides of the Atlantic.