The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), in its judgment of 16 July 2026 in Case C-421/24, upheld the lawfulness of the €750,000 fine imposed by the Italian Communications Authority (AGCOM) on Google Ireland Limited for breaching the Italian “Dignity Decree”, which prohibits gambling advertising.
The case dates back four years, when AGCOM imposed a €750,000 administrative fine on Google, a subsidiary of Alphabet, for disseminating gambling-related advertisements on the YouTube platform in breach of Article 9 of Decree-Law No. 87/2018 (the so-called Dignity Decree, entitled “Urgent Provisions for the Dignity of Workers and Businesses”). Article 9 prohibits “any form of advertising, including indirect advertising, relating to games or betting involving cash prizes, as well as gambling, regardless of the means or medium used, including sporting, cultural or artistic events, television or radio broadcasts, daily and periodical press, publications of any kind, billboards, and electronic, digital and online communication channels, including social media.” As of 1 January 2019, the prohibition was extended to “the sponsorship of events, activities, initiatives, programmes, products or services, as well as all other forms of promotional communication, including visual and audio references and the display of names, trademarks, symbols, activities or products whose advertising is prohibited under this Article.”
The Luxembourg judges clarified that EU law excludes gambling services, as well as all activities directly connected to them, from the scope of harmonisation in the field of electronic commerce, due to the significant moral, religious and cultural differences that exist among the Member States in this area.
At the same time, however, the CJEU held that providing hosting services by making space available on a website or online platform is not intrinsically connected with gambling, since such activity consists of storing information supplied by users in a neutral manner, without any promotional purpose. Consequently, online hosting services do not fall within the gambling exclusion under EU law but instead remain subject to the EU legal framework governing electronic commerce.
In the specific case, Google could only have benefited from the hosting provider liability exemption if it had lacked knowledge of the information transmitted or stored. The Court, however, held that where an online platform operator, for the purpose of entering into a commercial partnership agreement, reviews the main theme of a video channel, or examines its most viewed or most recent videos together with the associated metadata, it acquires actual knowledge of the essential content of that collection of videos and can no longer claim to be acting merely as an intermediary hosting provider.
For these reasons, the Court concluded that Google may be held liable “for the dissemination of the unlawful gambling advertising” (source: Agimeg)