France has ordered internet service providers to block Polymarket, escalating a dispute with a prediction market that remained accessible despite an earlier restriction on transactions from French territory.
The order changes enforcement from limiting wagers to denying ordinary access to the website. The National Gambling Authority, known as the ANJ, announced on July 17, 2026, that its president had instructed providers to impose the block one day earlier.
The regulator says Polymarket promotes gambling services that are not authorized in France. Reuters independently reported the order, while the RSS item from Mashable brought the decision back into the technology news cycle on Sunday. The dispute is about both the contracts offered and the software interfaces that place those contracts in front of users.
The Order Moves Enforcement to Internet Providers
The ANJ began examining services offered through Polymarket in November 2024. It identified Adventure One QSS Inc. as the company behind the relevant websites and treated the platform's event contracts as an unauthorized gambling offer rather than a permitted financial product. The distinction matters because France licenses only specified forms of online gambling and requires approved operators to follow national player-protection rules.
An initial formal notice produced a geoblock intended to stop financial transactions connected to Polymarket from French territory. The authority now says that control was circumvented in practice, leaving users able to reach a homepage filled with live event odds even when the payment restriction was supposed to prevent French betting. A visitor who can see odds is not necessarily placing a wager, but French law allows the regulator to examine exposure to the offer separately from completed transactions.
The new instruction creates a network-level access block. Instead of relying on the platform to reject a transaction, French internet providers must prevent customers from reaching the site through the ordinary domestic connection path. Users may still try technical workarounds, but the legal duty has moved closer to the point of access. The ANJ said it used the same administrative power to block 1,290 URLs in 2025, placing Polymarket inside an established enforcement process rather than a one-off technical measure.
Traffic and Missing User Checks Drove the Escalation
Audience data supplied by the ANJ shows why the earlier measure was judged insufficient. The regulator counted 578,751 visits and 205,057 unique visitors from France in June, after two years of rising traffic. Those figures describe visits rather than confirmed wagers, and repeat visits account for much of the total. They still demonstrate that the earlier financial restriction did not remove the platform from French public view.
French law also treats promotion as a separate issue from accepting a bet. The authority said Polymarket's homepage continuously displayed odds for open events and therefore advertised an unauthorized service. It noted that promoting an unlicensed betting site can carry a fine of up to 100,000 euros, including when a person publicly distributes odds or payout ratios for promotional purposes.
The ANJ cited another gap: the versions available to French and European users lacked a Know Your Customer system that could verify user integrity. Its February assessment said prediction sites can remain open around the clock without the betting limits, time controls or age checks found in the legal French market. Licensed operators also have obligations tied to account ownership and excessive gambling, protections that do not follow automatically from a blockchain-based settlement system.
The regulator also referred to suspicious weather wagers in which sensors may have been hacked to affect an outcome. It did not present that allegation as a final finding. A Paris prosecutor's cybercrime unit opened an investigation on May 4 and assigned the matter to France's office for combating cybercrime. The case illustrates a specific integrity risk: when a contract is resolved by an external data source, interference with that source can affect both the recorded result and the money distributed to traders.
Prediction Contracts Straddle Two Regulatory Systems
Polymarket lets participants buy positions tied to yes-or-no events, with the contract price changing as traders take opposite views. A contract trading at 63 cents is commonly read as the market assigning roughly a 63 percent chance to the stated result, though that price reflects supply, demand and available liquidity rather than a scientific forecast. A published resolution rule decides the outcome, and a position can usually be sold before settlement. Resale resembles a financial market, while staking money on an uncertain event resembles betting.
France has chosen the gambling classification and says prediction markets are illegal unless authorized under its limited national regime. Other jurisdictions have taken different routes. The ANJ said the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission authorized Polymarket to serve US residents in November 2025, while Nevada's gaming regulator later challenged prediction markets in court. The authority also listed Germany, Belgium, Romania, Switzerland, Poland, the Netherlands, Greece, Italy and Portugal among European countries that have restricted or blocked such platforms.
Regulatory attention is not confined to access controls. Polymarket's promotional practices faced separate scrutiny in June after reports about paid creator videos. The French decision adds a distribution issue to that record. Authorities can examine a prediction market at three different points: the advertisement that attracts a user, the interface that displays the contract and the transaction that funds a position.
Identity and Location Controls Will Determine Any Return
The French order does not describe the block as irrevocable. The ANJ said it would watch for changes by Adventure One QSS, particularly identity and location verification applied early enough to stop people in France from seeing the service or gaining access. That wording places the compliance check before account funding. A control imposed only at the final payment step would not answer the concern raised by the homepage itself, and a warning banner would not establish where a user is located.
That condition leaves Polymarket with a product-design problem as well as a legal one. A prediction market built for instant global access must decide a user's location before serving tradable odds, then keep the same boundary in account creation and payment flows. The company would also need to account for VPN use and inconsistent location signals without locking out lawful users elsewhere. France has made those layers one compliance question: if the front page promotes the market inside the country, blocking the wager alone is no longer enough.