What was reported, and what was not
On 15 October 2026 AGIMEG reported that AGCOM, Italy's communications authority, is preparing updated guidelines on gambling "infotainment" sites. These are portals tied to licensed gaming operators, often on .live, .sport and .news domains. Under the reported draft, a site would qualify for the editorial exemption only with a real newsroom and a responsible director, frequent updates, no automatic redirects to gaming platforms, no gambling trademarks, and no ADM logo or concession numbers. AGCOM would check trademark registrations, whether the activity is genuine, and the economic links between portals and operators. A 30-day public consultation is said to start "soon".
The report does not say the guidelines have been adopted, and it gives no delibera number. Everything below is analysis of a proposal as reported, not of a binding rule.
The case for the regulator
The strongest argument for AGCOM is that the law is explicit and the evasion is real. Article 9 of decree-law 87/2018, the Decreto Dignità, bans "any form of advertising, including indirect advertising" of games or bets with cash winnings, on any medium. From 1 January 2019 it also covers sponsorships and visual or audio citations of a name, brand or symbol. The ban's stated rationale is consumer protection and countering gambling disorder, and the text lets AGCOM fine the client, the owner of the medium and the organiser at 20% of the sponsorship or advertising value, with a floor of €50,000 per violation (AGCOM, delibera 132/19/CONS).
A site named after a bookmaker, run by that bookmaker's group and carried on pitch-side banners is a plausible circumvention. Pagella Politica documented sites such as starcasino.sport and leovegas.news, which can be advertised because they carry no explicit gambling content, and noted that leovegas.news was an official sponsor of Atalanta and Inter (Pagella Politica). If the exemption is available to anyone who registers a .news domain, the statute is a dead letter for the businesses it aims at.
Why the existing framework invited this
The loophole is partly AGCOM's own design. Its 2019 guidelines say that informative, descriptive communications about a licensed offer fall outside the ban, and that what decides the matter is the message's presentation (language, graphics, context) and the setting in which the service is offered (AGCOM, delibera 132/19/CONS, adopted 18 April 2019). The same document records operators arguing that a blanket ban conflicts with proportionality and with Articles 41 and 21 of the Constitution, and that editorial communications about operators and their events are protected expression.
AGCOM has since applied that logic loosely. In March 2024 Commissioner Massimiliano Capitanio said a sports-entertainment site did not appear to fall under the ban so long as it made no reference to gambling and showed no logos or graphics amounting to indirect advertising (Calcio e Finanza). In September 2025 AGCOM opened a review of DAZN's on-screen betting odds and said that the 2019 guidelines were "currently under revision" and already cover infotainment sites and promotional overlays (Calcio e Finanza). The reported draft is therefore a sequel to a revision AGCOM announced a year ago, not a surprise.
Where the draft is sound
Several reported criteria test substance rather than appearance. A responsible director, a functioning newsroom and regular updates are objective, checkable signals of genuine editorial activity, and they preserve the one thing a speech-protective regime should protect: real journalism that happens to be funded by an operator. Banning automatic redirects to gaming platforms goes straight to the harm, because it removes the "surprise effect" that the 2019 guidelines already treat as a mark of promotion. Looking at economic links between portals and operators is also the right unit of analysis, since a site's independence is a question of money and control, not domain suffix.
Where proportionality is at risk
The weak points are process and scope. Three questions need answers in the consultation text.
- Legal form. Guidelines that decide who may publish about sport are consequential. The reported draft should be adopted by a numbered delibera with reasons, after the consultation, so publishers can challenge it before the administrative courts.
- Trademark and logo rules. A blanket ban on any gambling trademark or ADM logo is blunt. The 2019 guidelines already allow the bare citation of a licensee as funder of a project where the communication is purely informative. An editorial site that discloses its ownership is more transparent than one that hides it, and the rules should not push disclosure out.
- Editorial independence. "A real newsroom" must not become a licensing test for journalism. Criteria should be about staffing and output that can be shown by documents, not about AGCOM judging whether coverage is good enough.
The exemption in the 2019 text also protects "editorial communications ... having as their subject gambling operators ... reconcilable with the freedom of expression" under Article 21. A real outlet that critiques the industry must not be swept up with sham portals.
What to watch
The consultation is the real test. AGCOM should publish the draft text, show its evidence on how many portals qualify as sham, state how an operator-funded outlet proves independence, and set transitional time before enforcement. Enforcement against intermediaries, such as the platforms that carry the ads, is a separate matter under Italy's wider platform regime and should not be folded into this one. A narrow, evidence-backed test that targets redirects and brand laundering would close a genuine loophole without chilling legitimate sports and industry media. A vague test enforced case by case would do the opposite.
As of 18 October 2026, none of this is settled. The draft criteria, the numbering of any delibera and the length of the consultation should be checked against AGCOM's own publications as they appear.