A licensing dispute became a nationwide block
In mid-March 2026, a Buenos Aires court ordered ENACOM — Argentina's national communications regulator — to coordinate with internet service providers to block the prediction-market platform Polymarket across the entire territory of the republic. The same ruling told Apple and Google to remove or restrict Polymarket's mobile app for users in Argentina. The case was brought by the Lotería de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires (LOTBA) and national lottery bodies; the prosecution, led by Juan Rozas, argued that Polymarket functioned as an unlicensed gambling service with no age or identity verification, and Judge Susana Parada agreed (CryptoPotato; BanklessTimes).
The episode has been described as Argentina's emerging "ENACOM platform-liability policy." That label is misleading in a way that matters for anyone trying to read where the country is heading.
The case for the block — stated fairly
The order is not frivolous. Polymarket lets users stake money on real-world outcomes, and in Argentina that looks a great deal like betting. Licensed operators must verify identity and age, fund problem-gambling programs, and submit to provincial gaming oversight; a global platform that does none of this enjoys a regulatory arbitrage over compliant competitors and exposes minors to wagering. Prosecutors also flagged a suspicious move in the odds on an inflation figure roughly fifteen minutes before the official release — a genuine market-integrity concern. A regulator that ignored all of this would be accused, reasonably, of abdicating consumer protection.
But ENACOM made no rule at all
Here is the part the "policy" framing obscures: ENACOM did not decide that Polymarket is liable for anything. A court did. ENACOM has no intermediary-liability mandate and, by its own account, neither the legal authority nor the technical capacity to block a website. It relays judicial blocking orders to the major ISPs and publishes the list of those orders each year (ENACOM). The regulator is a conduit, not a content authority.
That distinction is the whole architecture of Argentine platform law — and it is healthier than the "policy" narrative suggests. Argentina has no statute assigning liability to online intermediaries. The governing rule is a Supreme Court precedent: Rodríguez, María Belén c/ Google Inc. (CSJN, 28 October 2014), which held that search engines and hosts have no general duty to monitor third-party content and are liable only under a subjective standard — that is, once they have actual knowledge of unlawful material and fail to act. For manifestly unlawful content, extrajudicial notice can suffice; for everything contestable, a judge must decide (ICLG). Layered on top, Article 57 of the Argentina Digital Law (Ley 27.078, 2014) forbids ISPs from blocking or restricting any content "except by court order or express request of the user" (Argentina.gob.ar; InfoLeg).
Why the judge-gated model is worth defending
Put together, these rules describe a system in which no platform is taken offline in Argentina without a court signing off, and no intermediary is presumed liable for what its users post. Compare that to the alternative many legislatures now reach for: an administrative platform-liability regime in which a regulator issues takedown demands, sets compliance deadlines, and fines platforms for "systemic" failures. Those systems push intermediaries toward over-removal, because the cheapest way to avoid liability is to delete anything a complainant flags. Argentina's judge-in-the-loop default is slower, but it builds in an adversarial check before speech or a service disappears. For a pro-innovation, free-expression publication, that is a feature, not a bug.
The Polymarket order is the blunt edge to watch
The problem is that even a court-gated system can produce disproportionate remedies, and the Polymarket block is a clear example. A licensing dispute with one operator was answered with a nationwide, ISP-level block of the entire domain plus its mirrors, paired with app-store delisting. That is the heaviest tool in the box, deployed against a civil licensing question, and it is trivially defeated by a VPN or a fresh mirror while imposing collateral costs on the net-neutrality norms that Ley 27.078 was written to protect. Blocking access to a service is not the same as adjudicating whether its operator broke a licensing rule — and conflating the two invites scope creep.
The real risk is statutory overreach
The live danger is that Argentina, frustrated with case-by-case litigation, codifies a broad "platform responsibility" statute that hands ENACOM or another body standing administrative power to order blocks and assign liability. There is an active debate about exactly that. The better path is to legislate the Rodríguez protections — no general monitoring duty, judicial authorization for contested takedowns, narrow and time-limited blocks — rather than to expand a telecom regulator into a content cop. The Polymarket case should be read not as the birth of an ENACOM platform-liability policy, but as a warning about what happens when a powerful blocking tool meets a regulatory vacuum.