On July 16, 2026, the Autorité Nationale des Jeux (ANJ), France's gambling regulator, ordered the country's internet service providers to block Polymarket nationwide. The order treats the prediction-market platform as an unlicensed gambling operator rather than a financial trading venue — the culmination of nearly two years of escalating, and largely failed, enforcement.
A Two-Year Trail of Ineffective Half-Measures
The ANJ's own account of the case, published on its site, traces the timeline. The regulator first restricted Polymarket's financial transactions from French territory in November 2024. In February 2026, it went further, formally reclassifying prediction markets as illegal gambling under French law and issuing warnings to Polymarket, Kalshi, and smaller platforms. Neither step worked: the ANJ says Polymarket recorded 578,751 visits from 205,057 unique French users in June 2026 alone, largely because a VPN was enough to route around the transaction ban while the homepage — displaying live odds — stayed reachable (ANJ). The nationwide DNS-level block is the ANJ's admission that geofencing and financial restrictions alone don't work against a borderless platform.
The Case the ANJ Is Actually Making
It deserves to be stated plainly, because it's not frivolous. French licensed gambling operators are legally required to offer stake limits and self-exclusion tools — protections Polymarket does not provide. The ANJ also points to a live cybercrime investigation, opened May 4, 2026, into suspected tampering with a Météo-France weather sensor used to settle temperature-based markets, after unusual payouts on Polymarket bets tied to Paris readings. Combined with the absence of any know-your-customer identification layer, the regulator's argument is that Polymarket is functionally indistinguishable from an unlicensed betting shop that happens to call its odds a "market" — and that French consumer-protection law shouldn't have a crypto-shaped loophole. Blocking is also the tool France's law actually provides: the Code de la sécurité intérieure's gambling provisions have long authorized ISP-level blocking of unlicensed betting sites that ignore cease-and-desist orders (Légifrance, Code de la sécurité intérieure).
Where the Order Overreaches
The problem is fit, not motive. Polymarket says it will contest the block in French courts, arguing the measure is disproportionate because most French visits are informational — people checking odds on elections or macro events, not staking money, since transactions have been geofenced since 2024 (iGamingToday). A DNS-level block cannot tell a reader from a bettor; it removes both. That's the same proportionality failure that has dogged website blocking as a regulatory tool everywhere it's been tried, from copyright injunctions to platform bans: the technical instrument is coarser than the legal violation it's meant to address.
There's also a circumvention problem the ANJ's own history undercuts its case on. The regulator is imposing a blunter tool specifically because the previous, narrower one (the 2024 transaction ban) was defeated by VPNs. Nothing about DNS blocking is more VPN-resistant than a transaction geofence — if anything, it's less so, since evading a payment rail requires more friction than evading a domain block. France risks repeating the enforcement-theater pattern: a headline order that pushes committed users one browser extension away while doing little to protect the casual visitors the ANJ says it's protecting.
A Classification Fight With No Clean Answer
Underneath the blocking mechanics sits a genuinely unresolved question: is a prediction market a gambling product or a financial instrument? The United States has answered it differently — the CFTC permits Kalshi's election and event contracts to trade as regulated derivatives, not casino products, a framework Polymarket itself has moved toward domestically. France's February 2026 reclassification forecloses that debate rather than resolving it, collapsing markets on elections, weather, and macro events into the same legal bucket as sports betting on slot-machine terms. That's a defensible policy choice, but it's a legislative-scale one, and it's being made through gambling-regulator administrative blocking power rather than through Assemblée Nationale debate on how prediction markets should actually be supervised.
The Better Path Was Available
France had a narrower option: require Polymarket to implement real KYC, stake limits, and self-exclusion as a condition of continued access — the same compliance bar it holds licensed operators to — backed by the threat of blocking as a last resort, not a first one. That would have targeted the actual deficiency (no consumer protections) rather than the platform's existence. Instead, the ANJ has reached for the tool most likely to be evaded by exactly the users most capable of causing the addiction and integrity harms it cites, while cutting off the much larger population using Polymarket as a genuine information source. France joins more than 30 countries that have now restricted the platform (CoinDesk) — a trend that says less about Polymarket's specific failures than about how few jurisdictions have built a workable middle path between "unregulated" and "blocked."