A €157,000 fine against a €1,000 gain
On 20 October 2026 Italy's Constitutional Court deposited ruling No. 172, answering a referral from the TAR Lazio administrative court. It held that the fixed €50,000 minimum fine in Article 9(2) of the 2018 'Decreto Dignità' (Decree-Law 87/2018) is unconstitutional where it produces a manifestly disproportionate result. The advertising ban itself stays in force. (L'Adige; Studio Cataldi)
The facts show why the case mattered. According to the decision as reproduced by the legal database eius.it, AGCOM fined a 28-year-old warehouse worker €157,000 in total for promotional content on two YouTube channels and one Twitch channel. The worker earned about €1,300 a month. The activity brought in about €1,000. The three channels had 64, 2,010 and 2,504 followers, and the videos at issue had between 53 and 202 views. (eius.it)
The case for the ban, stated fairly
The strongest argument for the law deserves a hearing. Gambling harms are real and fall hardest on vulnerable people. Online promotion is cheap, targeted and hard to police. A statute with a high fixed floor gives regulators a deterrent that does not depend on proving the commercial value of each post. The Court accepted this reasoning. It stressed that the ban protects individual and collective health, safety and public order, and it kept the ban intact.
The Court also declined to remove the minimum altogether. Doing so could have produced trivial or zero penalties for real violators. A lower sum is allowed only where the amount is manifestly disproportionate. (L'Adige)
What the law actually did
Article 9(2) sets the fine at 20% of the value of the sponsorship or advertising, and 'in any case not less than €50,000 for each violation'. A fine tied to value can in principle scale with the harm. The fixed floor stops that. Studio Cataldi reports that AGCOM practice mostly applied the minimum rather than a proportional criterion. The Court described the floor as markedly severe. It said the floor is excessive for marginal episodes, such as occasional promotional activity by a private individual on a non-monothematic online channel. (Studio Cataldi)
In this case the arithmetic was stark. The decision records €55,000 for one channel and €51,000 for each of the other two. The total was well over 100 times the creator's gain from the activity. A penalty on that scale no longer corrects behaviour. It ruins the person. It also chills ordinary speakers far beyond gambling. A small creator who sees a six-figure fine for a few low-view videos has every reason to avoid anything near the topic, or to leave the platform.
The remedy: Article 11 criteria, not a free-for-all
The Court's fix is narrow and workable. In cases of manifest disproportion, AGCOM must use the general criteria of Article 11 of Law 689/1981, the framework statute for administrative sanctions. Those criteria are the gravity of the violation, the steps taken to remove or reduce its consequences, the offender's personality, and the offender's economic conditions. (Normattiva, Law 689/1981; Studio Cataldi)
These are the same factors Italian administrative law already applies elsewhere. The ruling does not ask regulators to invent a new test. It asks them to use the one the legal system already has. The case went back to TAR Lazio, which will review the amount.
Why this is good for enforcement, too
Proportionality is often framed as a concession to the regulated. It is better understood as a condition of credible enforcement. Rigid penalties push regulators toward two bad outcomes. They may skip small cases because the mandatory fine looks absurd, which makes enforcement arbitrary. Or they may apply the fine anyway and invite years of litigation, as happened here. A graduated scale lets AGCOM concentrate on professional operators and affiliate networks that profit from promotion, and treat marginal hobbyists differently.
The fine was also imposed under a statute drafted in 2018, when the target was mainly established advertisers, broadcasters and sponsors. It then reached individuals on video platforms, where the same fixed floor means something very different. The Court's reasoning reflects that mismatch. A number set for corporate advertisers cannot be applied unchanged to a person earning about €1,000 from the activity.
What to watch
Two open questions remain. First, how far AGCOM will go below €50,000 in practice. The Court limited relief to manifestly disproportionate cases, so the agency retains wide discretion, and its first decisions after this ruling will show whether the exception is used honestly or interpreted narrowly. Second, whether Parliament updates Article 9 itself. A statute that distinguishes commercial operators from private individuals would be clearer than case-by-case adjustment through the courts.
For speech and innovation, the lesson is general. A legitimate public-interest ban can survive while its penalty is tested against the offender's actual conduct and means. Proportionality is not a loophole in content rules. It is what keeps them defensible, and it keeps them from falling hardest on the least resourced speakers. As the EFF argues in a different context, perfect moderation at scale is impossible, but systems still owe people reasonable procedures and outcomes. (EFF)