A narrower lane for a broad ban
On August 10, 2026, Italy's communications regulator AGCOM published Delibera n. 200/26/CONS, a Supplementary Act to its 2019 guidelines for gambling-harm prevention campaigns, entering into force the following day. The act does not create new law; it interprets Article 9 of Decree-Law 87/2018 — the "Decreto Dignità," which bans all direct and indirect advertising of gambling and betting with cash prizes, across every medium including social platforms.
That 2018 ban created an odd carve-out: licensed operators must still fund responsible-gambling campaigns (0.2% of net gaming revenue, capped at €1 million annually, per Il Sole 24 Ore's reporting on the rule), and those campaigns are exempt from the advertising prohibition precisely because they're meant to warn people off gambling, not sell it. AGCOM's new act tightens the line between the two. Influencers and celebrities can still appear in these campaigns, but only when the messaging is "clearly oriented to moderation, awareness of risks and responsible behaviors" — protective content must dominate, not brand-friendly cameos. The Authority explicitly bars using a testimonial who is simultaneously tied to a separate commercial activity built on the operator's own brand — the scenario where an athlete fronts an operator's official prevention spot while also appearing in its sponsored content elsewhere, letting the "warning" double as a soft ad.
The steelman
The concern behind this is legitimate. When a well-liked footballer or streamer tells millions of young followers that a betting brand is "okay," the medium itself — parasocial trust, algorithmic reach, native-feeling content — does more normalizing work than the words in the caption. Italy already has data suggesting the problem is live: AGCOM fined 21 content creators roughly €2 million in a 2024 enforcement sweep for promoting gambling on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, X and Twitch — the first time the regulator went after individual creators rather than operators or broadcasters. A prevention campaign that quietly rehabilitates a brand's image while nominally warning about addiction isn't prevention; closing that loophole is a defensible, narrowly-tailored fix, and AGCOM was careful here — it opted for "particular caution," not a blanket ban on using well-known people in these campaigns at all.
Where the rule stops short
The trouble is that Delibera 200/26/CONS regulates the wrong actor for the bigger problem. It governs licensed operators' official, funded prevention campaigns — a small, already-compliant slice of the ecosystem. It does essentially nothing about the phenomenon AGCOM's own officials describe as the more urgent one: unlicensed "tipster" accounts on Instagram, Telegram, TikTok and YouTube that push supposedly "infallible" betting predictions and monetize the following through ad revenue, affiliate links and paid subscriptions. AGCOM board member Davide Gallino said as much at a University of Salerno panel in May 2026, describing timelines filling up with accounts promising "unbeatable, infallible methods to earn more" — and noting that "much of this advertising is not permitted," under Article 9's own terms, yet keeps running anyway. Il Sole 24 Ore's coverage of the August rules confirms AGCOM is watching this space, but the Supplementary Act itself is a campaign-content standard, not a tipster-account enforcement mechanism.
That gap is structural, not an oversight. A licensed operator has a concession to lose and a compliance department to answer to; a tipster running an anonymous Telegram channel or a TikTok account with an offshore following has neither. AGCOM can fine the operators whose logos or affiliate links show up in tipster content — as it did in 2024 — but chasing pseudonymous accounts one takedown at a time, especially when many point users toward gambling sites with no Italian license at all, is a losing numbers game against a compliant industry that has every incentive to over-comply with rules AGCOM can actually enforce against it.
The proportionality test
For a publication that generally favors light-touch, evidence-based regulation, this is a rule that mostly passes: it doesn't ban speech, doesn't bar public figures from association with a lawful industry, and targets a specific circumvention (using "prevention" funding as a disguised endorsement channel) rather than expression generally. Operators retain latitude to run these campaigns with well-known faces, provided the content is genuinely risk-focused — a standard AGCOM can audit against actual campaign footage rather than vague intent.
The real risk is regulatory theater: a headline-friendly crackdown on the compliant, licensed side of the market while the unlicensed tipster economy — the part actually reaching underage and vulnerable users at scale, per Gallino's own framing — continues untouched because it's genuinely harder to police. If AGCOM wants proportionate rules that match enforcement effort to actual harm, the next act needs a mechanism aimed at unlicensed accounts and offshore-linked promotion, not just a tighter leash on operators who were already inside the tent.