On 6 February 2026, the Italian Media Regulator (AGCOM) published its decision to dismiss the sanctioning proceedings against the Australian platform Kick Streaming Pty Ltd (Kick) for the alleged breach of the gambling advertising ban under Article 9 of the Dignity Decree.
Article 9 of the Dignity Decree introduced in Italy a blanket ban on advertising gambling. That includes any form of direct or indirect commercial communication, including sponsoring. The compliance of such ban with EU laws and EU Treaty principles, such as proportionality, necessity, and coherence, is presently under scrutiny of the EU Court of Justice (case C-194/25). Compared to other European regulations, this law is extremely restrictive.
The AGCOM proceedings originated from several livestreaming videos with slot machines’ promotional or advertising content on the Kick platform. These videos were uploaded on the platform through different channels fully managed by an Italian streamer.
According to Kick’s defence, the content under dispute was published independently by the streamer, without any commercial relationship with the platform. In particular, it was highlighted that the disputed videos constituted user-generated content and that there was no promotional agreement between Kick and the streamer, thus the platform did not receive any direct economic compensation or other benefits from it. In brief, the company only made its technical infrastructure (the platform) available to the streamer, acting as mere hosting provider.
Also, Kick was not aware of the illegal gambling advertising until the receipt of the AGCOM’s notice of dispute, but once received, it immediately removed the contents and disabled the relevant channels.
Following the investigation and substantially agreeing with Kick’s defence, the Media Authority determined that the platform did not breach the gambling advertising ban.
Notably, it considered applicable to Kick the exemption clause referred to in Article 6(1) of the EU Digital Services Act (EU Regulation 2022/2065, also known as DSA), according to which the hosting provider is not liable for information stored at the request of a service recipient under the following conditions:
(a) the platform does not have actual knowledge of illegal activity or illegal content;
(b) upon obtaining such knowledge or awareness, it acts expeditiously to remove or to disable access to the illegal content.
The DSA model is based on an attenuated responsibility of hosting providers with post-report removal obligations. Most importantly, according to the DSA, the platform is not subject to any general obligation to monitor user-generated content in advance.
With reference to Kick’s case, the Authority highlighted that in the absence of a commercial relationship between the platform and the content creator, it was not possible to qualify the publication of the videos on Kick as an advertising activity directly attributable to the company that manages the platform.
On the basis of the above considerations, the AGCOM dismissed the sanctioning proceedings.
To put things into context, AGCOM’s position is consistent with the Italian dominant case law concerning the passive role of the hosting provider toward very large online platforms (VLOPs).
On the same day, the Authority dismissed another sanctioning proceeding against Meta, for an alleged breach of the gambling advertising ban through a Facebook page linked to a tipster active in online slots. The Facebook page published content and links to livestreams related to online gambling sessions. Similarly to the case of Kick, Meta’s defence was based on the user-generated content without any commercial relationship between the platform and the page manager and the lack of paid advertisements.
However, AGCOM’s sanctioning proceedings over Google for having promoted gambling through YouTube is still pending before EU Court of Justice (case C-421/24). In this case, among the legal arguments of the Authority, a distinction was made in terms of a VLOPS’ liability between editorial activity in the presence of a relationship with the content creator (the YouTube “Partner Program”) and the mere technical intermediation.
Addressing gambling advertising under the DSA appears to be challenging. Now, without a proactive intervention of the involved stakeholders, only the case-law interventions will clarify how VLOPS should deal with it.
