EU Court Says That Google Can Be Held Accountable for Gambling Advertisements on YouTube

Key Points

• The Court of Justice of the European Union delivered its decision on 16 July 2026, indicating that the hosting exception of Google is at risk according to the e-Commerce Directive.
• The risk occurs for platforms that examine the content of the creator’s channels within a business cooperation. Google Ireland was fined by Italy’s AGCOM by 750,000 euros in 2022 for having hundreds of videos that were advertising gambling on YouTube. The action has been taken according to the Dignity Decree which bans the advertisements of this sort.
• The Italian Council of State now needs to decide if the YouTube Partner Programme turned Google into an active participant instead of a passive host. The above-mentioned fine of 750,000 euros is yet to be confirmed.

The ruling by the Second Chamber of the Court of Justice of the European Union was issued on the 16th of July 2026 concerning the case C-421/24. The dispute started between Google Ireland and Italy’s communications authority, AGCOM, due to gambling promotion videos uploaded to YouTube. Judges stopped short of upholding the fine itself. They delivered guidance that carries greater weight because it sets out exactly where liability protection stops for platforms across Europe.

The Fine That Started It

AGCOM’s Resolution 275/22/CONS, adopted on 19 July 2022, found that Google Ireland had breached Article 9 of Italy’s Dignity Decree, the provision that bans any direct or indirect promotion of gambling activities with monetary prizes. The administrative fine totalled €750,000. At issue were several YouTube channels operated by a single content creator, carrying hundreds of videos that regulators considered promotional material for online gambling sites. The content included live gambling sessions played with real money, references to bonuses, and links to platforms accessible to Italian users. AGCOM also ordered the removal of the remaining videos and the cessation of the conduct.

Google challenged the measure, arguing it had acted as a hosting provider and could not be held liable for videos uploaded independently by third parties. That rationale enjoys strong support in European law, but only up to a certain extent. On 23 May 2024, the Italian Council of State asked Luxembourg for an answer on precisely how far that extent extends.

The Text of the E-Commerce Directive

In its first move, the court had to decide on jurisdiction. Google had made it clear that Directive 2000/31/EC concerning electronic commerce explicitly does not apply to gambling services with monetary value. If the directive applies to neither, then the directive cannot protect the host of such gambling sites. The CJEU rejected that reading. The exclusion targets gambling services themselves, not every platform that happens to store gambling-related videos. A video-hosting service remains within the directive’s scope even when some of its content promotes gambling.

That clarification matters because it keeps the liability question open rather than closing it on a technicality. Whether Google can actually claim the hosting exemption depends not on the nature of the videos but on the nature of Google’s involvement with them.

Where Monetisation Becomes a Legal Problem

Article 14 of the e-Commerce Directive shields a hosting provider from liability when its role is strictly technical, automatic, and passive, and when it has no actual knowledge of the unlawful material it stores. The CJEU set out when that shield fell away.

The decisive factor was the YouTube Partner Programme. Through that arrangement, creators share advertising revenue with Google. The court did not say that revenue sharing alone strips a platform of its protection; the mere existence of a commercial partnership is not enough to impose automatic liability. What changes the calculation is what happened before or during that partnership. As the CJEU stated: “That is not the case where an operator reviews, for the purpose of concluding a commercial partnership contract, the main theme of a video channel, that channel’s most viewed videos or newest videos and the associated metadata.”

Titles, descriptions, thumbnails, view counts, and upload recency are all part of that metadata. A platform that examines those signals to decide whether a channel is commercially viable has, in the court’s view, potentially acquired specific knowledge of the content through which it will earn and distribute revenue. Once that knowledge is present, the passive-intermediary defence becomes harder to sustain.

Google’s Response and the Unresolved Fine

Google did not walk away from Luxembourg with a confirmed penalty. The CJEU’s role in preliminary reference proceedings is to interpret EU law, not to replace the national court in making factual findings. The €750,000 fine and the removal order remain before Italy’s Council of State, which must now apply the CJEU’s legal test to what actually happened.

That court will need to establish what checks Google carried out when admitting the creator’s channel to the Partner Programme, what it learned about the videos in doing so, and whether that knowledge was sufficient to remove the passive-intermediary argument. Only after that assessment can it decide whether Google owes the fine.

Google expressed its dissatisfaction plainly. “We are disappointed by the CJEU’s decision, which we will need further clarity on. We will raise our arguments before the Council of State,” a spokesperson said. A second statement, issued after the judgment text was released, struck a more measured tone: “We are carefully reviewing the text of the ruling.”

The Wider Regulatory Picture in Italy

The CJEU ruling lands against a background of growing legal pressure on Italy’s gambling advertising enforcement framework. AGCOM delivered its 2026 annual report to Parliament on 14 July and officials noted zero new fines issued for gambling advertising violations throughout 2025. Enforcement activity did not vanish after that change. The numbers dropped sharply from 12.39 million euros collected in fines and settlements during 2023 down to 1.81 million euros the following year. Unresolved court matters created real difficulties for sustaining certain penalties in this climate. A separate legal action continues to advance alongside the main proceedings.

Courts examined fresh questions on 29 July 2025 when the Lazio Regional Administrative Court referred an issue to Italy’s Constitutional Court. The matter centres on whether the Dignity Decree establishes a fair level of 50000 euros for each breach. Enforcement officials first levied a fine of 157,000 euros against one content creator after videos appeared on YouTube and Twitch with direct links to gambling websites. Judges listened to public arguments on 24 June 2026 yet they still hold back from delivering the final verdict in the case. Both issues arise out of one single problem, which is the fact that the 2018 ban on advertisement was applied to television and print media, but is now applied to the content created by creators via digital media platforms where the boundary between regular payments for content and advertisements is hard to establish.

What This Means Beyond Google?

The CJEU’s judgment in C-421/24 does not only concern YouTube. The court’s reasoning applies to any platform that reviews content as part of a commercial partnership before entering a revenue-sharing arrangement, which describes the operational model of most major social and video platforms. Creator monetisation programmes are now embedded across the digital economy. A platform that selects, vets, and financially rewards a creator’s channel is not behaving identically to a platform that simply stores whatever users upload.

Gambling is the clearest regulated sector, but the principle is not limited to it. Financial products, healthcare services, pharmaceuticals, and alcohol all carry advertising restrictions across EU member states. A platform that reviews a creator’s channel and enters a commercial partnership could face liability questions in any of those areas if the content later turns out to breach national rules.

For gambling operators and affiliates specifically, the ruling reinforces what regulators have been saying for several years: the promotional nature of content is determined by what it contains and how it functions, not by how it is labelled. A gameplay session presented as entertainment, a review that directs viewers to a bonus link, or a livestream that includes a platform’s logo can all constitute advertising under strict national frameworks.

Expert Analysis

The CJEU has drawn a line that the industry has spent years arguing did not exist. Platforms cannot claim passive-intermediary status and simultaneously build structured commercial relationships with creators whose content they have assessed and selected. The Italian proceedings will now test whether Google’s review of the channel in question crossed that line in practice. Whatever the Council of State decides, the legal logic established in Luxembourg will apply across every partnership programme operating on European soil. Platforms that have not already reviewed their onboarding processes for commercial partners in regulated content categories are likely now doing so.