LEGAL NEWS IN THE SPOTLIGHT | The CJEU on the hosting safe harbour for monetized gambling-related videos on YouTube

On 16 July 2026, the CJEU issued its judgment in Case C-421/24 (Google Ireland v AGCOM), on a reference from the Italian Council of State concerning a euro 750,000 fine imposed by AGCOM on Google for hosting videos that promoted gambling across five YouTube channels enrolled in Google’s revenue-sharing “YouTube Partner Program”. The Court first held that hosting services fall within Directive 2000/31/EC (the E-Commerce Directive) even where the hosted content advertises gambling, since the gambling exclusion under Article 1(5)(d) covers only activities intrinsically linked to gambling and not the neutral act of hosting gambling-related content. On the issue of liability, the Court ruled that a hosting provider loses the Article 14 safe harbour where, in the course of concluding or performing a revenue-sharing partnership agreement with a user, it examines a channel’s main theme, its most-viewed or most recent videos, or their metadata. According to the Court, such review – whether automated or not – gives the hosting provider an “active role” in relation to the videos uploaded to the channel, since the provider thereby acquires actual knowledge of the channel’s essential content, and therefore it does not play a merely technical, automatic and passive role.

Newsletter n. 120 – July 2026