ANTITRUST | Advocate General’s conclusions on the responsibility of hosting service providers in gambling advertising

On 27 November 2025, Advocate General of the Court of Justice of the European Union Maciej Szpunar (AG) filed his conclusions  on the preliminary ruling referred by the Italian Administrative Court of Second Instance (Consiglio di Stato) on case C421/24 (Italian Regulatory Authority for Communication v Google Ireland Limited) which concerned the applicability of Article 14.1 of the Directive 2000/31/CE (e-commerce Directive) in relation to a fine for gambling advertising. The AG suggested that to establish the applicability of Article 14.1 of the e-commerce Directive, which provided for non-responsibility of the hosting provider, it is needed to examine specifically the criteria of optimization and the element of the remuneration. According to the AG, the indexing of contents, the creation of a search function and the recommendation of videos based on users’ profiles or preferences is directly linked to the scope of the activity of platforms and that, being those activities defined as display optimization, the role of the platform is the one of an intermediary, leading to the abstract applicability of Article 14 of the e-commerce Directive. Moreover, the AG affirmed that Google does not monitor the content of videos before they are uploaded by users, therefore Google does not engage in any control on content uploaded to its video-sharing Platform even in the context of their partnership program. On the remuneration aspect, the AG found that the sharing of profits does not automatically exclude the hosting service provider from the scope of Article 14.1 of the e-commerce Directive.

Newsletter n. 113 – December 2025