Chile’s battle over online gambling has burst back into the political spotlight just days before voters choose their next president, as a fresh bill to clamp down on advertising for offshore betting sites lands in Congress.
Independent senator Karim Bianchi has filed a proposal that would impose heavy fines on media outlets, influencers, and intermediaries who promote unlicensed gambling platforms, marking the latest attempt to impose order on a market that has expanded far faster than Chile’s laws.
“The problem is not only that these companies operate without paying a peso in Chile,” Bianchi said as he introduced the measure. “We now have a situation where our courts are being asked to resolve disputes without a law, and that is simply not sustainable for citizens, operators, or the State.”
On Sunday, Chile holds a closely watched presidential run-off between conservative nationalist José Antonio Kast and Jeannette Jara, the Communist Party candidate backed by the governing left coalition. While neither campaign has made gambling reform the centre of its platform, Bianchi’s initiative ensures that online betting will be waiting in the inbox of whoever takes office at La Moneda.
A stalled Gambling Act returns via the side door
Bianchi’s advertising bill is narrower than the sweeping “Gambling Act” package first introduced in 2023, when the Finance Ministry under President Gabriel Boric sent a draft law to Congress to create Chile’s first comprehensive framework for online betting and casino games. That original project aimed to license operators, define consumer protections, establish responsible-gambling rules, and impose sanctions on companies that continued to target Chile without authorization.
Lawmakers spent much of 2023 working through key definitions – from what counts as an online bet to how to classify different types of platforms and affiliates – and debating tax proposals designed to capture revenue from a fast-growing offshore market. Industry estimates at the time suggested that Chileans were staking hundreds of millions of dollars a year with foreign betting brands, many of them sponsors of top-flight football clubs.
But momentum disappeared in 2024 when municipal casino concessionaires filed legal challenges, arguing that opening an online market without compensating them would violate long-standing exclusivity commitments written into their contracts. Faced with potential claims running into the hundreds of millions of dollars, the Finance Ministry effectively froze work on the Gambling Act while it assessed the risks.
The result was a regulatory tangle. Online operators continued to advertise and sign sponsorship deals; clubs in the Primera División argued that betting partnerships were now essential to their financial survival; and regulators found themselves trying to police an activity that Chilean law barely recognised.
Courts, regulators, and telecoms run out of road
More fundamentally, members of the judiciary have warned in written rulings that they are being asked to decide complex online gambling cases without a clear statutory framework.
In several decisions touching on advertising, sponsorship, and domain-blocking orders, judges have stated that using general consumer or criminal provisions to regulate a specific, rapidly evolving market risks inconsistency and overreach – and have urged Congress to legislate.
Bianchi’s bill explicitly shares that concern. “We cannot keep stretching existing norms just to respond to new situations,” he said. “A Gambling Act is the only way to provide legal certainty to families, to clubs, to the media, and to responsible operators that may want to enter the Chilean market under clear rules.”
Election noise, legislative silence
Sunday’s presidential run-off between Kast and Jara will determine the direction of economic and social policy for the rest of the decade – and, by extension, the fate of online gambling reform.
Kast, who has campaigned on a law-and-order platform and closer alignment with business interests, has signalled openness to regulated markets in other sectors but has not set out a detailed gambling proposal. Jara, a former labour minister and trade union lawyer, has framed online betting primarily as a consumer-protection issue and has backed tougher controls on advertising and sponsorships.
With the outgoing administration in its final weeks and Congress partly consumed by electioneering, few observers expect Bianchi’s bill to progress beyond committee discussion before the vote. But in interviews, he has been clear that the point, for now, is to force the next government to treat online gambling as a priority rather than a side issue.
“We have already seen what happens when we postpone this debate,” he said. “We end up with a shadow market, with clubs fighting regulators, with contradictory court rulings, and with families exposed to products that nobody is supervising. Whoever wins on Sunday will inherit this problem on day one.”
What’s at stake for the next administration
Bianchi’s latest move does not solve those structural tensions. But by placing advertising in the crosshairs and tying the issue explicitly to the presidential transition, it ensures that online gambling will be part of the broader conversation about how Chile wants to regulate digital markets, protect consumers, and share the proceeds of a rapidly expanding industry.
As the senator put it in one recent interview, “We are not trying to ban the internet or football or entertainment. We are saying that if gambling is going to happen anyway, it must happen under transparent rules that protect Chileans and ensure that those who profit also assume their responsibilities.”
