Brazil ordered over 13,000 illegal sites blocked in twelve days
The figure that best describes the impact of the Brazilian ban is not in Congress but in the blockades. Data from the Executive itself shows that in twelve days, access to more than 13,000 illegal websites was ordered to be shut down, an average of over a thousand pages detected per day, just as the deadline for amendments to the Provisional Measure that outlawed fixed-odds betting and online gaming expired at 11:59 PM on Tuesday, October 13.
The amendments are all moving in one direction. As of the previous Friday, at least 58 had been submitted, with four formal withdrawals, and the prevailing sentiment is not to retain the text written by the Government but to rescue the sports betting business. Several legislators propose limiting the prohibition solely to online casino and maintaining sports forecasting with strict advertising frameworks, including a cut to stadium sponsorship. There are texts that go even further, requesting the return of every modality that operated with a license before the measure.
The process, however, is stalled due to an omission. The Mixed Commission responsible for reviewing the regulation has already defined its members, but the leadership of Congress has not yet appointed the president or the rapporteur who must sign the opinion. Deliberation expires on November 23, and from November 9, the text begins to hinder the plenary's agenda, and it is expected that the discussion will gain political momentum once the electoral outcome is resolved.
In parallel, the legal market is being dismantled according to its own schedule. Federal authorizations expire on October 25, and the Ministry of Finance's regulation set December 15 as the unextendable deadline for companies to cease operations completely. Between October 9 and 14, banks automatically return funds that players did not withdraw before October 5, and since Wednesday, Caixa Econômica Federal is in charge of mediating cases with operational difficulties.
The state's response to the surge in clandestine offerings came from law enforcement. The Ministry of Justice and Public Security officially established a specialized division within the Federal Police, whose sole task will be to pursue clandestine gambling and sports match-fixing, a request that the force's own leadership had sent at the beginning of October and which has now been formalized.
The judicial front remains stagnant. The lawsuits and requests for suspension signed by the sector's largest associations are still in the office of Minister Luiz Fux, who has not yet ruled on any of the injunctions.
The 13,000 sites in twelve days are the harshest measure of the effect produced by the measure. At the end of September, with the ban days away from coming into force, the Government reported a total of 506 illegal sites detected; today, it detects more than a thousand per day. That is the curve, and it describes an administrative apparatus blocking at a rate that no oversight structure can sustain over time, to contain a demand that was previously met by a few dozen licensed platforms. The other problem is the calendar, because authorizations expire on October 25, the same day as the runoff election, and the commission that could modify the norm does not begin to press the plenary's agenda until November 9, so between one date and the other, the regulated market ceases to exist without anyone having voted on anything.
Tags: Brazil betting ban, MP 1.394, Blocking of illegal websites, Federal Police