Russia blocks more unauthorised gambling domains in 2018

In Russia, online gambling is expecting an annual total climb even higher this year. Russia blocked more than twice as many unauthorised online gambling domains in 2018 than the previous year.

Roskomnadzor targeted over 130k gambling domains in 2018, up from just under 63k in 2017. Most of these offending domains were international variants of Russian-licensed brands.

In this new year, Roskomnadzor has already banished nearly 5k gambling domains to its digital dungeon. The regulator recently signalled that it was prepping new, more efficient tools to ban the unauthorised online gambling domains.

Google had begun complying with the regulator’s demands by connecting to the federal state information system (FGIS), which stores the list of banned resources. Russian-approved firms must connect their systems to the FGIS to ensure newly banned domains are automatically blocked within an acceptable timeframe.