Seven years after Switzerland shut its doors to foreign gambling operators, the government is asking whether the experiment worked. The Federal Department of Justice and Police is conducting a formal evaluation of the Money Gaming Act, the 2019 law that reserved the online casino market for domestic concession holders and ordered internet providers to block everyone else. The review lands at a symbolic moment. The official blacklist of blocked gambling sites has swelled to nearly 3,000 domains, and the report due later this year will decide what happens next.
A blacklist approaching 3,000 domains
The blocking regime is the most visible piece of the Swiss model. Since 2019, two authorities have shared the task: the Federal Gaming Board (ESBK) polices online casino games, while the intercantonal supervisor Gespa covers lotteries and sports betting. Both maintain public lists of unauthorised sites, and Swiss internet service providers are legally required to deny access to every domain that appears on them.
Those lists have grown at a remarkable pace. The February 2026 update added several hundred domains in a single revision, pushing the combined total close to the 3,000 mark. The additions include not only offshore casinos and sportsbooks but also sites that merely funnel Swiss users towards them.
Enforcement, in other words, has never been busier. Yet the sheer length of the list raises an uncomfortable question for Bern. If operators can be struck off by the hundreds and still keep coming back under new domains, is DNS blocking containing the problem or merely documenting it? That question now sits at the centre of a much broader review.
Why Bern is re-examining its 2019 law
That review has been building for some time. The Federal Department of Justice and Police decided to evaluate the Money Gaming Act after a series of parliamentary interventions questioned whether the law was delivering on its promises, and tasked the Federal Office of Justice with leading the work. The scope of the formal evaluation is broad: whether players are actually being channelled into the licensed market, whether protection standards hold up in practice, and whether the enforcement tools, blocking above all, justify their cost.
The timing matters. The report is expected in the second half of 2026, which makes this the year Switzerland decides whether its model needs repair. An advisory group drawing on regulators, cantonal authorities and addiction specialists has accompanied the process since 2023, a signal that Bern treats the exercise as more than a formality.
Any honest verdict will have to weigh both sides of the ledger. The enforcement record is easy to count. Harder to assess is the legal market the law was meant to build.
What the legal market looks like from the inside
That market is unlike almost anything else in Europe. Switzerland issued no standalone online gambling licences when it rewrote its law. Instead, the right to operate online was attached to the country’s existing land-based casino concessions, while lotteries and sports betting stayed with two state-backed monopolies. Foreign companies were excluded from the outset, with no application route open to them.
The numbers illustrate how tightly the system is drawn. Market data compiled by Casinoinswitzerland.ch shows around a dozen licensed online casinos currently serving Swiss players, each one tied to a land-based concession holder. That figure has barely moved since the law took effect, because the licensing route allows no other path: an operator without a Swiss casino concession cannot enter the online market at all. The result is a legal offering that regulators can supervise in full, but also a level of concentration that few other European markets would tolerate.
Scarcity has an economic consequence, however. Demand that finds no home in a dozen licensed platforms does not simply disappear. It goes looking elsewhere, and that is where the state starts losing money.
The economics of the grey zone
The losses are not hypothetical. Studies cited by Swiss public broadcasting estimate that unlicensed operators cost the state over CHF200 million a year in missed contributions to the social security system, since offshore platforms pay nothing into the funds that licensed casinos are obliged to support. Most of these operators are based in Malta or Gibraltar, where their business is perfectly legal. Swiss authorities can block their domains but cannot prosecute the companies behind them.
This is the enforcement gap that no blacklist can fully close. A blocked operator registers a new domain within days, while the revenue it collects from Swiss players never touches the Swiss tax base. British regulators are watching a similar pattern in the UK, where illicit operators recruit openly on social media despite one of the most developed licensing regimes in the world.
The Swiss evaluation will therefore be read well beyond Bern. If even a market this small and this tightly sealed cannot starve the grey zone, larger jurisdictions will want to know why.
What happens next
What happens next depends on the report due later this year. The plausible outcomes range from technical fixes, such as payment blocking to complement DNS filters, to a more fundamental debate about whether a wider legal offering would channel players better than a narrow one. Regulators across Europe face versions of the same dilemma, as the ongoing reform discussion around the UK online casino market shows. Switzerland is simply the first to put its answer in writing.
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