French Regulatory Notice

[CreativeUsername]

Hi guys,

We have received a notice from Arjel saying we cannot promote any casino site to French players. Even on the pages that we don't target French players, we have to hide the links for visitors from France. I have checked many major affiliate sites and found out that nobody really seems to bother with disabling links to visitors with French IP. Has anybody had an issue with Arjel before? How shall we approach to this issue?

Thanks for your advice in advance.

 

[Zuga]

after quick google search for anyone wondering what Arjel is http://www.arjel.fr/

Are you French btw? Might be why you got targeted . You can do quick GEO block for those french visitors , but then again not sure whats the portion of your traffic we talking here.

 

[CreativeUsername]

after quick google search for anyone wondering what Arjel is

Are you French btw? Might be why you got targeted . You can do quick GEO block for those french visitors , but then again not sure whats the portion of your traffic we talking here.

Thanks for your reply. We are neither French nor based in France; majority of our content is in English. French traffic is not in top 10; however, we are still talking about a significant amount of traffic here, although we don't specifically target French players. I am just curious whether we should worry about this notice. GEO block is a feasible option in the worst case, of course. However, I'd like to figure out what is the stance of other affiliates against this organization as many affiliate sites seem to accept visitors from France.

 

[TheGooner]

Most "french" traffic is not actually readers from France.
There are a lot of hosting platforms, and VPNs that use French IP addresses.

OVH SAS is a big one - full of site scanning bot traffic.

 

[eboy78]

ARJEL is trying to block french players to access forbidden casinos. But it is impossible to do so.
Many casinos accept players and affiliates sites are much happy to promote them.

At some point, casino will become legal I am sure. Too much money missed in taxes...

 

[Nerdybet]

Would using Cloudflare be an option, coupled with masking the registrar? That's common practice among affiliates in Scandinavia. However, it seems you're running a larger organization which likely has quite a few footprints online. I don't know what French law says, but you may wanna research the sort of penalty they could impose on you.

 

[Mikew]

If your domain is not a .fr then you will be OK.
You get a warning, then if you do not make any change, the will request for your domain to be blocked by ISP in France.
Your website will no longer be accessible by in France.
Talking from experience.
This started happening since last year and you may have realized that all well known french portals had all changed their domain name and moved their sites.