Frameworks written to tax Netflix, Uber and Spotify are reshaping market access for online gambling. In Mexico, they could offer a lawful alternative to sub-licensing, while in Chile they have created tax liability in a market that still has no online gambling law at all.
Operators entering Mexico’s online gambling market have long had one main route: find one of the 39 land-based permit holders, piggyback on its licence, and pay a sub-licence fee, a revenue share, or similar arrangement.
Since 1 January 2026, however, they have had another option, one that sits outside the country’s gambling licensing regime. But experts say operators are treading carefully, with the legal basis for the new route still open to question.
Mexico’s 2026 reform of the Special Tax on Production and Services law, the IEPS Law, brought betting offered over the internet by “digital platforms” squarely into the tax orbit of the Ministry of Finance, the SHCP. The practical effect is that a foreign operator can serve Mexican players lawfully by registering with the tax authority, paying the gaming tax and filing monthly reports, without a permit from the Secretariat of the Interior (SEGOB), without a sub-licence, and without partnering a Mexican company.
“It is not a traditional licence; it is another way to operate legally in the market, and almost nobody has explored it yet,” said Alfredo Lazcano, gaming lawyer and chair at Mexico City firm Lazcano Sámano. “Strictly speaking, a Malta Gaming Authority (MGA)-licensed entity can now provide online gambling into Mexico legally, without a physical presence, as long as it complies with the tax requirements.”
A reform that hasn’t arrived
Mexico has been trying to overhaul its gambling regime, and to write dedicated rules for the online sector, for several years. At the end of last year, the industry believed reform was finally within reach: SEGOB had convened a consultation that brought regulators, operators, suppliers and associations around the same table. Since then, however, progress has stalled.
Dr Miguel Ángel Ochoa Sánchez, president of AIEJA, told NEXT.io recently: “Since March 2025, when we took part in the last working session convened by SEGOB, which was supposed to lead to the drafting of the new Federal Gaming and Lotteries Law, there has been no concrete progress, and we don’t even have sight of a draft.”
What the sector wants, he says, is a foundation rather than a favour: “Gaming in Mexico is a highly active, innovative, job-creating sector… But to do so fully and securely, we need a solid legal foundation that allows us to plan for the long term.”
That vacuum is where the tax route has appeared. While the gambling law stands still, the finance ministry has moved.
Written for Uber, inherited by gambling
The framework is not a gambling invention. It descends from Mexico’s 2019 amendment to the Value Added Tax (VAT) Law, which set out how to tax digital services supplied from abroad to Mexican residents: streaming, ride-hailing, food delivery, e-commerce.
The likes of Netflix, Uber and Amazon were the intended targets. More than 300 digital companies have registered under the regime, and Lazcano describes four years of tax collection as a success for the state: serious companies, monthly reporting, compliance officers, and no middleman between the business and the tax authority.
Gambling has been folded into that machinery rather than bolted on. Gambling companies, however, are subject to the gaming tax rather than VAT, which is expressly excluded for gambling activity.
Lazcano highlights that a registered digital platform does not require a permanent establishment for tax purposes, so an operator can stay offshore without being treated as a Mexican taxpayer on its worldwide activity. For Lazcano, this means that there are now two distinct regulatory and tax regimes under which betting and gambling companies may lawfully operate in Mexico.
Why nobody has moved first
If the pathway is that clean, the obvious question is why the market has not noticed. Lazcano’s answer is about incentives. “Today every international brand operating in Mexico allocates financial resources, in the form of revenue share or a fee, to a traditional permit holder to use its licence,” he said.
NEXT.io sources put the fee at around 8% of net gaming revenue, although Lazcano says the total cost can reach a much higher percentage, depending on the arrangements made with locally licensed companies. Moreover, intermediaries with relationships to permit holders usually broker entry and earn a referral fee for the introduction.
“These middlemen do not always operate under the same standards or transparency required by a reputable major global operator,” Lazcano said.
“Nobody is talking about the digital platform route, because economically it does not suit the permit holders or the brokers. It is completely legal, but no large company wants to take the first step. They already understand the opportunity. They are waiting for someone else to go first.”
Concerns over regulatory conflict
The second hesitation is institutional. Operators schooled in Europe and the United States are used to regulators litigating against each other, from European courts against member states to the current fight in the US between federal prediction-market rules and state gambling laws.
Clients ask what happens if SEGOB objects to a tax-based route into its market. Lazcano is unequivocal: “In Mexico that is not going to happen. We have a presidential regime, and the Ministry of Finance sits above the other ministries because it collects the revenue.”
There is also a stated policy purpose, he added. The government has been explicit that it wants to deal directly with operators rather than through third parties, cutting out influence-trafficking and reducing money-laundering risk at a moment when Washington is pressing Mexico hard on cartel finance. Under the permit-holder model, the authorities see aggregate figures reported by the licence holder; under the platform model they should see the revenue of each operator.
Meanwhile, SEGOB’s role remains an open question. New internal rules for the Ministry of the Interior, published in March 2025, gave its gaming directorate powers to establish “control mechanisms and rules” for digital platforms. However, NEXT.io understands that no action has been taken to date.
Chile: the tax without the law
Mexico is not the only market where digital-platform taxation is colliding with an unresolved question: when does taxing online gambling start to look like regulating it?
Chile has yet to regulate online gambling, although a licensing bill is making its way through the Senate. Sources do not expect a regulated market to emerge until late 2027 or early 2028.
Since July, however, Chile has applied a 19% digital VAT to gambling-related services supplied by foreign platforms to customers in the country. The tax sits within the digital-services regime introduced in 2020 for companies such as Netflix and Spotify.
The tax authority has been careful to frame it as a tax measure alone: it does not legalise online gambling, and the authority does not supervise the platforms.
That distinction has done little to settle the debate.
Cecilia Valdés, president of Chile’s casino association ACCJ, argued that the state had effectively legitimised illegal operators in pursuit of tax revenue, rather than putting in place a framework for online gambling first.
She told NEXT.io: “Chile has an important opportunity to build a modern, competitive, and responsible online gambling market. There is strong interest from serious international operators, but many companies with high compliance standards cannot enter a country where the activity is still unregulated.
“That is why we insist on doing things properly: first, clear rules, oversight, and a level playing field; then, the opening of the market. Only then will we be able to attract formal investment and keep out those who are currently operating outside the law.”
A foothold before regulation?
The online sector sees it differently.
The Chilean Association of Online Betting Platforms, aPAL, welcomed the return of a mechanism to declare and pay tax in Chile. The association said that operators had paid this tax until 2023, and many in the sector see the digital VAT as a potential first step towards regulation.
So far, however, compliance has been partial.
Twenty-five platforms operated by 19 companies registered, including Betano, Coolbet, Betway and Novibet. Others stayed out. The tax authority subsequently identified a further group of major operators, including bet365, PokerStars, GGPoker, LeoVegas and Roobet, and moved to make banks and card processors responsible for withholding the 19% tax at transaction level.
The numbers underline the uncertainty. Even taken together, the registered and identified operators represent only a fraction of the roughly 1,000 domains NEXT.io understands are accessible from Chile. Operators are also still unclear about what the tax base should be: gross revenue, net revenue or deposits.
For an industry waiting for a gambling law that may still be years away, Chile is therefore in an unusual position: operators can be taxed, but they cannot yet be licensed.
Learn more about Latin America’s key gambling markets in our upcoming market report, covering Brazil, Mexico, Peru, Argentina, Colombia and Chile.
Dingnews.com 02/09/2026