September 3, 2015

After the thrills and spills of an Autumn during which the British regulator pulled in close to 200 remote licence applications, there is still plenty of legal and regulatory entertainment to be had across Europe (and further afield) as 2015 wears on. Further EU Member States are ‘liberalising’ or ‘regulating’ their domestic markets, with greater or lesser degrees of competence. Portugal and Romania, for example, are lurching towards something like ‘regulated markets’ status. Other Member States are facing challenges from an apparently reinvigorated European Commission. Having survived one judicial challenge over its ‘point-of-consumption’ regulation, a second and more thoughtful judgment has identified that the British authorities have EU questions to answer on their imposition of remote gambling duty. Paradoxically, the super-efficient Germans continue to propagate a complete shambles in the space that should be occupied by a sane and rational system of remote gambling regulation. In France, everyone including ARJEL realises that the net effect of French regulation has been to create a thriving black market but the political will to effect change appears to be absent. In Belgium, the aggression of enforcement action appears to be inversely proportionate to the compliance of local law with EU principles and there is dark talk of players beginning to be prosecuted in a jurisdiction whose judicature appears not to realise that it is subject to the ECJ. Lithuanian regulators appear to be following suit with requirements for a land-based presence in that state. The Netherlands continues on its interminable path to liberalisation with operators existing in the regulatory limbo of the Ministry of Justice’s ‘prioritisation criteria’ and we await substantive Irish regulation which everyone hopes will be simpler than the preliminary drafts. Fragmentary and piecemeal efforts are being made by individual regulatory authorities to harmonise regulation, but those efforts have not saved market entrants from the daunting prospect of one day having to run some 26 different licences, or existing operators from impediments such as partitioned liquidity and the need to re-test already certified software for new jurisdictions. So the landscape internationally remains as complex and volatile as ever.