The long game

The long-awaited EC Green Paper on online gambling was finally published this week. Perhaps predictably, it goes long on issues of consumer protection, problem gambling, fraud and money laundering, and short on the impact of local restrictions on the free movement of services within the EU.

As a Green Paper, it’s essentially an evidence-gathering exercise by the Commission: a consultation designed to pull together a file of facts and information on which further policy-making will be based. Now clearly an evidence-based approach to policy and legislation in this area will be seen by many as a step in the right direction. But some of the EC’s rhetoric around this consultation, and the balance and weighting of their questions, suggests there’s little appetite at this stage for any big steps towards greater harmonisation of online gambling regulation: on the contrary, section 1.1 sets out the Commission’s stall pretty clearly, with an overarching objective of ensuring ‘the overall co-existence of the national systems’. So much for the Commission’s claims to be approaching the consultation ‘with an open mind’ (p4).

Dig deeper though, and perhaps there is some good news here – albeit no quick fix – for those opposed to local state monopolies, who want to see a level playing-field across Europe. Ultimately, if the EC wants to take steps towards a more harmonised position, it will need to counter the arguments that local monopolies are necessary and justified in order to minimise gambling-related problems. This new consultation exercise should help put some of the ‘consumer protection’ arguments firmly under the microscope: do the facts show anything specific about the French market for instance that would make promotion there by non-domestic EU operators harmful in a way that it’s not in say Great Britain?

Looked at from that perspective, and given that consumer/societal arguments will always tend to trump commercial concerns, perhaps the Green Paper’s apparently disproportionate focus on the former isn’t as discouraging as all that. But the timescale for any change will clearly not be rapid. For the time being at least, third party websites hosting advertising will need to continue to have complex and inefficient policies and processes for gambling ad acceptance and geo-location targeting. Sports teams, governing bodies and other rights holders will continue to be hampered in their efforts to derive sponsorship revenue from the gambling sector. And gambling operators will have to continue to see the idea of free trade within the EU as a long-term goal, not a constitutional right.