A comprehensive new survey of online gambling in Europe - published today by GamblingCompliance - has revealed the full extent to which the EU’s 27 member states are positioning themselves to tackle an activity which continues to generate controversy among politicians, legal professionals and other stakeholders across the continent.

While definitive legal clarity from either European officials in Brussels or from the European Court of Justice has been lacking, the new report nevertheless finds that 19 European governments are currently engaging in discussions regarding internet gambling in their jurisdictions.

The outcome of these debates is set to create a complex network of national licensing regimes across the continent, according to the survey, while liberal jurisdictions such as the UK and Malta find themselves increasingly isolated in their approach.

“Even as other EU member states follow the leads of Italy and the UK in expressly regulating internet gambling, the vast majority of European jurisdictions will continue to restrict access to their gambling markets to those operators they license and their government-sanctioned monopolies,” finds GamblingCompliance’s ‘Market Barriers: A European Online Gambling Study 2009’. 

Seven European states have already made concrete plans to introduce a national licensing system for remote gambling – plans which, in most cases, are to be underpinned by blocking mechanisms to halt financial transactions and deny internet access to unlicensed gambling websites.

“There is no question that ISP and payments blocking policies have gathered momentum in Europe since the introduction of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act in the United States in October 2006,” notes Harry Ashton, GamblingCompliance’s head of legal and regulatory research. 

“But, as experiences in US have shown, there are significant doubts as to how effective these blocking mechanisms will actually prove to be. In addition, the policies raise new legal questions for payments and internet service providers – including several related to European law,” Ashton added.

The report captures Europe’s online gaming sector at a critical stage as it morphs into one regulated by a series of national regimes, but Ashton notes that there are also new business opportunities emerging both for private operators and for traditional casino operators and national lotteries.

“We have clearly seen the increasing desire among media groups, terrestrial gaming operators and state-sanctioned lotteries to embrace online gambling,” he said.

“On the one hand, this represents new competition for internet gaming operators. However, it also provides an opportunity for them to offer their expertise to new market entrants either through partnerships and white label deals, or as software or payments solutions providers.”

The GamblingCompliance report provides a detailed analysis of relevant rules and restrictions applied to internet gambling for each of the 27 EU member states and Norway. It also provides a breakdown of applicable ECJ case law and recent infringement actions taken by the European Commission and other European bodies.

The independent report is the result of several months of research by GamblingCompliance’s seven-strong legal research team. It is the first major survey of Europe’s cross-border gambling market since a European Commission-backed study produced by the Swiss Institute of Comparative Law in 2006.

“The European online gambling landscape has shifted significantly over the past three years,” said Ashton. “With so many EU states currently considering changes this study assesses Europe’s online gambling sector at a critical moment in its development.”

For further information, or to purchase a copy of ‘Market Barriers: A European Online Gambling Study 2009’, please click here.