EGBA calls on EC to act in the online gambling sector

EGBA wants the Parliament and Commission to ensure Europe’s players in the online gambling sector are better protected.

UK.- The European Gaming and Betting Association (EGBA) has called on the incoming European Parliament and Commission (EC) to act in the online gambling sector to ensure Europe’s online gamblers are better protected. The association released a manifesto ahead of Europeans heading to the polls this week.

EGBA said that online betting represents more than 20% of the European gambling market. It believes that the lack of common European rules for online betting is jeopardising players safety when they play online. “That’s because EU countries have different rules for regulating online gambling and there are significant disparities in the quality of these national regulations, including the consumer protections available to online gamblers,” explained EGBA.

The association’s information was confirmed by a recent study by the City University of London which concluded that only one member state – Denmark – has fully implemented existing EU consumer protection guidelines for online gambling and that significant gaps exist in the protection of Europe’s players. The lack of common online gambling regulations also fails to protect Europe’s players from often bogus and unsupervised websites operated from outside the EU, says EGBA.

“In 2019, there’s no reason why online gamblers living in one member country should be less protected than those living in another – but they are. That’s why EGBA is calling for common EU rules and better regulatory cooperation to ensure a more consistent and better standard of protection for all Europe’s online gamblers, including access to a national self-exclusion register and protection against threats from outside the EU,” said Maarten Haijer, Secretary General, EGBA.

What EGBA wants

The EU manifesto calls for the European Commission to ensure the implementation of its 2014 Recommendation on consumer protection by all EU member states by proposing legally-binding measures. EGBA’s manifesto also asks the European Commission to propose a new policy for online gambling which takes account of recent digital developments – such as blockchain, artificial intelligence.

Moreover, it wants the EC to reinstate the expert group of national gambling authorities to ensure regular exchanges of best practices, dialogue and regulatory cooperation. EGBA also asks the EC to fully enforce EU law in the online gambling sector and EU member states to retain the competence for levying a point of consumption tax.