German gambling regulator stresses need for more adaptability in five-year review
The GGL has urged German legislators to consider how the regulator could be given more scope to adapt to the changing gambling market.
Key takeaways
- The GGL now oversees 129 licensed operators and 229 authorised websites. It conducted more than 600 compliance investigations in 2025 and monitored 5.3m registered players through its LUGAS system.
- Enforcement against illegal gambling has intensified, with prohibition proceedings rising from 68 in 2022 to 287 in 2025. The regulator says 1,843 illegal websites were blocked or removed from the German market, while 254 unlicensed operators ceased offering services in Germany.
- As Germany reviews the 2021 State Treaty on Gambling, the GGL is urging lawmakers to make the regulatory framework more flexible, arguing that gambling technology and business models are evolving faster than the current multi-year legislative process can respond.
Germany.- The German gambling regulator Gemeinsame Glücksspielbehörde der Länder (GGL) has been taking stock as it approaches the fifth anniversary of its creation. With the federal government currently reviewing German gambling legislation, it’s urging lawmakers to consider how it could be given more scope to adapt to a changing market in the next stage of its evolution.
“Five years ago, there was a political mandate. Today, there is a fully functional, nationwide specialist agency,” says GGL board member Ronald Benter introducing a review of the regulator’s work so far. “We had to recruit staff, build structures and expertise, and simultaneously shape a completely new supervisory area in practice. Today, we have the experience, the specialist knowledge, and the technical capabilities to effectively supervise a highly digitised and internationally oriented online gambling market. This is the starting point for the next stage of development.”
The GGL in numbers
Summarising its achievements and evolution, the GGL says it now has around 100 employees and has achieved its aims as set out under the 2021 Interstate Treaty on Gambling, which saw the 16 German states consolidate key areas of their respective gambling supervision into a single authority. Currently, 129 organisers and intermediaries have a licence from the GGL and are listed on the official whitelist. Some 229 gambling websites are authorised.
In 2025, the authority conducted more than 600 supervisory investigations of licensed operators to verify whether they were complying with legal requirements regarding player protection, advertising, and the specific design of their gambling offerings. Technical and organisational changes at the operators are also monitored. To date, the GGL has revoked two licences.
With the cross-border gambling oversight system LUGAS, the regulator has a central technical infrastructure for key areas of player protection and market monitoring. At the end of 2025, 5.3 million registered players were recorded in the central databases. Through the evaluation of valid safe server data, the oversight authority has an increasingly broad data basis at its disposal.
As for enforcement against unlicensed gambling operators, the regulator noted that it launched 287 prohibition proceedings in 2025, up from 68 in 2022. By the end of 2025, it had examined around 6,300 websites for illegal gambling offers or related advertising.
The authority says it is increasingly relying on a holistic enforcement approach. It not only targets individual providers but also systematically addresses their surrounding networks. Thus, in addition to payment service providers, advertising partners, affiliate networks, and hosting providers, other service providers involved in the technical infrastructure are increasingly being included in regulatory measures.
It says 1,843 illegal websites were no longer accessible from Germany in 2025 due to prohibitions or network blocks, while measures taken against payment service providers cut off 178 websites from access to established payment methods. Some 254 illegal providers had discontinued their services for the German market by the end of the year.
The visibility of illegal providers has also been reduced, as the GGL has successfully extended its enforcement to major digital platforms like Google. Since September 2024, only licensed gambling providers have been permitted to advertise via Google Ads in Germany.
“We don’t measure the success of our work solely by how many cases we pursue or how many rulings we issue, ” Benter emphasises. “What matters is the impact. With our measures, we disrupt the viability of illegal business models and make their operation more expensive in the long term. ”
He added: “The establishment of the GGL was also a challenging organisational step: 16 states are pooling essential parts of their gambling supervision in a single authority. After five years, we can say: This model works. Centralising expertise creates significant added value, especially in a digital and internationally driven market. Bringing together different perspectives and preparing decisions jointly is a demanding process.”
Adaptability needed to meet new challenges for regulated gambling in Germany
However, the GGL sees new challenges facing gambling regulation. Business models, technical structures, and forms of illegal gambling are evolving faster than a state treaty-based legal framework can change. The authority is therefore urging lawmakers to use the evaluation of the State Treaty on Gambling to make regulation more adaptable and to strengthen the GGL’s professional scope of action.
With the 2021 State Treaty on Gambling currently being evaluated, the GGL argues that the process should not only review the effectiveness of existing regulations but address the question of how regulation can respond to a market whose business models and technical structures can change, sometimes within just a few months.
Experience from the past five years reveals a tension, it says. While new business models, technological developments, or forms of illegal gambling can emerge quickly, changes to the state treaty legal framework regularly require a multi-year political and legislative process.
“We oversee a market whose business models and technical structures are sometimes changing faster than traditional administrative processes,” says Benter. “ Therefore, we must not only apply the law. We must understand the market technically. Good regulation today requires legal expertise, data competence, and technical understanding in equal measure.
“A market that is changing rapidly, both technologically and economically, needs a regulatory body that can react promptly to new developments ,” he adds. “We should therefore use the evaluation not only to review existing regulations, but also to answer the question of how our regulatory system can become faster and more adaptable.”
