Holland publishes draft igaming conditions
The national regulator has published the conditions for licence applications, which are due to open on March 1.
The Netherlands.- The Dutch gambling regulator, Kansspelautoriteit (KSA), has published the draft terms and conditions for licence applications under the Netherlands’ new Remote Gambling Act (KOA).
The licensing window for online gaming in Holland will open on March 1, with operations to go live from September 1.
The KSA has published draft versions of its KOA Policy Rules and KOA Model Permits. Final versions will be published in mid-January.
Along with the policy rules, the KSA has provided an inspection schedule detailing the systems and technical requirements that applicants must prepare for inspection.
It said that potential applicants will be able to take part in “feasibility tests” up until mid-January.
It said: “KSA has approached a number of parties to participate in the feasibility test. These are the current country-specific licensees, (international) industry associations and a few law firms.”
Applicants will have to complete a form on the KSA website, indicating what type of games they are applying to offer.
They will need to provide policies on a series of issues including marketing policy, detailing measures to prevent “aggressive advertising”, and addiction prevention policies.
All outsourced tasks must be revealed along with a risk assessment on outsourcing policy.
The new details also explain how Holland’s “cooling off” requirements will be applied.
The KSA said licences would be granted without any doubts provided an operator had not recently offered online games to the Dutch market and there were “no other reasons to doubt reliability”.
In order to determine whether an applicant had offered games in the Netherlands, the KSA said it would examine whether it had offered games on .nl websites in the previous 32 months.
It will also look at whether website text or advertising was written in Dutch and whether adverts were placed in Dutch media, or contained words, imagery or concepts associated with the Netherlands.
There appears to be no clear line on how many offences will result in an application being rejected, but a higher number of offences and more recent offences would make it more likely to have an application rejected.
