Home / Poker News August 2014 / Not all is Well with Dutch Regulation
Not all is Well with Dutch Regulation
Posted by: Mark Baldwing - Mon, 2014-08-18 08:21
Dutch lawmakers have been preparing to legalize and to regulate the
online poker and gaming market of the tiny country – once described as “a market full of potential” by Unibet CEO Henrik Tjarnstrom – but apparently, they’ve been getting it wrong for a number of rather obvious reasons.
Bas Jongmans, an attorney of the Dutch law firm Gaming Legal, has finally called the legalization efforts currently taking shape what they truly are: a discriminatory and expensive bundle of laws, born out of compromise between those hammering out the actual bills and a lobby of international operators.
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Indeed, this description fits every single country-wide legalization/regulation effort undertaken in the EU thus far. The French market is ailing and so is the Spanish one. The Italians might be slightly better off but they’re nowhere near their full potential, and they too might be going in the opposite direction. Why is this the case? Because the laws on which legalization and regulation is built in these countries are effectively designed to stifle competition, allowing a few hand-picked powerful operators to rule the markets unchallenged.
Jongmans has problems with the way land-based gambling operators in Holland are apparently discriminated against within the framework of the planned regulation. For years, he says, these operators have been promised some sort of compensation for their investments, and one potential form of compensation would’ve been facilitated access to the country’s online gaming market.
Jongmans, who does not believe lawmakers do indeed fully understand what they legislate on, isn’t particularly hopeful that the bill – which in its current form features a 20% tax on gross revenues derived from online gaming – will in any way be modified or improved before passed. The bottom line: the Dutch online gaming market may be headed the way of some of the above mentioned European markets.
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