| | |  | Last Updated: Tuesday, June 19, 2007 |  | | | The EU's stance on online gambling
- Monday, 18 Dec 2006
Any interested observer of the online gambling industry in Europe could be forgiven for wondering what the point of the European Commission actually is in regards to the online gambling market. The UK is considering opening the market, Germany is working hard on closing it, Spain and Italy have opened it already, and Austria is raking in the cash. Where is the common policy that all these long-time members of the European Union are supposed to have? And if they call themselves a Union, how come everyone can still do whatever he wants? How come the online gambling industry is faced with such widely differing conditions in every single European country?
This week, the European Commission's spokesman Oliver Drewes has shed some light on these issues at a speech in Bulgaria. Speaking for the influential EC internal markets commissioner Charlie McCreevy, Drewes explained the underlining rational of the EU's demand for free markets for the online gambling industry all throughout Europe. He stated that the policy of the EU is to have a basic structure of law that is similar all throughout the region, with minor exemptions granted to economies that want to protect minorities or face special issues. Regarding the dispute about online gambling access he pointed out that free trade was one of those fundamental basic agreements throughout the EU and that for a member country to shut out online gambling companies from their neighbor countries they would have to need a very good reason for this.
Drewes also mentioned that at this time, the European Commission has 9-10 cases open against the blocking of services from outside with discriminatory practices, many of them no doubt related to the online gambling industry. The pressure is definitely building up on the countries that are still not working towards achieving an EU wide integrated market for online gambling services, and it is ironic that the only country blatantly unwilling to break their online casino monopoly would be Germany, one of the founding fathers of the European free trade idea. | |
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