The biggest European online gambling regulators, namely the Italian AAMS, the French ARJEL, the Spanish DGOJ and the Portugese SCML took part in a two-day conference in Barcelona. The main aim of the meeting was to deepen the collaboration between the regulated markets, in order to save users from cheating and other crimes, and to take up the fight against addiction together. Besides these, the possibility of a shared market arose, and all regulators agreed in the fact that this is the long-term goal of both players and providers.
One of the regulators announced that “the meeting aimed at confirming their common willingness to promote an operational cooperation in the field of regulation and enhancing exchanges of information. In addition, discussions took place on the conditions necessary for a possible shared liquidity in certain games among some of the countries participating to the meeting”.
The legalized Italian market, open since 2009, only allows Italian players to compete against each other, and traffic dropped dramatically in the past year. Although the French market (open since 2010) still accepts players from abroad, they also suffer from a decrease concerning the player base. The main reason for this is that the providers have to pay extremely high taxes. Because of this, many providers have already left the market, and the ones still operating try to compensate their losses with an unusually high rake policy. This, however, has only worked for a short time, as the number of players keeps dropping, which results in a severe income drop.
The Spanish market operates legally since 5th June 2012, and they also accept foreign players (although PokerStars has decided to make their .es site available only for the Spanish), but at the same time, income is dropping because of the uncertainty in the taxation of the players.
Portugal can be considered an odd-one-out in this group. Officially, the only company allowed to provide online gambling services in the country is SCML (offering lottery and sports betting), but they find it hard to rule out other competitors (they already managed to exclude Bwin, the company that advertised itself with Portugese football teams). Portugese players are able to access and use all big sites offering online gambling services. Because of this, SCML is also planning to regulate the market; they are currently at the stage of studying the pros and cons of the Spanish structure. It would not come as a surprise if a regulated and licenced market took over quite soon in Potrugal.
A possible shared market between the regulated countries has already been debated for a long time, but it is still questionable when this could come true.
