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    • The U.S. Can Learn Lessons From European Online Gaming


    To say the United States can learn lessons from their European counterparts is something of a bold statement but what we mean is that there are drawbacks in the European model which the U.S. can avoid if is plans sensibly for any potential legalisation.



    Although legalisation appears to be a likely outcome of the various bills which are currently being proposed in the higher echelons of the American political system, there's no telling when any possible legalisation would come into effect. It certainly wouldn't be instant, meaning that there is plenty of time to refine the bills and prepare correctly. We've reported extensively on how various states have proposed their own state wide bills in recent months and this may be part of the model for the future of online poker in the land of the free.



    This is where the drawbacks of the European model comes into play; the European Union is a collection of 27 nation states each of which have their own sovereign laws. The laws of each country are, like it or hate it, under the umbrella of the European Parliament but not for every single industry. One of those industries is online gaming and each country which allows this regulates it's own, creating a national regulator which licensees each operator which wants to be based within it's borders.



    Online Internal Market


    What this means in practice is that there is no uniform regulation across the entire EU; this is no accident - the Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection recently stated explicitly that it will not pass any new laws to regulate the industry at a Europe-wide level. In practice this means that operators can be licensed in one country and operate in many others, whether that country wants it or not. This is the omission that the U.S. could avoid - there is nothing wrong with this type of federal umbrella legislation if it helps to smooth integration between different areas. We know that several U.S. states are well-advanced in their efforts to kick-start intra-state online gaming but all their plans differ in some ways. Federal laws will also surely provide potential poker and roulette players with the confidence required to gamble online once more.



    Europe is a slightly different case of course and gambling is not even legal in every country within the European Union. Member nations have different social problems and standards of living but so do U.S. states. Offline gambling is legal in some U.S. states and not in others, so the similarities are there. So while the United States can learn one or two things from it's European counterpart, federal regulation of the gaming industry is not one of them.




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