Public Gaming Magazine Sept/Oct 2021

54 PUBLIC GAMING INTERNATIONAL • SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2021 T oday, the Internet is a daily reality in a (post- covid?) market where Lotteries face the heavy competition of legal and illegal online gambling companies. The global COVID pandemic has driven consumers to turn to online to meet their needs to interact with each other, to buy products and services, and to play the lottery. Now that we are beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel when we emerge from this COVID dominated period when so much of our business and everyday life had to take place online, we can expect many of the behaviours adopted during the pandemic to have taken the form of habits that are likely to continue? Lottery operators are wasting no time adapting to these tendencies and evolving along with the ‘new normal’. In the past, regulators and legislators did not understand the need for a rapid response to market challenges. It may have been the fear of losing control of the situation or it may have been that they did not really recognize the serious threat that the illegal market represents for legally authorized operators like government lotteries. Or maybe stakeholders in government-authorized lottery need to stretch more to convince regulators of the need to respond quickly to market challenges. Whatever the answer is, today’s circumstances and the new normal must are powerful catalyst driving regulatory change and now is a good time for Lottery operators and associations to mobilize their resources to advocate for their stakeholders. This requires, as it always has, a stronger multi-disciplinary approach whereby technology suppliers, sales and marketing people, responsible gaming advocates, security professionals as well as legal experts gather around the table with an open mind to work on these solutions. The EU legislator has leveraged the disruption caused by the pandemic to highlight the importance of its myriad new digital proposals: the Digital Services Act (“DSA”), the Digital Markets Act (“DMA”), the Data Act, the Artificial Intelligence Act (“AI Act”), the European Digital Identity Regulation (“EUID”), the revised e-Privacy Regulation, revised Anti- Money Laundering rules, rules on crypto- assets etc. The EU clearly understands the relevance of the digital realm for the age we live in. The time of the internet as an under-regulated space is now over. And this is for sure a benefit and an opportunity for Lotteries in the, hopefully soon-to-be, post-Covid period. Even if we focus just on two elements of the post-COVID digital world, the THE DIGITAL POST-COVID FUTURE IN THE EU – the need for a multidisciplinary roadmap into the future By Philippe Vlaemminck & Arno Couwenbergh 1 Pharumlegal – Brussels 1 Philippe Vlaemminck is the managing partner of pharumlegal ( philippe.vlaemminck@pharumlegal.eu ) and Arno Couwenbergh is an associate of pharumlegal ( arno. couwenbergh@pharumlegal.eu ) Continued on page 59