18 PUBLIC GAMING INTERNATIONAL • SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2022 Secretary General, Legal and Regulatory Affairs Management at Belgium National Lottery; Executive Chair, EL Legal & Regulatory Work-Group One of the most important discussions currently taking place in several European countries concerns advertising and gambling. From a public policy perspective, advertising and gambling have always been a sensitive issue. On the one hand, regulating a gambling market should be about protecting the players from excessive gambling and gambling addiction. On the other hand, communication and advertising around the legal offer of games-ofchance and lotteries is a necessity in order to channel players towards the legal offer, and away from illegal operators who are not accountable to proper standards of integrity and responsible gaming. There is a certain tension there, and a balance must be found between attracting players to the legal offer and stimulating the players to play more. But where is the balance? For instance, if you advertise the jackpot of a draw game ... Is that channeling the players to the legal offer, or stimulating the players to play more? One line of defense often invoked by illegal gambling providers facing criminal proceedings is to claim that the gambling policy of an EU Member State is contrary to the EU Treaty because that gambling policy is not aimed at protecting players in a coherent and systematic way. They say: “look at how much advertising is done by the monopoly holder. That advertising is intended to maximize revenue for the state and certainly not to protect players”. These criminal proceedings then lead to preliminary questions for the European Court of Justice. In this way, the European Court of Justice has made a lot of rulings in recent years, trying to provide guidelines on how Member States should structure their gambling policies to be in line with the EU Treaty. In recent years, often under pressure from illegal gambling providers, several Member States have opened their gambling markets in one way or another to an increasing variety of gambling categories, with most being operated by private enterprise. In other words, the gambling market is divided between the monopoly holder on the one hand, and other gambling providers on the other hand. As a result of this opening of the markets, the non-monopoly gambling providers were granted the right to advertise in a legal manner. Since every provider wants to gain as much market share as possible and as quickly as possible, when a gambling market opens up, the so-called ‘small gambling start-ups’ begin to advertise in a massive way. They are omnipresent in time and space. If they are criticized for saturating the market with so much publicity, they typically point the finger at the state lottery operator and claim that the monopolist is the real problem. Unfortunately, some politicians go along with that story, advocating for new and strict rules for the monopoly holder without imposing the same rules on the newly legal gambling providers. It appears that the rationale for this inequity is that the monopoly holder should be held to a higher standard and set the good example, that the newborn legal gambling providers Report from the EL (European Lotteries Association) Legal and Regulatory Work-Group on Advertising by Piet Van Baeveghem
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