EU REGULATION
While full legal harmonization without aligned procedures may still result in inconsistent application, harmonizing certain procedures first can deliver practical convergence even where substantive rules would remain national. Further harmonisation can be advanced through supervisory convergence. Gambling regulators could pursue a similar convergence pathway by jointly developing supervisory handbooks, sharing case studies, and agreeing on baseline expectations for licensing reviews, audits, enforcement and sanctions. This would not eliminate national discretion, but it may well reduce unpredictability for cross-border operators 10 . Finally, the harmonization must address market-facing clarity. Other sectors have learned that regulation, and most importantly, channelling, fails if consumers cannot recognise regulated products. In online gambling, the inability of players to distinguish legal from illegal offers undermines both consumer protection and enforcement credibility. Harmonization here means shared principles for consumer- facing signals: consistent use of licensing identifiers, clear disclosures, and restrictions on how unlicensed or hybrid products present themselves. For example, Ontario’s online gaming framework explicitly treats consumer recognition as a regulatory objective. When Ontario opened its regulated online gambling market in April 2022, regulators acknowledged that enforcement alone would not displace the unregulated market unless players could clearly recognise which offers were legal and regulated. To address this, Ontario implemented a market-facing clarity model built around three elements: visible regulatory signals, clear public communication, and restrictions on how unregulated or non- authorised operators may present themselves.
In 2023, Ontario’s authorities published research 11 howing that more than 86 percent of Ontario’s online gamblers knowingly play on regulated sites. The study explicitly links this outcome to visibility, recognisability, and trust in the regulated market. The Ontario Attorney General described this as a “made-in- Ontario” model that displaces the unregulated market by making regulation visible to consumers. In contrast, in many European gambling regimes, players struggle to distinguish legal from illegal offers, especially online and in hybrid formats. Ontario’s experience mirrors what the EU has learned in product safety (CE-marking) and food regulation (mandatory labelling): consumer-facing signals are essential for enforcement credibility. Where consumers can easily identify regulated and legal products, regulators gain leverage; where they cannot, unregulated markets may still flourish. This is particularly important for hybrid gaming formats, which often fall outside traditional gambling definitions thus remaining license-free but which function similarly from the user’s perspective. Harmonisation would require a functional approach to such hybrid and/or borderline products. Prediction markets 12 , sweepstakes, social casinos, gamified investment tools, and media-based prize formats cannot be regulated effectively through rigid category boundaries. Other sectors have moved toward activity-based regulation, focusing on risk and consumer impact rather than formal labels. Gambling regulators will need to adopt the same logic if they want convergence in EU online gambling markets, especially where users need to distinguish license-free models from illegal gambling offers.
10 Germany illustrates how procedural harmonisation can be achieved within a decentralised legal framework. In the data protection field, the Data Protection Conference (Datenschutzkonferenz, “DSK”) serves as a coordination body through which federal and state data protection authorities agree on common interpretations, procedural approaches, and enforcement priorities. A similar logic underpins the creation of the Joint Gam- bling Authority of the German Federal States (Gemeinsame Glücksspielbehörde der Länder, GGL), which consolidates operational enforcement and provides a single procedural interface for licensing, supervision, and enforcement, despite gambling law remaining rooted in local legislative competence. 11 https://www.agco.ca/en/news/over-86-ontarios-online-gamblers-play-regulated-sites-study 12 Prediction markets sit at the intersection of gambling, financial instruments, and digital platforms, making them a stress test for Europe’s regulatory architecture. Across European single market, prediction markets are treated inconsistently. In some jurisdictions they are classified as gambling, in others they may resemble financial derivatives or fall into grey, unregulated areas. In summary, there is no dedicated framework at the EU level. Cross-border by design, they raise familiar concerns: consumer protection, market integrity, AML, and data governance. Horizontal EU rules (AML, GDPR, DSA) already apply, but there is lack of consumer-facing markers clearly distinguishing license-free, admissible offers from illegal gambling
IMGL MAGAZINE | MARCH 2026
PAGE 11
Made with FlippingBook flipbook maker