Casino City's iGaming Pocket Directory - 2013 Edition

Sponsored by JURISDICTIONS 105 Visit iGamingPocketDirectory.com for more information. In its place rose nation-by-nation regulation, thus changing the economics of online gaming. France, Italy, Spain and Belgium have all adopted forms of online gaming regulations. More nations are sure to join that group. But each nation adopts country-specific regulations, creating its own set of compliance headaches for operators. For example, in France, licensed operators can only offer sports betting and poker. Online casinos are illegal. And poker and sports betting are taxed heavily and in a specific way. Each poker pot is taxed 2 percent – which has to be paid by the players. The 2 percent tax is not figured into the rake. There’s also a 2 percent tax on tournament entries. There’s an 8.5 percent tax on each sports bet made. Private data for French players have to be stored on special servers. And French regulations are very specific about addressing problem gaming in certain ways, which need to be baked into the software. Just as important, French players cannot play against players outside France. The French market has been removed from the worldwide liquidity pool. So have the Spanish and Italian markets. More markets are moving in this direction as nation-by- nation regulation takes hold. So now instead of having one system that can be used around the world – or a set series of markets – operators have to comply with several regulatory structures, and that increases costs. And instead of paying one low tax rate in an offshore jurisdiction, operators have to pay much higher taxes in several jurisdictions. And instead of building and relying on global liquidity for games like poker and bingo, operators have to compete individually in nations and build a series of smaller liquidity pools. The economics of scale are – to a certain degree – thrown out. Yes, this is the brave new world of online gaming. And lots of countries, such as Canada and Belgium, are now regulating online games when they weren’t just a few years back. So that’s good for the industry. But from a regulatory policy standpoint, it would be nice to turn back the regulatory clock and try for a do-over. Because right now, there’s a mishmash of regulations, with no sign of harmonization on the horizon. IGAMING JURISDICTIONS OVERVIEW