Following the most recent reports on the Netherlands gambling market launch, the country is expected to start the process of regulating and licensing online gambling facilities in July 2020. The main goal is to launch a fully regulated, Dutch online gaming market at the beginning of 2021. This statement came from the country’s major gaming regulator Kansspelautoriteit following the country enabling Remote Gambling Act after much debate.
Several months before in February, the country’s Senate finally conducted voting in reference to the Remote Gambling Bill. After the voting process, the Dutch Senate approved the bill. This means that licensing of online gambling operators in the country will start the very next year. The approval of the Remote Gambling Bill was a long-lasting process as it was approved many months before by the country’s Parliament lower house.
The Netherlands Moving Forward Towards Regulation
With the country’s Parliament, lower house approving the Remote Gambling Bill three years ago and now with the Dutch Senate’s approval, the country can finally take further steps towards completely restructuring the regulation process of their online gaming market. Following the latest efforts done, the country finally allows international online gambling facilities to apply for iGaming licensing.
Since the major online gaming regulator in the country is Kansspelautoriteir, all license applications have to be submitted to this regulator. In other words, only license applications submitted to Kansspelautoriteir can be approved later on. Despite the fact that the Remote Gambling Bill has long passed, the process of licensing foreign iGaming operators cannot begin until 2020. Since the process of regulating the market takes months, the upcoming iGaming industry’s regulatory system cannot be operational until the early months of 2021.
This is great news for foreign iGaming operators is the Netherlands features a very attractive area for this industry due to the rapid increase in popularity of online gambling and gambling in general. In fact, Dutch players remain increasing their iGaming and gambling activities and foreign operators want to hop on the bandwagon. Despite the fact that the main gambling regulator in the country Kansspelautoriteit has tried for several years to pause unregulated gaming in the area, it did not have enough power to regulate the industry efficiently based on the country’s current laws.
The Biggest Legislative Breakthrough
Once the upcoming iGaming industry-related regulations are active, all sorts of iGaming operators will have to fully adopt specific tools and policies which are employed in order to minimize the potential risk of gaming addictions. This means that players will be much better protected especially as operators will have to employ self-exclusion programs. These programs allow punters to exclude themselves from gaming for a specific time period whenever they like.
Following this big legislative breakthrough, the Kansspelautoriteit Chairman, Rene Jansen said that the country’s regulator will probably start accepting applications in 2020. He also added that the regulator also has to wait on the country’s Ministry of Security and Justice to modify additional technical regulations related to the Remote Gambling Act. Due to this reason, the major regulator cannot start offering licenses for iGmaing operators until the final technicalities have been modified. Either way, the country’s regulated online gambling market is set to launch on the 1st of January 2021.
