Europe’s Gambling Rulebook Is Quietly Being Rewritten

For much of the past year, Europe’s gambling watchdogs have been fixated on two familiar adversaries: rising taxes and the black market. The higher levies introduced across several jurisdictions in 2025 were designed to raise public revenues and curb excessive gambling, while tougher enforcement was meant to drive illegal operators out of the shadows. Yet the headlines that followed painted a far more complicated picture. Licensed companies complained that their margins were being squeezed, regulators lamented the stubborn resilience of illegal sites, and for consumers there was little evidence that stricter rules had actually delivered better protection.

As 2026 begins, the more interesting question for Europe’s iGaming sector is no longer whether those pressures will continue, but what new forces are starting to shape the regulatory landscape. Industry insiders suggest the next phase will not come in the form of another sudden tax shock, but through something slower and potentially more transformative: a steady drift toward affordability checks, shared technical standards and a kind of practical harmonisation across borders. This will not arrive through a single EU-wide gambling statute, but through quieter, more technical channels that could ultimately reshape how operators function and how fragmented the market really is.

For decades, gambling regulation has been defended on moral, public health and fiscal grounds, and that is unlikely to change. But Europe’s online gambling market is inherently borderless, while national rules increasingly collide with shared systems for payments, platforms, data and algorithms. The result is a form of harmonisation that already binds operators together, whether national regulators openly acknowledge it or not. Companies across the EU must comply with the General Data Protection Regulation, anti-money laundering laws, consumer protection rules and, increasingly, the Digital Services Act. The forthcoming AI Act will add yet another layer, governing how automated systems assess risk, personalise offers or trigger player interventions. None of these laws were written specifically for gambling, but taken together they standardise a large part of the compliance machinery that surrounds it.

That horizontal web of regulation makes technical convergence far easier than political harmonisation. Bjorn Fuchs, chairman of the Dutch trade association VNLOK, notes that there is already “a move towards harmonisation in European gambling, through various ongoing projects, co-operation and research”, even though a great deal of work remains. Dr Wulf Hambach, managing partner at Hambach & Hambach, agrees that regulators are sharing experiences more intensively across markets, but he also observes that national authorities remain wary of simply importing foreign standards wholesale.

History explains that caution. In many regulated industries, legal harmonisation alone has rarely delivered consistent results. As Hambach puts it, “European experience across regulated industries shows that regulatory harmonisation rarely succeeds through top-down political acts.” Financial services provide a particularly vivid example. Early EU frameworks relied on minimum harmonisation and mutual recognition, on the assumption that shared rules would automatically produce similar outcomes. The financial crisis exposed the limits of that approach. “Legal harmonisation is necessary but insufficient,” Hambach argues. The same lesson can be seen in payments and data protection: even under fully harmonised legal regimes, enforcement cultures differ, and so do outcomes. “Convergence only becomes effective when supervisory expectations, enforcement practices and operational interpretations are aligned,” he says. Otherwise, “even highly harmonised legal frameworks can magnify differences in national regulatory culture”.

For gambling, the implication is uncomfortable but straightforward. A single EU gambling law is neither realistic nor even essential. What truly matters is whether regulators can agree on common technical definitions — of harm indicators, risk metrics and reporting formats — and align their supervisory expectations around them.

That is where standards bodies and industry initiatives come into play. The European Committee for Standardisation has already approved EN 17531, a shared reporting standard designed to support online gambling supervision. The European Gaming and Betting Association has also promoted standardised “markers of harm” to help identify risky behaviour across jurisdictions. These tools may be described as voluntary, but Hambach warns that in regulated industries they rarely remain so. Once supervisors start to build their oversight systems around them, voluntary standards tend to become de facto obligations. He points to Germany’s experience with information-security rules, where ISO/IEC 27001 began as a best-practice framework but is now widely treated as a licensing requirement even without being explicitly written into law.

The same process is likely to play out with AI-driven harm detection in European gambling. Pekka Ilmivalta, head of Nordic Legal’s Finnish office and a veteran of gambling reform, predicts that AI and harm-detection standards “will certainly develop from being a best practice to become a compliance requirement”. The unanswered question, he says, is whether regulators will simply set expectations or take on a more direct, data-driven supervisory role. Fuchs stresses that “AI harm detection systems are a means to an end”, but he sees their promise. “When there are sufficient common standards for elements regarding harm detection, AI systems could most definitely become a foundation for future enforcement and licensing,” he says, adding that real-time behavioural analysis is already strengthening consumer protection.

Not everyone is convinced that standardisation will automatically lead to true harmonisation. In Denmark, Morten Rønde of Spillebranchen doubts Europe is moving toward real alignment, arguing that national rules are still shaped more by “local opinion trends rather than solid scientific evidence”. He also cautions against rigid, uniform controls. Experience from finance and data protection, he says, shows that principle-based, technologically neutral regulation works better than fixed thresholds. Even so, critics acknowledge that once regulators start relying on shared data structures and indicators, it becomes harder to sustain wide divergences between countries.

The Netherlands offers a vivid illustration of both the promise and the peril of Europe’s current trajectory. The country only liberalised online gambling in 2021, yet it is already rethinking its approach after political attitudes toward the sector hardened dramatically. Policymakers are now debating tighter financial limits, potentially linked to players’ means, and commissioning studies to evaluate their effects. Fuchs understands the logic. “If we’re committed to consumer protection, we should strive for the most effective way to do so. As such, an affordability-based approach is a good perspective,” he says, noting that versions of affordability checks already exist across Europe. But he also issues a warning that Dutch regulators know well: “Over-asking the consumer will inevitably push them towards the black market.”

Rønde is even more direct. With channelisation in the Netherlands reportedly hovering around 50%, he calls it “a serious warning sign”. Advertising bans, affordability rules and high taxes may all have contributed, but the conclusion is stark. “There is little reason for other countries to look to the Netherlands for regulatory inspiration,” he says. Ilmivalta takes a more cautious view. He expects the Dutch experience to be closely watched but hopes it will not become a European template. “Most legislations are missing relevant information to support effective measures,” he argues. Instead of blunt financial limits, he favours “a less custodial AI-based means to enhance responsible gaming and to intervene when the individual need is real”. The contrast between static caps and dynamic assessment captures the broader shift now under way.

Looking back on 2025, Fuchs expects taxes and black-market enforcement to “remain very dominant headlines in 2026”, but he sees consumer protection and operator duty of care becoming inseparable from those debates. “Overregulating and over-taxing will cripple legal operators, which will diminish the net consumer protection,” he warns. If licensed products become unattractive or cumbersome, players will simply drift elsewhere. Rønde echoes that concern for mature markets like Britain and Denmark, where he believes new restrictions “risk putting licensed operators at an even greater disadvantage compared with black market operators”. Enforcement has not kept pace with the visibility of unlicensed brands on television and social media, he adds, and “if regulation continues to tighten without effective enforcement, there is a growing risk that consumers will be pushed away from licensed products and toward unregulated offerings.”

Germany offers perhaps the clearest example. Despite years of strict rules, channelisation into the legal online casino market remains weak, and studies cited by regulators suggest illegal sites still dominate online slots play. Hambach says this should surprise no one: punitive taxes and restrictive product rules can undermine the very channelling regulators want to achieve. The conclusion is not that regulation is pointless, but that blunt instruments quickly lose their effectiveness, prompting authorities to look instead toward affordability, data and technology.

One area where Europe lags badly is in helping players tell legal from illegal sites. In many countries, consumers struggle to distinguish between the two, especially as hybrid products blur traditional definitions of gambling. That confusion weakens both enforcement and trust. Other jurisdictions have learned this lesson. Ontario’s regulated online market, launched in 2022, made consumer recognition a core objective. By clearly signalling which operators were licensed and limiting how unregulated sites could present themselves, the province achieved high awareness of legal offerings. Research published in 2023 showed that more than 86% of Ontario’s online gamblers knowingly used regulated platforms. European regulators, by contrast, often admit that players cannot easily tell the difference.

Hambach draws a parallel with product safety. CE markings and mandatory labelling do not replace enforcement, but they make regulation visible, giving both consumers and authorities a lever to pull. Gambling, with its increasingly digital and hybrid formats, may need similar signals if channelisation is to improve.

Taken together, all of this points to a quieter but more profound shift in 2026. Taxes will rise in some places and enforcement drives will continue, but the deeper change will be a slow convergence built on common standards layered over EU-wide regimes, shared data structures, AI governance and closer cooperation between supervisors. Hambach expects the fight against the black market to remain central, but insists regulators must “strike a careful balance between the risk of further player migration to the black market and the need to strengthen the attractiveness and competitiveness of legal offerings”. That balance will increasingly be shaped by technical rules rather than headline-grabbing bans. Europe’s gambling sector may not see a single unified law, but it is likely to feel increasingly unified in how risk is measured, data is reported and technology is deployed — a shift that could prove far more consequential than any change in the tax rate.

By fLEXI tEAM