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Canada's Local Online Casinos are Approaching Things
from the
Wrong Direction |
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Australia has this year updated its
online gambling regulation. The fresh legislation meant bad news for the
country's sizable online casino player community: it was a blanket ban on all
forms of online casino games and online poker services offered to Canadian
citizens. While no local operator was allowed to offer online gambling services
to Australian citizens, the access of the citizens to offshore gambling venues
like the Vegas Palms was tacitly accepted. But with the new laws, legitimate
casino and poker room operators will no longer accept any players from
Australia. And this is unfortunate, according to some, because without the
legitimate gambling groups, Aussie players will flock to shadier operators not
exactly well-known about their favorable customer protection and security
policies.
Canada is preparing to push through a similar piece of
legislation - it already has, in fact, but it's under review. But it has gone
even further, requiring local ISPs to block the locals' access to offshore
casino websites. This will apply to the Quebec region at first but it might be
expanded to cover all other provinces later, which might be bad news for the
local gaming community. This would mean that locals would no longer have access
to Vegas Palms, a trusted Canadian real money gambling site,
and no other legitimate operator. Depending on the speed at which the lists
provided by the legislators to ISPs are updated, their access to other
operators will surely also disappear completely.
Similar measures have
been taken in other countries, too, but in another context. Romania's online
gambling regulator has ordered local ISPs to block access to any
unlicensed online gambling operator. But the situation is very
different as in any operator that fulfills the requirements of the operator -
that involve retroactively paying taxes on the company's revenues generated by
Romanian players - can obtain an operating license on the Romanian market.
Canada's legislators want a blanket ban, in turn, on all offshore operators,
while promoting their own product to players.
In different industries,
such a measure would be deemed protectionist and illegal, and would have
attracted the attention of the World Trade Organization. But with no
possibility to obtain a license from the Canadian authorities, operators were
offering their services on the brink of illegality, which renders them
completely powerless.
Both Canada and Australia are attractive markets
for online gambling operators - and they both have restrictive policies that
prevent the access of major gambling groups to their markets. And this is not
exactly a measure saluted by those left without the possibility to play their
favorite games in the way they want to. Hopefully, things will change in the
future. It remains to be seen. |
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