Europe Soars While Pennsylvania Crashes: APCW Perspectives for 27 May, 2016

[APCW]

The online gambling situation in Pennsylvania
moved much more quickly than anticipated,
with things coming to a head this past week.
Also, we're discussing Internet betting in Europe,
including Romania, Poland and the U.K.


WATCH ON YOUTUBE



Pennsylvania Bills Fail: http://www.mcall.com/news/nationworl...524-story.html
The Future of FanDuel: http://calvinayre.com/2016/05/16/bus...ompany-future/
Poland Online Poker: http://calvinayre.com/2016/05/16/bus...er-home-games/
Romania Online Gambling: http://news.worldcasinodirectory.com...president-7243
Ladbrokes Gala-Coral Merger: http://www.igamingbusiness.com/news/...nge-shop-sales

[Sherlock]

You can add Czechs to the list of the censorship. Today the bill that will force ISPs block the websites that Ministry of Finance will tag went through. They do not even bother to do the courts the censorship. It will be some anonymous bureaucrats from department of finance and ISPs have to pay it from their pocket.

[negue]

Hi Todd,

And thank you for bringing us so many "good" news in this APCW Perspective video

I'm not aware of what's going on in Poland, nor in the Czech Republic, but what @Sherlock posted about CZ is already happening in Romania. As a matter of fact, the gambling law has been in effect for the past 8 months, and there were some operators that accepted the retroactive 20% tax on past income amounts since 2009. I will mention only the big/international sites that agreed to pay this "fee" and also paid a pretty good amount of cash to become licensed in Romania: Pokerstars, NetBet, Stanleybet, Betfair, 888, Unibet. There are also ~ 15 local/regional companies that were previously operating only on brick&mortar locations. They got licensed for accepting online gambling, set up their sites and started advertising.

If I may point out, the news article about Romania that appears on the video is from 2015. Since then, the president approved the law, the "national gambling office" started issuing licenses and threats ...And of course they also started a blacklist. It is updated ~ once a month, and at this moment contains 764 forbidden gambling sites. Being put on the blacklist means the respective site is not going to be accessible from Romania, because the office enforces this blacklisting through ISPs. When you try to access a blacklisted site, you are automatically redirected to a page hosted by the Romanian Special Communications Service, that tells you the site you were trying to access is not licensed, then proceeds to remind you about the EUR2,500 fine you can be "awarded" with if they catch you playing on an unlicensed site. "If".

The blacklisted sites are mainly slots/casino, but there are some poker rooms, rummy and lotto courier sites in there. Not all these black sheeps accepted their faith, and started changing their domain names, moving the content around. What this means is the office is fairly busy in detecting on what new address that site moved to

It did not matter at all that the biggest NGO's in the country protested and sent letters to the gambling office, Senate and president, saying that the office forcing ISP's to redirect their customers' visits is a violation of privacy. They simply did not answer and continued to add more and more site to that blacklist.

Thank God for the free DNS services! Personally I use the Google ones. And yes, it is that easy to circumvent the gambling law.

One final mention: the office would like to see affiliates getting licensed too (that must be new for most of you!), and the fee would be a cool EUR6,000 / year, and of course said affiliates would only be able to promote the licensed sites. Right now there are zero licensed affiliates. And, thanks to the whois privacy services and foreign hosting services, I don't think we'll see licensed affiliates soon.

Take care and good luck to everyone!

[ocreditor]

Great video. Thanks JT