According to a press release issued today by ARJEL -- the French Autorité de régulation des jeux en ligne -- the French, Portuguese, Spanish and Italian online gambling regulatory authorities have signed an agreement concerning online poker liquidity sharing.

From the press release:

This agreement aims at improving cooperation and information exchanges among the authorities to allow the liquidity sharing between licensed online poker operators, fighting the illegal market and fraud, guaranteeing player protection and the respect of the anti-money laundering prescriptions. The concrete implementation of the sharing will depend on the regulatory requirements of each jurisdiction. The authorities commit to make their best efforts to enable effective implementation by the end of the year.
The entire agreement and brief press release can be viewed here: http://www.arjel.fr/IMG/pdf/20170706CP.pdf

Buzzy is interested to hear what GPWA members think about the agreement.

As pointed out by Flush Draw, this is obviously great news for players:

As readers of this site likely already know, player liquidity is the lifeblood of an online poker room. The more players a poker room has, the more attractive its games look to prospective players. When these players see all the activity at the tables and decide to sign up, the tables get even more populated, making the poker room look even better. Conversely, online poker rooms with little activity do not attract more players, resulting in a death spiral as player numbers dwindle.

Naturally, the larger a population the online poker rooms can draw from, the more players they will be able to attract (all things being equal). When France, Spain, Portgual, and Italy decided to blockade themselves from each other and the rest of the world, they unnecessarily limited their potential player pools, putting their online poker industries behind the eight ball from the get go.
But Casino.org warns that the deal should not be considered a quick fix:

The implementation of the proposed system is likely to take time, and there’s no guarantee that it will provide a complete answer to the EU’s poker problems. The downward trend in online poker is international and has also been experienced in jurisdictions that have access to global player pools, such as the UK. But ring-fenced markets still suffer the most.

The experiment will be watched closely by the US online gambling jurisdictions of Nevada, New Jersey, and Delaware, and by those states considering following their lead, such as Pennsylvania.

Pokerstars parent Amaya will be watching too, as it has the most to gain from the integration of four markets in which the company is already dominant. The fusion of these markets would create a new PokerStars network which would likely be the second largest in the world, after its other global .com network.