European gambling regulation’s quiet convergence

For most of the past year, Europe’s gambling regulators have been transfixed by two familiar villains: tax hikes and the black market. Higher levies enforced in 2025 are meant to fund public spending and discourage excess, while tougher enforcement was supposed to squeeze out illegal operators.

Instead, many European headlines have told a more nuanced story. Licensed operators complain of shrinking margins and regulators of stubbornly resilient illegal operators, while in the end there has overall been minimal improvement in consumer protection as a result of tightened regulation.

As 2026 commences, the question for Europe’s iGaming industry is not whether these themes will persist, but what else is coming into view? According to a string of industry figures, the next phase of regulation is likely to be less dramatic than a sudden tax shock, but potentially more consequential: a gradual shift towards affordability controls, technical standards and de facto harmonisation across borders.

This is unlikely to happen through an EU-specific gambling law, but rather through quieter mechanisms that may ultimately reshape how the industry operates and limit fragmentation.

Standards before statutes 

For decades, gambling policy has been justified by moral, public health and fiscal considerations. That is unlikely to change. Yet Europe’s online market is borderless, and national rules increasingly collide with shared infrastructure: payments, platforms, data and algorithms. The result is a form of harmonisation that already binds operators, whether regulators acknowledge it or not. 

Gambling firms across the EU must comply with the General Data Protection Regulation, anti-money laundering rules, consumer protection law and, increasingly, the Digital Services Act. The forthcoming AI Act will add another layer, governing how automated systems score risk, personalise player offers or trigger interventions. None of these laws are gambling-specific, but together they standardise much of the compliance machinery around gambling. 

This horizontal framework makes technical convergence easier than political harmonisation. Bjorn Fuchs, chairman of the Dutch trade body VNLOK, observes that there is already “a move towards harmonisation in European gambling, through various ongoing projects, co-operation and research”, even if much ground remains to be covered.

Dr Wulf Hambach, managing partner at Hambach & Hambach, agrees that regulators are exchanging experiences more intensively between markets, but notes that national authorities remain cautious in importing foreign standards wholesale. 

History suggests why. In other regulated sectors, legal harmonisation has often proved insufficient on its own. As Hambach puts it: “European experience across regulated industries shows that regulatory harmonisation rarely succeeds through top-down political acts.”

Financial services illustrate the point well, he explains. Early EU frameworks relied on minimum harmonisation and mutual recognition, assuming that shared rules would deliver consistent outcomes. The financial crisis exposed the flaw in that logic. “Legal harmonisation is necessary but insufficient,” Hambach argues. 

The same lesson runs through payments and data protection. Even under fully harmonised regimes, outcomes diverge when enforcement cultures differ. “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”.

The implication for gambling is uncomfortable but clear. The general analysis is a single EU gambling law is neither realistic nor necessary. What matters is whether regulators can agree on common technical definitions – of harm markers, risk indicators, reporting formats – and align their supervisory expectations around them. 

From best practice to obligation 

This is where standards bodies and industry initiatives enter the frame. The European Committee for Standardisation has already approved EN 17531, a common reporting standard to support the supervision of online gambling. The European Gaming and Betting Association has also pushed ahead with standardised “markers of harm”, designed to identify risky behaviour across markets. 

Such initiatives are formally voluntary, but in practice, they rarely remain so, Hambach says. In many regulated sectors, voluntary standards become de facto requirements once supervisors build their processes around them. Germany’s experience with information-security standards is instructive. Hambach puts forward the example of ISO/IEC 27001, an international standard for information security management systems which began as best practice but is now widely treated as a licensing requirement, even without explicit statutory mandates. 

The same dynamic is likely to apply to AI and harm-detection systems within European gambling. Pekka Ilmivalta, head of Nordic Legal’s Finnish office and a veteran of national gambling reform, predicts that AI and harm-detection standards “will certainly develop from being a best practice to become a compliance requirement”. The open question, he adds, is whether regulators will merely set expectations or assume a more central role in data-driven oversight. 

Fuchs stresses that “AI harm detection systems are a means to an end”, but he sees their potential. “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 adds. Real-time analysis of behaviour, he argues, is already improving consumer protection. 

However, not everyone is convinced that standardisation equals harmonisation. In Denmark Morten Rønde at Spillebranchen doubts that Europe is moving toward de facto alignment, arguing that national measures remain driven by “local opinion trends rather than solid scientific evidence”. He also warns against rigid, one-size-fits-all controls. Experience from finance and data protection, he says, shows that principle-based, technologically neutral rules work better than static thresholds. 

Yet even sceptics acknowledge that the direction of travel favours convergence. Once regulators begin to rely on shared data structures and indicators, divergence becomes harder to sustain. 

The Dutch experiment in European gambling

Some markets in Europe could clearly benefit from a Europe-wide approach to regulation, particularly as political sentiment towards the European gambling sector has suffered massively in markets like the Netherlands in recent years.

Having liberalised online gambling only in 2021, the country is already reconsidering its framework. Policymakers are discussing tighter financial limits, potentially linked to players’ means, and are commissioning studies to assess their impact. 

Fuchs sees 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 elements of affordability already exist in various European regimes. But he also sounds a warning familiar to Dutch regulators: “Over-asking the consumer will inevitably push them towards the black market.” 

Rønde is blunter. With channelisation in the Netherlands reportedly around 50%, he calls the situation “a serious warning sign”. Advertising bans, affordability limits and high taxes may each have played a role, but the outcome is clear enough. “There is little reason for other countries to look to the Netherlands for regulatory inspiration,” he argues. 

Others are more cautious. Ilmivalta says the Dutch experience will be watched closely, but hopes it does not become a continental template for European gambling. “Most legislations are missing relevant information to support effective measures,” he says. Rather than rigid financial thresholds, he would prefer “a less custodial AI-based means to enhance responsible gaming and to intervene when the individual need is real”. 

That distinction – between static limits and dynamic assessment – points to a broader regulatory shift. 

What will dominate European gambling regulation in 2026?

Reflecting on regulation in 2025, Fuchs expects taxes and black market enforcement to “remain very dominant headlines in 2026”. He says consumer protection and operator duty of care are becoming inseparable from those debates. “Overregulating and over-taxing will cripple legal operators, which will diminish the net consumer protection,” he says. The logic is simple: if licensed products become unattractive or awkward, players drift elsewhere. 

That risk is already visible in markets that have tightened fastest. Rønde warns that regulatory changes in large, mature European gambling markets such as Britain and Denmark “risk putting licensed operators at an even greater disadvantage compared with black market operators”. 

Enforcement, he notes, has struggled to keep pace with unlicensed visibility on television and social media. “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 a particularly stark illustration. Despite years of restrictive measures, channelisation into the legal online casino market remains weak. Recent studies cited by regulators suggest that illegal offerings still command a large share of online slots play. Hambach notes that this should not surprise anyone: punitive taxation and product constraints can undermine the very channelling regulators seek to achieve. 

The lesson is not that regulation is futile, but that blunt instruments have diminishing returns. That has prompted regulators to look elsewhere – toward affordability, data and technology. 

The future of black market growth

One area where Europe lags noticeably is market-facing clarity. In many countries, players struggle to distinguish legal from illegal offers online, particularly as hybrid formats blur traditional definitions of gambling. That undermines both enforcement and consumer trust. 

Other jurisdictions have learned this lesson the hard way. Ontario’s online gaming framework, launched in 2022, treated consumer recognition as a regulatory objective. By making licensing visible and restricting how unregulated operators present themselves, the province achieved high awareness of legal sites. Research published in 2023 showed that more than 86% of Ontario’s online gamblers knowingly played on regulated platforms. European regulators, by contrast, often concede that players cannot easily tell the difference. 

The parallel with product safety is telling. As Hambach highlights, CE markings and mandatory labelling across legal gambling sites cannot replace enforcement, but they make regulation visible, giving consumers and authorities leverage. Gambling, with its increasingly digital and hybrid products, may need similar signals if channelling is to improve. 

A quieter convergence 

Taken together, these threads point to a subtler regulatory shift in 2026. Taxes will rise in some places; enforcement campaigns will continue. But the more durable change is likely to be a gradual convergence: common standards layered onto existing EU-wide regimes, shared data and AI governance and closer cooperation among supervisors. 

Hambach expects the fight against the black market to remain central, but stresses the need to “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 mediated through technical rules rather than headline-grabbing bans. 

European gambling regulation could see operators and regulators acting in a more harmonised manner across borders, by agreeing on how to measure risk, report data and deploy technology, even as each member state keeps full control over its European gambling laws. For operators, that may feel less dramatic than a new tax rate – but it could prove far more consequential.