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Deutsch: EDRi-Stellungnahme zur Konsultation über Online-Glücksspiele

European Digital Rights responded to the European Commission consultation on online gambling. As previously reported, an early draft of the consultation document appeared to be in favour of blocking, in principle, but recognised the failings of this approach, which it described as "challenging," "costly" and "ineffective".

The final version of the consultation document was more neutral, simply asking about existing schemes, effectiveness and ISP liability. The Commission finds itself in a difficult position with regard to this consultation because it is looking at the issue of online gambling with regard to protectionism of domestic services by Member States, real and perceived dangers with regard to gambling addiction and organised crime (money laundering and fraud, in particular) - without any clear idea either from the Commission or the Member States as regards the relative importance of each issue.

The situation is made even more complicated by Member States that claim to be in favour of blocking of foreign (including those legally registered in other EU Member States and non-EU ) websites for consumer protection reasons while their real motivation is simple, old-fashioned protectionism. Belgium provides the best example of this - on the one hand, it allowed blatantly fraudulent TV-based games to remain in operation for years (as shockingly illustrated by the Basta documentary team) and, on the other, it will launch a blocking system in January to "protect consumers." Rumours are that the main target of the blocking system is a fully legal and registered British website deemed to offer too much competition to Belgian services. Similarly, blocking in France "protects" French consumers from services in Britain which give significantly higher returns to gamblers compared with French services.

A further layer of complexity is added by a lack of clarity as to how the blocking would be done. The Commission only refers to DNS blocking and "IP blocking" (it is not clear if this means IP address blocking by the intermediary or geographic blocking by the sites themselves). Blocking via deep packet inspection, as appears possible in France in the short-to medium-term is not discussed.

In short, the Commission was consulting in order to address one or more of the problems mentioned above, with no clear prioritisation, and assessed one blocking solution (DNS blocking) and one unclear solution ("IP blocking"), while ignoring another (deep packet inspection).

EDRi's response looks at the necessity and proportionality of blocking in relation to each of the possible motivations that are mentioned by the Commission and in relation to each of the technologies listed by the Commission, as well as deep packet inspection. Our view is that blocking is not the "least restrictive alternative" in any of the possible scenarios and that blocking of gambling sites in order to protect domestic services from competition is a blatant and unacceptable affront to the most basic principles on which the European Union is based.

Consultation document - Green Paper: On on-line gambling in the Internal Market (24.03.2011)
http://ec.europa.eu/internal_market/consultations/docs/2011/online_gam...

EDRi's consultation response (29.07.2011)
http://www.edri.org/files/110729_gamblingconsultation_EDRI.pdf

Basta documentary (only in Dutch)
http://www.een.be/programmas/basta/de-mol-in-het-belspel

EDRi-gram: EC's leak describes blocking as "challenging", "costly" and ineffective (26.01.2011)
http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number9.2/blocking-commission-gambling

(Contribution by Joe McNamee - EDRi)