The committee in charge of gaming in the Swedish parliament (Riksdag) has turned down a proposal to tighten advertising regulations for so-called “higher risk” gaming.
The Culture Committee of the Riksdag was looking at a gaming reform bill that was aiming to reduce harm to more vulnerable consumers. At first the government had mulled a ban on “high risk” gaming ads between 6 a.m. and 9 p.m. The draft said such ads should be subject to “adjusted moderation, i.e. different rules for the type of gaming involved.
The Culture Committee disagreed, declaring that “adjusted moderation” would be “an attempt to implement a risk classification by the back door.” It added that this “further risks eroding the regulated market for those actors who have a loose license, pay Swedish tax and maintain a high level of consumer protection and who, with an adjusted requirement, do not have the opportunity to market their products to a wider extent.”
The committee added that it was “too early to implement changes in the field of marketing as the practice has just been established.”
It concluded, “When re-regulating the gaming market, it was judged to be difficult to divide the forms of gaming into more or less risky games in a long-term sustainable way and let this alone be the guiding principle for the design of the regulation. There is no reason to make a different assessment now.”
