It’s been 17 years since the U.K.’s Gambling Act was updated, but Gambling Commission deputy CEO Sarah Gardner January 11 told an audience of Danish regulators that warnings about the risks of an exploding black market are “overstated.”
Gaming sites operating outside of the law will be hard to stamp out, Gardner said, as reported by iGaming Business, and added that such action is “further upstream.” This is pretty much the same line that has been taken by the commission: that illegal gambling does not pose a major threat to the legal variety.
Gardner told the audience, “There is an argument, sometimes made in Great Britain, that just because there are illegal sites and unregulated gambling – with no protections and bad outcomes for consumers – we should scale back or stop some of the interventions we think we need to make in the regulated market to mitigate against the risk of consumers jumping from regulated gambling into unregulated gambling.”
She said no regulator should knowingly allow illegal practices to continue. She added that the rapid innovations in iGaming means that regulators must constantly upgrade their skills in order to stay current.
She continued, “Innovation is… leading to experimentation, promotion and use of emerging products such as non-fungible tokens—or NFTs—‘synthetic shares’ and crypto currency.”
Gardner concluded, “These are products that we think gambling regulators need to be keeping watch on. They are becoming increasingly widespread and through them, what products can be defined and regulated as gambling is becoming increasingly blurred depending on each jurisdiction’s rules.”
