Judges back Holland against Ladbrokes on online gaming

Lotto

Nice to see that the UK isn't the only country where the state lottery gets special treatment.

What odds

Did Ladbrokes give on themselves winning this?

One law for us........

See US vs. Antigua at the WTO.

If the EU (allegedly a "single market".....yeah.....right...) can't get its bleedin' act together here, why the hell does anyone expect this sort of thing to work cross-border anywhere else?

Ladbrokes ought to lobby the British government to take this to the WTO. It'd be dead funny to watch the bright light of WTO trade rules being shone into the murky corners of European pork politics.

I have to admit though that the whole idea of NL being concerned about Internet scams strikes me as cripplingly funny as they have a bit of a dodgy reputation in this area...

Translation

"Other EU countries have introduced new licensing and regulation systems that embrace competition"

"Other EU countries allow foreigners to tax the stupid."

Dutch citizens?

No! Dutch residents.

As a Dutch citizen residing in the UK, I can quite happily and legally place bets with Messrs Hill, Ladbrokes and such like... unless I visit the parentals, from where I have to use an IP anonymiser

Another country

where it looks like Betfair may be blocked.

Dutch IP addresses

Is this really the only protection they have!?

So I can pay with a Dutch Debit card, from a Dutch bank, giving a Dutch address and as long as my IP says otherwise its legal.

Changing my IP is something I might do to get around restrictions, setting up offshore bank accounts registered to an address outside the country is something I would not.

I grew up in the UK. I live in the Netherlands.

It's nice here. They have a concept of social responsibility. It makes it a great place for my children to grow up in.

We are in no way constrained here in the Netherlands. If you seriously, honestly, want to give your money away to greedy unscrupulous con artists, you can - we have those here too. There's a whole bunch of other things permitted here which are illegal in the UK, none of which I have any particular objection to (so why are they illegal in the UK? Who knows? Who cares? I live in the Netherlands).

What we don't have is the brutal ugliness of the organised gambling industry. There are casinos - there's even one at Schiphol, as I'm sure many Reg readers are aware - and lotteries and all sorts of other ways of blowing the housekeeping money, but there are not the grinding, strident, rebarbative intrusions offered by the bookies.

Both in the UK and in Germany you see the gambling industry shitting on the high streets and the billboards of every town, felt-tipping their websites onto the bodies of second-rate prizefighters, larding the commercial breaks of cheap TV and generally representing an eyesore wherever they appear.

I don't want bookies here. I don't want them near here and I don't want them claiming the "right" to leech off my neighbours. I don't care for the business they are in, I don't believe in "a little flutter" or whatever the euphemism du jour is for making a pointless hole in your beer money. The judges have it right this time, and have earned their piece of my tax money.

And the absence of bookies certainly doesn't seem to discourage visitors from Fuckoff Island. Any Saturday night you will find scads of them bellowing, brawling, cursing and vomiting their way through the streets of Amsterdam. They're immediately recognisable - no other visiting group (mis)behaves like they do.

So, dear readers, I entreat you. By all means enjoy those freedoms which come from a British passport and a pound sterling </irony>. But please also understand that, after years of tiresome, jingoistic, anti-Brussels cant being spewed from the UK media, you can't expect to take out of a community if you adamantly refuse to put anything in, and that - surprise! - foreigners actually do know better sometimes.

AC because of the knee-jerk this is going to trigger in all the Billy Britains out there.

Nothing to do with restricting gambling...

The Dutch government could care less about their citizens being addicted to gambling. In fact, the Dutch government runs the Lotto, the state lottery, sports betting, numerous other forms of gambling, and umpteen casinos.

The problem is they just do not want competition, or a way for their citizens to gamble without being able get a piece of the pie.

The the?

De Lotto means "the Lotto", as you might suspect. So if you say "the De Lotto" it means "the the Lotto".

Brits were never good at languages, but that one's a bit obvious.