Mayfair and Park Lane*
Government sansctioned monopoly?
*Good old fashioned pr0n mags, as well expensive streets
Ladbrokes has lost a long-running restriction of trade case against the De Lotto - the Dutch lottery and sports betting site - which objected to the company taking bets from Dutch citizens. The European Court of Justice has ruled that national authorities may restrict internet gaming if they so wish because laws on this issue …
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...
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.
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.
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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 Dutch Government"??? Which one? The one isn't there anymore, the one that is coming along in a month's time, or the one that is holding the door for the first and second?
Well, well. That's one bloke happily living in the NL... Poor guy... Been there done that 23 odd years long, and got sick and bored of it. My new Haven? The UK! Good country, socially well mixed and mingled, nobody cares if I stay below the radar (which I do, most of the time), and nobody minds my business (except Elf and Shavethem (which we oughta get rid of sooner now))...
So now what? You like the tut tut tut generated by a mindless neighbour who isn't quite correct himself? Good for you. I would love if they mind their f*cking problems, and not mine. I don't bother them with my opinion about them, so please leave the property.
<Apu>Thank you, and please come again!</Apu>