Europe’s gambling regulators spent much of 2025 grappling with tax increases and black market enforcement. Licensed operators reported shrinking margins, illegal operators remained resilient, and consumer protection showed minimal improvement despite tightened regulation. As 2026 begins, industry experts suggest the next phase of regulation will be less dramatic but potentially more consequential: a gradual shift toward affordability controls, technical standards, and cross-border harmonisation.
Standards Before Statutes
Europe’s online gambling market is borderless, and national rules increasingly collide with shared infrastructure spanning payments, platforms, data, and algorithms. This creates a form of harmonisation that already binds operators, whether regulators acknowledge it or not.
Gambling firms across the EU must comply with the General Data Protection Regulation, anti-money laundering rules, consumer protection law, and increasingly, the Digital Services Act. The forthcoming AI Act will add another layer, governing how automated systems score risk, personalise player offers, or trigger interventions. None of these laws are gambling-specific, but together they standardise much of the compliance machinery around gambling.
This horizontal framework makes technical convergence easier than political harmonisation. Bjorn Fuchs, chairman of the Dutch trade body VNLOK, observes that there is already “a move towards harmonisation in European gambling, through various ongoing projects, cooperation and research,” even if much ground remains to be covered.
Dr. Wulf Hambach, managing partner at Hambach & Hambach, agrees that regulators are exchanging experiences more intensively between markets, but notes that national authorities remain cautious in importing foreign standards wholesale.
“European experience across regulated industries shows that regulatory harmonisation rarely succeeds through top-down political acts,” Hambach said. Financial services illustrate the point well. Early EU frameworks relied on minimum harmonisation and mutual recognition, assuming that shared rules would deliver consistent outcomes. The financial crisis exposed the flaw in that logic.
“Legal harmonisation is necessary but insufficient,” Hambach argues. “Convergence only becomes effective when supervisory expectations, enforcement practices and operational interpretations are aligned. Otherwise, even highly harmonised legal frameworks can magnify differences in national regulatory culture.”
The implication for gambling is clear: a single EU gambling law is neither realistic nor necessary. What matters is whether regulators can agree on common technical definitions of harm markers, risk indicators, and reporting formats, and align their supervisory expectations around them.
From Best Practice to Obligation
The European Committee for Standardisation has already approved EN 17531, a common reporting standard to support the supervision of online gambling. The European Gaming and Betting Association has also advanced standardised “markers of harm” designed to identify risky behaviour across markets.
Such initiatives are formally voluntary, but in practice, they rarely remain so, Hambach says. In many regulated sectors, voluntary standards become requirements once supervisors build their processes around them. Germany’s experience with information-security standards is instructive. ISO/IEC 27001, an international standard for information security management systems, began as best practice but is now widely treated as a licensing requirement, even without explicit statutory mandates.
The same dynamic is likely to apply to AI and harm-detection systems within European gambling. Pekka Ilmivalta, head of Nordic Legal’s Finnish office and a veteran of national gambling reform, predicts that AI and harm-detection standards “will certainly develop from being a best practice to become a compliance requirement.” The open question, he adds, is whether regulators will merely set expectations or assume a more central role in data-driven oversight.
Fuchs stresses that “AI harm detection systems are a means to an end,” but he sees their potential. “When there are sufficient common standards for elements regarding harm detection, AI systems could most definitely become a foundation for future enforcement and licensing,” he adds. Real-time analysis of behaviour, he argues, is already improving consumer protection.
Not everyone is convinced that standardisation equals harmonisation. In Denmark, Morten Rønde at Spillebranchen doubts that Europe is moving toward alignment, arguing that national measures remain driven by “local opinion trends rather than solid scientific evidence.” He also warns against rigid, one-size-fits-all controls. Experience from finance and data protection, he says, shows that principle-based, technologically neutral rules work better than static thresholds.
Yet even sceptics acknowledge that the direction of travel favours convergence. Once regulators begin to rely on shared data structures and indicators, divergence becomes harder to sustain.
The Dutch Experiment
Some markets could clearly benefit from a Europe-wide approach to regulation, particularly as political sentiment towards the gambling sector has suffered in markets like the Netherlands in recent years.
Having liberalised online gambling only in 2021, the Netherlands is already reconsidering its framework. Policymakers are discussing tighter financial limits, potentially linked to players’ means, and are commissioning studies to assess their impact.
Fuchs sees the logic. “If we’re committed to consumer protection, we should strive for the most effective way to do so. As such, an affordability-based approach is a good perspective,” he says, noting that elements of affordability already exist in various European regimes. But he also sounds a warning familiar to Dutch regulators: “Over-asking the consumer will inevitably push them towards the black market.”
Rønde is blunter. With channelisation in the Netherlands reportedly around 50%, he calls the situation “a serious warning sign.” Advertising bans, affordability limits, and high taxes may each have played a role, but the outcome is clear. “There is little reason for other countries to look to the Netherlands for regulatory inspiration,” he argues.
Others are more cautious. Ilmivalta says the Dutch experience will be watched closely, but hopes it does not become a continental template. “Most legislations are missing relevant information to support effective measures,” he says. Rather than rigid financial thresholds, he would prefer “a less custodial AI-based means to enhance responsible gaming and to intervene when the individual need is real.”
That distinction between static limits and dynamic assessment points to a broader regulatory shift.
What Will Dominate Regulation in 2026?
Fuchs expects taxes and black market enforcement to “remain very dominant headlines in 2026.” He says consumer protection and operator duty of care are becoming inseparable from those debates. “Overregulating and over-taxing will cripple legal operators, which will diminish the net consumer protection,” he says. The logic is simple: if licensed products become unattractive or awkward, players drift elsewhere.
That risk is already visible in markets that have tightened fastest. Rønde warns that regulatory changes in large, mature markets such as Britain and Denmark “risk putting licensed operators at an even greater disadvantage compared with black market operators.”
Enforcement, he notes, has struggled to keep pace with unlicensed visibility on television and social media. “If regulation continues to tighten without effective enforcement, there is a growing risk that consumers will be pushed away from licensed products and toward unregulated offerings.”
Germany offers a particularly stark illustration. Despite years of restrictive measures, channelisation into the legal online casino market remains weak. Recent studies cited by regulators suggest that illegal offerings still command a large share of online slots play. Hambach notes that this should not surprise anyone: punitive taxation and product constraints can undermine the very channelling regulators seek to achieve.
The lesson is not that regulation is futile, but that blunt instruments have diminishing returns. That has prompted regulators to look elsewhere toward affordability, data, and technology.
The Future of Black Market Growth
One area where Europe lags noticeably is market-facing clarity. In many countries, players struggle to distinguish legal from illegal offers online, particularly as hybrid formats blur traditional definitions of gambling. That undermines both enforcement and consumer trust.
Other jurisdictions have learned this lesson the hard way. Ontario’s online gaming framework, launched in 2022, treated consumer recognition as a regulatory objective. By making licensing visible and restricting how unregulated operators present themselves, the province achieved high awareness of legal sites. Research published in 2023 showed that more than 86% of Ontario’s online gamblers knowingly played on regulated platforms. European regulators, by contrast, often concede that players cannot easily tell the difference.
The parallel with product safety is telling. As Hambach highlights, CE markings and mandatory labelling across legal gambling sites cannot replace enforcement, but they make regulation visible, giving consumers and authorities leverage. Gambling, with its increasingly digital and hybrid products, may need similar signals if channelling is to improve.
A Quieter Convergence
Taken together, these threads point to a subtler regulatory shift in 2026. Taxes will rise in some places; enforcement campaigns will continue. But the more durable change is likely to be a gradual convergence: common standards layered onto existing EU-wide regimes, shared data and AI governance, and closer cooperation among supervisors.
Hambach expects the fight against the black market to remain central, but stresses the need to “strike a careful balance between the risk of further player migration to the black market and the need to strengthen the attractiveness and competitiveness of legal offerings.” That balance will increasingly be mediated through technical rules rather than headline-grabbing bans.
European gambling regulation could see operators and regulators acting in a more harmonised manner across borders, by agreeing on how to measure risk, report data, and deploy technology, even as each member state keeps full control over its gambling laws. For operators, that may feel less dramatic than a new tax rate but it could prove far more consequential.
Source: igamingbusiness
