Regulatory news

A Swedish court has torn up Spelinspektionen's SEK8 million fine against LeoVegas's Roar Vegas, ruling the regulator never proved a duty-of-care breach. Coming weeks after the Svenska Spel reversal, it signals that Sweden's responsible-gambling enforcement model may be unenforceable until the rules are rewritten.

The Dutch cabinet has dropped its plan to raise the online slots age to 21 and instead bet its five-year strategy on a near-total ad ban and a market-wide deposit cap. The gamble: deepen protection inside the licensed market without pushing players, and their money, to the black market.

Veikkaus has tightened gambling loss checkpoints for under-25s but scrapped the annual limit for older players, days before Finland's monopoly opens to licensed competition. The carve-out for its highest-spending customers exposes the tension between safer gambling and defending market share ahead of 2027.

Finland has drawn roughly 50 licence applications since its window opened in March, already matching the ceiling industry observers projected for the entire market and reached more than a year before the 1 July 2027 launch that ends Veikkaus's monopoly. Officials say most applicants are foreign, while operators await detail on advertising, bonusing and enforcement.

Europe now has its first common technical framework for detecting risky gambling behaviour. The new EN 18144 standard, published by CEN and backed by the EGBA, gives operators a shared methodology that could reshape how player protection works across the continent.

Brussels has shared early estimates suggesting new EU-level taxes on online gambling, big tech and crypto could raise close to €11 billion a year for the 2028 to 2034 budget. A 3% levy on gambling net turnover could yield around €1.9 billion annually, though the figures are analytical options, not law, and any bloc-wide tax needs unanimous Member State approval.

New Jersey senators have advanced a trio of responsible gambling bills, led by S-2356's mandate to study and standardise advertising language, as the state's iGaming revenue hits a record $276.3 million and builds on the Division of Gaming Enforcement's new behavioural-monitoring standards.

Türkiye reported more than 84,000 illegal gambling sites for closure in 2025 and froze roughly 5.1 billion lira, approximately $131 million, in suspect funds, yet offshore hosting and resilient demand expose the limits of a prohibition-led strategy with no licensed alternative.

A High Court of England and Wales judge has ruled that foreign law and earlier Georgian judgments must be weighed in SPRIBE's intellectual property battle over the Aviator crash game, blocking Aviator LLC's attempt to fast-track the ownership question. The procedural win decides nothing on the merits, with trademark and copyright issues deferred to a full trial.

Spain's gambling regulator, the DGOJ, has ordered a precautionary nationwide block on Polymarket and Kalshi and opened a sanctions procedure, treating the prediction platforms as unlicensed gambling rather than financial exchanges and aligning Spain with a widening European crackdown.

As its licensed gambling market reaches €1.55 billion, Slovakia's regulator has signed two May 2026 memoranda, building a multi-source database with Digitálna koalícia and embedding gambling-harm training at a Nitra university to shield minors from unlicensed offshore operators.

A debt crisis among young people in Enschede has reopened a Dutch debate that won't go away. With one in five local youngsters in debt, a councillor is pushing for the legal online gambling age to climb to 24, a level that would be unprecedented in Europe.