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Online Gambling Market Purged From Illegal Casinos In Poland

03 July 2017, 14:43 CET

Europe has special regulations that regulate online gambling and Poland recently joined these regulations.

After EU clamps down on the avoidance of corporate tax, now the larger gambling facilities that are not suitable according to European regulations have been blocked after Poland approved the new regulatory regime on April 1.

The new Poland gambling laws were created in order to liberalize the market at a local level, allowing just the highly reputable establishments like NetBet to fully operate. Basically, the international operator needs to apply for a Poland license for sports betting provisions. Poker, bingo games and online casinos would only be available through the designated gambling monopoly decided.

In the past few years online sports betting enjoyed a constant increase in popularity and demand in Europe, including Poland. The number of Polish customers is more than what is considered as being satisfactory.

Operators that want to operate in the Polish local market at the moment need to pay a 12% tax on turnover. According to the Polish Ministry Of Finance, the general reaction was criticism because of the fact that the rate is really high according to various standards that can be mentioned. In most of the regulated jurisdiction of the country betting services and online gambling are taxed based on gross gaming revenue percentage though.

The authorities declared that the unlicensed operations are not welcomed and that the entire market is going to be strictly monitored for violations and wrongdoings. In order to prevent the operations that are unlicensed a blacklist of the unauthorized operators will be released at a later point of the year. Local gambling community will not have access to those operators.

The first names have been added at the start of April and many others are added. The full list is present on the website of the Polish Ministry Of Finance and features 311 domains. Daily updates have appeared in the last 2 months. However, this list is a lot shorter than what the other regulated jurisdictions have in Europe.

Polish ISPs are going to block access to the websites of the domains on the list. Local ISPs actually have until July 1st to start blocking the operations that are not licensed. Much is written and said about internet service provider blocking but in many cases the conclusion is that this is not going to be effective. iGaming did find various ways to go round obstacles implemented by internet service providers.

Polish authorities are mainly focused on trying to remove the black market businesses. The problem is that different reputable operators have been effectively scared off because of the really high turnover task that the regulation process introduced. Allowed operations only feature sports betting, which is another reason why operators were upset.

Both the large gambling operators and the European governments are interested in regulating the entire online gambling environment. Even so, overtaxation and overregulation are seen as big problems towards achieving this goal.

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