Following a decision we already anticipated one week ago in the article “Estonia to fight against illegal gambling”, the national Tax and Custom Board completed last Tuesday the first part of its list of illegal gaming providers to be banned by Estonian internet service providers.
In order to enforce the new legislation adopted by the beginning of the year, the Board clarified that, since the only operator of the sector owning a State license is the OEG group, all the other ones have to be considered as non legal and therefore deserves to be blocked.
The first list completed by the end of last week includes some 175 domains the Tax Board expects Estonian ISPs to block, among which there are also the names of some of the biggest internet gambling companies as PokerStars, PartyPoker, bwin and Full Tilt Poker.
Estonian internet providers are now expected to disable accesses from Estonian IPs to all the rooms included in the list for not occurring into a 40,000 kroons fine for providing access to online gambling, even if the growth of the gambling market suggests to keep following the development of the situation in the next few weeks.
The list sent to service providers includes in fact also the names of companies that showed already a great attention – and investments – towards the Estonian market as Unibet, NordicBet, TrioBet and the Bingo games included into Kroonika online version and so it is most likely to happen that at least some of them will start the processes for the acquisition of a legal Estonian online gaming license.
It is also true, though, that the block requested by the Estonian Tax and Custom Board can be easily overcome by average computer users and companies.
If for the first one the use of a good proxy is a solution that could work quite successfully, what experiences in other EU Member States tells is that also gaming companies might try to keep offering online games to Estonian players simply moving from one web address to another once their name start appearing on the list of sites to be blocked.
Complaints against the Estonian legislations have lately been moved since the system in use promotes the closure of the market and therefore goes against EU regulations on freedom of movement of goods and services.
On its side, jumping on the issue when similar regulations have been put into force in other EU countries, the European Commission already clarified that online gambling could be considered one of those exceptional fields where national governments can still apply their own policies even going against
EU agreements.
This is a reprint from estonianfreepress.com To view the original, click here.
