NETHERLANDS Trends and Developments Contributed by: Alan Littler, Franssen Tolboom
Introduction On 1 April 2021, the Remote Gambling Act entered into force in the Netherlands, bringing sweeping changes to the somewhat outdated Betting and Gambling Act. As of this date, the national regulatory authority, the Kansspelautoriteit (Netherlands Gambling Authority, NGA), was able to accept applications for remote gambling licences. The choice of this date did not go unnoticed by many, with comments inevitably being made about how this would transpire to be some sort of April Fool’s Day “joke” when April began. Fortu- nately, it did not, and the first fortnight of April saw some of today’s current operators submit their licence applications to the NGA. At the time the NGA had stated that, all things being equal, applications submitted during the first two weeks of the month would result in licences being awarded to successful applicants in time for them to “go live” at the start of October. A total of ten licences were awarded, entering into force on 1 October 2021, all of which were awarded for the maximum period possible, namely five years. Therefore, 2026 will bear witness to some of the current 30 plus licence holders submitting applications for their subsequent licences, enabling them to remain on the market beyond their first five years. This chapter of the guide will consider some of the key points of the “relicensing” process, as this will be a key development which will start to play out at the tail end of 2025, through 2026, and then beyond for other licence holders whose licences were awarded at a later date. Another development which will be addressed in this contribution is of a more unexpected nature, and has arisen in relation to advertising and attempts by the NGA to over-extend the application of the ban on advertising unlicensed games of chance. This has arisen in the context of sponsorship deals and international sports events taking place on Dutch soil. Relicensing As of 5 January 2026, the NGA will accept the “first batch” of applications from those whose current licences will expire as of the end of September 2026. Following the initial burst of licences at the end of 2021, the NGA awarded further licences on an ongo-
ing basis. This resulted in there really only being one batch where multiple licences were awarded at the same time; all others were awarded as and when the respective application processes were completed. Ahead of the opening of the licensing regime, the NGA published a policy rule, in which it detailed its expec- tations for licence applications, whilst also providing insight into how it would assess an applicant’s previ- ous locally unlicensed remote gambling presence in the Netherlands, if any. In doing so, it established a “leniency programme” through which, if an applicant satisfied a variety of conditions, such past wrongdoing would not, in itself, stand in the way of the NGA find- ing that the applicant’s reliability was “beyond doubt”. Fast-forwarding to 2025, it then became apparent that a new policy rule would be required, to guide the process for applications from those already on the licensed market, including in terms of how the NGA would view a licensed applicant’s behaviour during the first licence. The regulatory regime establishes that remote gam- bling licences can be awarded for a period of up to five years, but consideration had not been given as to how the process for a subsequent licence, from the same entity, could take shape. Therefore, whilst some may refer to the new process as a “relicensing” process, essentially, for the purposes of the law, an application is simply an application, regardless of whether it is the first or second licence held by an entity. However, a single entity cannot have two concurrent licences, as the regime restricts entities to a single licence. Ref- erences to multiple licences must be read as such licences being held consecutively, and not in parallel. Whilst for some applicants, during the first application, past behaviour on the unlicensed market was a key concern, the NGA has now spelled out its approach regarding how it will view a licensed applicant’s behaviour to date. To this end, the NGA has released the Remote Gambling Policy Rule 2026 ( Beleidsregels vergunningverlening kansspelen op afstand 2026 ) which sets out this, and many other issues, in detail. That said, the devil hides not so much in the depth of the detail, but the margin of discretion which the NGA has afforded itself, and how it will seek to make use of this in practice.
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