UK Online Casinos
Most of the blog and news posts written around the world concerning online gambling law will almost always focus on US legislation. However John Penrose, the minister responsible for gambling policy and regulation, has plunged the UK stance on online gambling into the spotlight with a change to the law.
Fortunately though for online casino players, there will be few changes to the playing experience. The changes mean that any operator offering online gambling products to the UK market will have to earn a license in order to continue to do so. These licenses will be administered by the Gambling Commission and will come in to full effect in 2013 or 2014.
The idea of these changes is to alter the focus of licensing from where operators are based to the location of where their products are used. Thus effectively ending the use of the 'Whitelist' (the list of trusted jurisdictions created by the UK), and encouraging operators to move back to the UK.
However, operators in trusted jurisdictions will treated more leniently which led to Allan Bell, Isle of Man Minister for the Department of Economic Development, calling the plans "encouraging".
The taxation on those who are awarded a license is yet to be announced.
