The New York Times, Sep 8th 2010. The highest court in the European Union ruled Wednesday that Germany’s efforts to protect state-run gambling monopolies violated E.U. laws. The ruling gives a boost to private betting companies that are eager to break into the lucrative German market.
Germany, like a number of other European countries, has been trying to keep sports betting, lotteries and some other kinds of gambling under the control of state-run operators, saying this protects consumers from fraud and addiction. But lately these monopolies have come under threat from Web sites based in offshore locations like Gibraltar and from hundreds of sports betting shops that have taken advantage of gray areas in the law to open their doors in cities across Germany. [...]
“I think now, with this decision, we will soon have a liberalized market,” said Michael Schmid, senior consultant at Goldmedia, a research firm in Berlin. “It will be very hard to maintain a monopoly in the future.” [...]
In Germany, online gambling is still officially banned, but it generates an estimated €1 billion, or $1.28 billion, in annual revenue for offshore operators that take bets in Germany, according to Goldmedia. That total has been rising at an annual rate of about 30 percent a year, the firm says. As online gambling grows, state-run gambling companies are suffering; one of these, Oddset, a sports-betting service, has seen revenue decline roughly 60 percent since 2005, according to Goldmedia. [...]
It’s a quite interesting post.