ERP? NFI, to use a TLA

Wouldn’t it be a good idea to have a group of gambling regulators in Europe which could work together to help the development of online gambling regulation? They could share information to allow for more efficient regulation, establishing a framework which protected people while allowing legitimate businesses to offer their services and pay the commensurate tax.

Step forward the ERP – the European Regulatory Platform – which describes itself as a think-tank for doing just that. It launched this week, I gather. Wonderful, I hear you say – and I applaud your enthusiasm. Who knows?  They might even read stuff written by punters and others who know something about the market, and get some tips on what might make sense and what might not.

Or answer B: the European Regulatory Platform, despite its own lofty self-description, has a membership which includes Belgium, France and Spain – those bastions of gambling expertise – but not the UK, Malta, or Denmark who (despite being fully-fledged EU Member States with gambling regulation in place and multiple licensees between them) were, in the parlance, NFI.

So in fact, it is just a trade association of regulators who want to enforce national protectionism and find a more effective way to block the gambling industry’s voice in Brussels.

WTF?