Commercial communications for gambling products should continue to be excluded from the scope of the revised Audiovisual Media Service Directive (AMSD). That is the outcome of the vote in the European Parliament’s Culture and Education Committee. EL welcomes this clarification.
Commercial communications for gambling products should continue to be excluded from the scope of the revised Audiovisual Media Service Directive (AMSD). That is the outcome of today’s vote in the European Parliament’s Culture and Education Committee.
EL welcomes this clarification. As EL Secretary General Arjan van ‘t Veer comments: “EL welcomes the fact that CULT Committee has recognised specificity of the gambling sector where the competence lies at national level. The step taken by the European Parliament today is again one in an ongoing direction.”
Currently, gambling operations are excluded from the scope of the Directive. Commercial communications for gambling products are not. As a consequence, the country-of-origin principle enshrined in the Audiovisual Media Services Directive is used as a legal basis by some gambling operators based in one Member State to broadcast, by satellite, their gambling products’ ads to consumers based in other Member States where those products are illegal. Such malevolent operators do not comply with the legislation in the Member State of these consumers in the field of consumer protection or taxation and thus undermine the efficiency of the regulatory system set up by that Member State. This is a misleading practice towards consumers who are led to presume that publicly advertised services surely are legal.
The file will soon proceed to Trialogue discussion between the three institutions European Parliament, Council and European Commission. EL hopes that the Council will follow the lead of the European Parliament and go even further by clearly excluding gambling from the full scope of the Directive.
The amendment to Recital 3 as voted in the Committee today:
“Games of chance involving a stake representing a sum of money, including lotteries, betting and other forms of gambling services and any form of advertising, including commercial communication, for those activities, as well as on-line games and search engines, should continue to be excluded from the scope of Directive 2010/13/EU.” [amendment to Recital 3 as contained in Compromise amendment 15]
