Belgium heads new project to standardise European gaming law

Peter Naessens, the director of the Belgian Gaming Commission, is going to lead a new project aimed to standardise online gambling legislation across Europe.

The project is under the ageis of the European Committee for Standardisation. A number of industry bodies and regulators join hands in the project to create rules for compliance and reporting that will become standard in the industry.

Their most important goal is to implement standards on the sort of data the online gambling operators need to send to their respective regulators, as well as the manner in which they do it. Technical Committee 456 will be the group responsible for setting these standards.

The committee has the task of “Reporting in support of online gambling supervision.”

The impetus for creating this committee came from a request by the European Commission. It was labelled “Standardisation request to the ‘European Committee for Standardisation’ as regards a European standard on reporting in support of supervision of online gambling services by the gambling regulatory authorities of the Member States.”

Currently, member states of the European Union’s regulatory authorities are in charge of supervising online gambling activities in the region. This is done through information reported by the operators or the software suppliers about online gambling.

Standards are currently lacking and need to be improved. This project will develop new requirements for the reporting of online gambling. This will help improve levels of consumer protection, game fairness, transparency of operations, and identifying and stopping match-fixing and other forms of fraud.

Feedback and suggestions will be obtained from gambling regulators, operators, consumers associations and gaming suppliers. They can offer their expertise and guidance on how best the group can create these new standards.

The new committee will strive to rectify any issues present. New standards will help all parties concerned.