Business is booming for online gambling operators around the world. Here in the UK, we have the most highly regulated gambling market in the world, thanks to the ever-loved pastime being legalized for centuries and thus governed heavily by governmental bodies. While this can cause headaches for gambling operators thanks to ever-changing rules and regulations, it also means that it is the safest market in the world for players.
Part of the safety aspect involved in gambling is that of responsible gambling.
What exactly is responsible gambling?
Responsible gambling is about gambling for the pure fun of it, when people can have a bet without any troubling behaviors arising. In essence, it’s about people avoiding problem gambling and everything associated with it.
While the onus is certainly on oneself to practice responsible gambling, there is also a big onus on gambling companies to ensure patrons are gambling responsibly, at least in highly regulated markets.
Considered as one of the most controlled markets in the world, the UK gambling market – as with other dominant jurisdictions – views responsible gambling as one of the most crucial areas of regulation. Indeed, responsible gambling and regulation complement one another, and both are monitored with scrutiny by means of routine inspections and penalties.
In the UK, the Gambling Commission oversees operators’ compliance to various regulations to do with responsible gambling. These include social responsibility, self-exclusion across multiple operators, fair and transparent terms and practices in marketing, preventing underage gambling, and more. Operators that find themselves in non-compliance with these can find themselves facing steep fines and even suspension of operations. For instance, just recently, The Gambling Commission suspended an online operator for not including the GAMSTOP self-exclusion scheme. Inclusion in the scheme has been mandatory for operators since 2020.
Ever-evolving market regulation
Market regulation, particularly in the UK, continues to evolve and grow stricter, which means that operators must keep up to date with the Gambling Commission, as well as any other gambling-related legislation and news, such as the yet-to-be-actioned White Paper. This also means that the rules and regulations surrounding operators’ responsible gaming checks and balances are very strict and continue to get stricter. Tools such as those that can identify problem gamblers in real-time are often deployed by companies to help keep a watchful eye on customers.
For gamblers, especially problem gamblers, this is good news. With increased stringency in responsible gambling on the side of operators, this makes it very hard for them to lose a large amount of money in a small amount of time. It makes gambling, whether it’s in-venue or online, safer for everyone involved.
The wild west
Of course, there are other markets that aren’t as highly regulated as the UK. For instance, if you were online gambling in a place where gambling itself was a grey area, you likely wouldn’t expect to see any of the same features of responsible gaming. Self-exclusion programs, bet limits, and weekly limits would be off the table unless the operator felt so bound to their own sense of responsibility. Advertising may be misleading or confusing.
This not only makes it more unsafe for the player, but it can also lead to rogue operators who game their own experiences to deliberately cause harm to players in the hopes of getting skyrocketing profits. And it can work. If you imagine a problem player who is spending $1000 a day on their habit, you’ve just made $7000 in a week. With 15 of these players and a month, you have made almost half a million dollars.
This is exactly the type of situation that is best to avoid and why market regulation exists. Even though governments would be able to claim some great tax from providers on that half a million dollars, governments also have a duty to their constituents as well, to protect and serve them.
So, while ever-changing rules and regulations do exist in highly regulated gambling markets, it’s all for the best, even if it is a big hassle for operators. The promotion of social responsibility in gambling helps us all in the end.
