KSA seeks Big Tech deals against illegal gambling ads and weighs court action

The Dutch gambling authority KSA is seeking agreements with major technology platforms to counter the spread of illegal gambling advertising on social media, and says it is prepared to consider legal action if talks do not produce sufficient results. The position was set out in a contribution published on the KSA website by its chair, Michel Groothuizen, and.

Groothuizen said dialogue should be combined with the possibility of legal action, while acknowledging the difficulty of any confrontation with the technology companies. He argued that the platforms are unlikely to give up voluntarily the revenue they earn from advertising by unauthorised operators.

The KSA chair said social platforms carry hundreds of thousands of advertisements for illegal gambling, some of them addressed explicitly to people enrolled in self-exclusion registers in various European countries, or even to minors. According to Groothuizen, both Dutch legislation and the European Digital Services Act provide sufficient legal grounds to sanction such conduct.

He added that the existence of possible grounds for legal action does not necessarily mean it should be started immediately. In his view, a lost case could prove more damaging than proceedings never brought, and any litigation could run for years through appeals and challenges.

Groothuizen said his main objective remains a concrete change in the platforms' behaviour, and that he therefore continues to favour dialogue and the search for shared solutions. He recalled a meeting held earlier this year in Dublin between European gambling regulators and representatives of Google and Meta, from which a joint task force was formed. Among its initiatives is work on a list of authorised operators in the European Union, a whitelist developed with Google that would allow the platform to identify and block advertisers not on the list, who would be considered unauthorised.

He also said the collaboration does not guarantee that the interests of the authorities and those of the technology companies coincide, as their respective priorities are often opposed. He concluded that if the online platforms do not show sufficient commitment, or if voluntary initiatives prove ineffective, recourse to the courts would remain a concrete option.