European gambling regulation’s quiet convergence: Is cross-market harmonisation the answer?

Legal and regulatory experts consider how Europe may seek to harmonise regulation across various sectors that touch on gambling.

For most of the past year, Europe’s gambling regulators have been transfixed by two familiar villains: tax hikes and the black market. Higher levies enforced in 2025 are meant to fund public spending and discourage excess, while tougher enforcement was supposed to squeeze out illegal operators.

  Instead, many European headlines have told a more nuanced story. Licensed operators complain of shrinking margins and regulators of stubbornly resilient illegal operators, while in the end there has overall been minimal improvement in consumer protection as a result of tightened regulation.

As 2026 commences, the question for Europe’s iGaming industry is not whether these themes will persist, but what else is coming into view? According to a string of industry figures, the next phase of regulation is likely to be less dramatic than a sudden tax shock, but potentially more consequential: a gradual shift towards affordability controls, technical standards and de facto harmonisation across borders.

This is unlikely to happen through an EU-specific gambling law, but rather through quieter mechanisms that may ultimately reshape how the industry operates and limit fragmentation.

Standards before statutes 

For decades, gambling policy has been justified by moral, public health and fiscal considerations. That is unlikely to change. Yet Europe’s online market is borderless, and national rules increasingly collide with shared infrastructure: payments, platforms, data and algorithms. The result is a form of harmonisation that already binds operators, whether regulators acknowledge it or not. 

Gambling firms across the EU must comply with the General Data Protection Regulation, anti-money laundering rules, consumer protection law and, increasingly, the Digital Services Act. The forthcoming AI Act will add another layer, governing how automated systems score risk, personalise player offers or trigger interventions. None of these laws are gambling-specific, but together they standardise much of the compliance machinery around gambling. 

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