Dutch regulators are seriously considering tougher restrictions on gambling advertising, including a potential blanket ban, after acknowledging that current safeguards aren’t doing enough to protect vulnerable players. And of course, this has sparked a familiar industry debate: does cracking down on legal operators actually push players toward the unregulated market?

The Self-Exclusion Problem

Back in 2021, the Netherlands banned untargeted gambling ads. Billboards disappeared. Sponsorships ended. Mass-media promotions were phased out. But newly published parliamentary responses reveal a significant gap in the system. State Secretary Claudia van Bruggen highlighted something critical: operators cannot reliably verify whether a player has enrolled in Cruks, the national self-exclusion scheme, when they publish advertisements. Self-excluded players are still being exposed to gambling content.

To make matters worse, Cruks only covers licensed operators. Black market platforms aren’t part of the system at all, leaving self-excluded players vulnerable on both fronts.

The Industry Pushback

Industry representatives aren’t happy about where this is heading. A total ad ban would effectively render legitimate operators invisible to the market, they argue, while unlicensed operators continue operating without consequence. There’s real logic to this, frankly: if legal companies can’t promote themselves, players looking for gambling will inevitably drift toward unregulated alternatives.

The Netherlands already struggles with channelization rates. A significant portion of the market remains outside regulated channels. Further restrictions could worsen that problem rather than solve it.

Enforcement Gains Ground

To their credit, Dutch regulators haven’t gone soft. The Kansspelautoriteit has been handing down serious penalties. Novatech received a record-breaking fine of €28.9 million for illegal gambling operations. Fortaprime was hit with €2 million. The KSA chair even suggested the Novatech penalty should have been higher.

The real question now is whether lawmakers will pursue aggressive advertising restrictions alongside enforcement, or whether they’ll acknowledge that a more balanced approach serves players better than pushing them underground.

What the team thinks

Philippa Ashworth says:

Hartley raises a legitimate regulatory tension, but I’d argue the Dutch are conflating two separate problems: advertising effectiveness and self-exclusion system design. Rather than another advertising ban that simply shifts spend to digital channels where targeting is actually harder to control, regulators should focus on what the data really shows, which is that their self-exclusion infrastructure itself has technical and enforcement gaps that no ad restriction will solve. The more interesting question isn’t whether to ban ads, but whether the Netherlands has invested adequately in cross-operator registry systems and real-time verification protocols that would actually prevent excluded players from gambling, regardless of how they discover operators.