California regulator again calls for regulatory harmony

Richard Schuetz, head of the California Gambling Control Commission, has repeated his call for regulatory harmony in United States internet gambling, bemoaning the apparent inability of Congress to agree on a federal solution and describing “multitudinous” regulatory entities for a sector that is both national and international as an outdated concept.

However, Schuetz acknowledges that few people in the online gambling industry now believe that the federal government can deliver an effective and harmonious regulatory regime, and that continued state-by-state regulation is therefore a more likely outcome.

“To replicate the state-by-state experience of the terrestrial casino evolution across the country for the iGaming sector is a troubling thought, for the nature of the systems involved in iGaming present a unique challenge in making them accommodate a multitude of regulatory standards,” Schuetz observes.

“The goal is regulatory harmonization, especially over the platform, which is the center of the operation, controlling the operation of the game.”

The California regulator opines that the time is “now or never” for regulators to address the harmonisation issue, an element that is central to establishing an effective solution for legalised online gambling.

“If, instead, more states authorize online gaming without thinking through platform standardization and other achievable areas of harmonization, it will soon be too late and the US will end up looking like Europe, with a patchwork of jurisdictional requirements,” he warns.

“As our friends across the pond have come to realize, the lack of standardization is less than optimal and has spurred the European Union to mount an after-the-fact initiative to align what is discordant. The effort has not been easy or particularly successful.”

Related and similar