Norway will soon block foreign gambling sites

According to the Norwegian newspaper Verdens Gang, the Norwegian government plans to shortly club through a series of new rules$ing games online. The most important point concerns blocking. The idea of this regulation is to prevent Norwegian customers from going out on foreign bookmakers.

The news hit Like a bomb at lunchtime on Tuesday, april 24. The effect on the bookmaker's stock prices was immediate. All the major bookmakers collapsed and several of them backed down by up to ten percent.

That the news had a big impact is not so strange, but many people read more into the news than you should. Here we figure out what Norway will actually decide on.

IP blocking or DNS blocking?

In the article in Verdens Gang, which then quickly spread in all media, it is written that it is IP blocking that Norway will introduce for foreign bookmakers. However, the government's proposal is actually about a solution with a kind of DNS blocking. In practice, it is a proposal for a ”warning box” that the Norwegian authorities are currently filing.

IP blocking is about making it impossible to navigate to certain websites. The technology is most often used to geographically separate different areas based on the IP address used. A recent example is the state of New Jersey in the United States. Here, some online games are legal, but only if you are actually in the state. Anyone who tries to enter a netcasino in New Jersey from a computer in the neighboring state of New York is blocked from access. DNS blocking does not have the same blocking effect at all. Anyone who wants to ignore the warning just needs to click away from the box.

Henrik Tjärnström is CEO of Kindred, whose stock price plummeted significantly on Tuesday. He believes that the” intended " blocking does not make any real difference. To the news agency directly, he states that nothing concrete has actually happened.

Protecting the Norwegian gaming monopoly

There are two arguments behind the Norwegian authorities ' proposal. The first is to protect the gambling monopoly that actually prevails in Norway. The second is to make it tougher for foreign bookmakers to operate in Norway in a more direct way.

The idea of blocking foreign gambling sites can be said to be ”part two” in a battery of measures to make it difficult for foreign sites to appeal to Norwegian players. The first measure came into place a few months ago. Many Norwegian players then discovered that it was suddenly no longer possible to make deposits and withdrawals using certain methods. Incidentally, this regulation will be further tightened in the coming months.

Part three of the battery of measures is expected to be introduced shortly. This means that the Norwegian state pension fund (popularly known as the Oil Fund) will no longer be able to hold shares in gaming companies.

Implications for Gambling Legislation in New Zealand

A couple of days ago we published an article about the$ing maximum bonus ceiling debate that is currently being conducted in Denmark (read more here ). With this news from Norway, it is clear that our neighboring countries in different ways want to tighten their gaming laws. It is quite possible that the group at that is currently looking at how the new gaming legislation in New Zealand will be implemented and interpreted, looks to the neighboring countries and chooses to harmonize the New Zealand model with that of neighboring countries.