The Netherlands Gambling Authority said on October 14 it is prepared to use legal force against Google and Meta over the illegal gambling advertising carried on their platforms.
A threat, not yet a case
KSA chairman Michel Groothuizen made the warning in a statement on the state of the Dutch regulated gambling market, published five years after the online market opened. He said the platforms profit significantly from advertisements for illegal operators in the Netherlands and elsewhere, and that restricting them runs against their business model. “Voluntarily giving this up or imposing substantial restrictions on themselves goes squarely against their business model,” he wrote in the statement. “Yet that is what we demand of them, preferably amicably, if necessary by force.”
No proceedings have been filed. Groothuizen warned that litigation would be slow: the companies would fight to the highest court, and a final ruling could take five years. He named Dutch law and the EU Digital Services Act as possible grounds for action, though enforcement of the DSA would likely fall to the European Commission rather than the KSA.
Cooperation alongside the threat
The threat sits next to a working relationship. After talks with Google and Meta at their European headquarters in Dublin earlier this year, the KSA joined a joint task force with the two companies, and the KSA and Google are working on a European whitelist of licensed operators meant to limit the visibility of unregulated platforms. Groothuizen cautioned that this year’s cooperation is not a permanent alliance and that the KSA would pursue litigation if the companies failed to make good on their promises. No launch date has been announced for the whitelist, nor has the KSA said which Google advertising services it would cover.
A separate court case is already moving without the regulator. VNLOK, the Dutch trade association of licensed operators, has sued Meta, and the case is entering its final phase in a court in Amsterdam. A July ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union found Google could be held liable in circumstances involving the promotion of gambling on YouTube videos, a decision arising from a 2022 Italian case in which Google Ireland was fined 750,000 euros.
The enforcement gap behind the threat
Groothuizen’s language follows a problem he acknowledged himself: fines on unlicensed operators produced limited results because the KSA struggled to collect the penalties. The regulator’s new approach targets infrastructure instead, disrupting payments and reducing the black market’s online visibility. The pressure has precedent in Italy, where the regulator AGCOM fined Meta 5.85 million euros in 2023 for violating the country’s gambling advertising laws.
When he is not analysing the latest compliance updates or dissecting quarterly operator results, Florian follows Bundesliga football closely and maintains a healthy skepticism toward anyone claiming to have cracked a winning betting system. He brings a grounded, insider-aware perspective to his writing and is always more interested in the structural story behind the headline than the headline itself.