Europe's Online Gambling Industry Is The Biggest In The World

European countries are continuing to embrace online gambling as a much needed source of revenue for their ailing economies.
Ironically, Europe has taken a much more practical approach on the divisive subject than the US, whose main objections centre around the social problems caused by online gambling.
Instead, European objections tended to stem more from a desire to protect their domestically run state lotteries and gaming operations from foreign competition.
European states now seem to appreciate the nigh impossibility of continually preventing gamblers from wagering their money online and with the decline in land-based casinos, have decided on a more practical approach to the situation.
As consultant David Trunkfield from PricewaterhouseCoopers explains:
“What’s happened is a realization that you can’t uninvent the Internet. People are gaming online. You either try to regulate and tax it, or people are going to go to the offshore operators, where you don’t get any revenue.”
While the US ponders and resists the demand for online gambling, Europe’s online market has been steadily growing to become the biggest in the world today. This year alone its revenue accounted for $12.5 billion of the industry’s $29.3 billion total.
The move to embrace the online gaming industry gained momentum in 2005 when the UK became the first major European country to begin regulating the market.Since then many EU countries such as France and Denmark have followed suit, with Italy earning €150 million in taxes in 2009 alone from partially liberalizing their industry.
Others EU countries including  Greece, Germany, Switzerland, and Spain are now considering taking similar measures.
In contrast, despite a high demand for the service in America, the US has been rigorously enforcing its online gambling ban since 2006  and been losing out on a steady revenue stream ever since.
Summing up the situation,  Betfair’s Tim Phillips concluded:
“The gambling business is one of Europe’s real success stories online. This is a business in which Europe leads the world.”