About this app
What is Spin Town?
The triumvirate of Netherlands, Germany and Sweden is often held up as an example of how not to regulate, with all three countries haemorrhaging players to waiting illegal operators. So what is public sentiment like towards operators? “My feeling is that if you look at public sentiment, they don’t see really the difference between online and land-based,” says Petra. “If you look into what they’re saying, they’re primarily talking online. But for the general public, there is no difference [between the channels] in that respect.”
She believes the sentiment towards gambling among the Dutch public is comparable to the UK, Finland, Germany, France. “So, very tense,” she says.
However the sentiment towards the Holland Casino brand has remained quite positive, while more generally the sentiment towards gambling is very critical.
About Spin Town
The pure-play prediction market-operators, Polymarket and Kalshi, emerged from Week 1 as the clear winners. On one hand, Kalshi’s market share lead narrowed over its competitors, falling to 82% for the week ended 13 September, down from 86% a week earlier.
Still, Kalshi had a nine-fold lead over Polymarket, its next closest rival. Polymarket, meanwhile, led the group with 762,000 app downloads, edging Kalshi, DraftKings and FanDuel in the category. The downloads represented a 13,509% weekly increase and 25% of total category downloads, Polymarket wrote in a statement.
Across the market, operators delivered high double-digit gains compared with Labor Day weekend, which featured a full slate of college football games but no NFL contests. Two operators, DraftKings and Underdog each saw triple-digit growth, delivering weekly increases of 125% and 119%, respectively. Three others, Polymarket, Crypto.com and Novig, saw gains of at least 30%, led by Polymarket with a weekly increase of 46%.
About Spin Town
Operators and companies linked to them are also prohibited from acquiring, licensing, or exploiting rights to sporting events held in the country. In the area of administrative penalties, the rapporteur’s text incorporates the new infractions into the existing sanctions system in Law 14.790 of 2023, which provides for fines of up to BRL2 billion ($392.8 million).
One of the main changes made by Vieira is the creation of the crime of promoting unauthorised betting operators. The penalty is one to five years imprisonment. This may be increased by one-sixth to two-thirds when the promotion is done by a digital influencer, athlete, or well-known person, due to their greater ability to reach the public.
The rapporteur also added a rule designed to prevent the immediate movement of professionals between companies in the sector and bodies responsible for authorising, classifying, regulating and overseeing betting. Anyone who has maintained a significant link with an operator or representative entity of the market will be barred, for 24 months, from assuming certain regulatory functions. A quarantine period of the same duration will also apply in the reverse movement, for the transition from the regulatory body to the private sector.
