Dutch parliament rejects a full ban on gambling advertising, while backing tougher tools against illegal sites

The Tweede Kamer has voted down a proposal to ban gambling advertising outright in the Netherlands, both online and offline. For PSPs, operators, and affiliates, the more interesting part is what survived the vote: tighter enforcement tools aimed at illegal sites, ad removals, and platform liability.

1. The proposal from SGP MP Diederik van Dijk did not pass, finishing with 64 votes out of the 76 needed. His concern was simple enough: if lawmakers only shut the digital door, online operators would just find a side entrance through land-based channels.
2. The state secretary opposed the full ban, saying the government wants to focus first on the online market and return to land-based gambling later. The proposal was supported by PRO, CDA, JA21, CU, DENK, PvdD, SGP, SP, MP Keijzer and VOLT, but that was not enough to get it over the line.
3. A separate proposal from the same MP, calling for a scenario in which the state fully exits gambling by selling its stakes in Holland Casino and Nederlandse Loterij, also failed. It received 48 votes.
4. Parliament did approve several other measures that matter more in practice for enforcement: studying whether the University of Amsterdam’s (UvA) open-source model could be used by the regulator; giving the regulator the power to block illegal sites via DNS and show a warning to users who land on blocked pages; and writing into law that platforms such as Meta can themselves be treated as violators if gambling ads remain visible after a takedown request.
5. Lawmakers also agreed to revisit raising the minimum age for risky gambling to 21, but only after action against the illegal market becomes effective. In the same batch, they backed work on a blacklist of illegal operators and on criminal enforcement against illegal gambling companies together with KSA, the public prosecutor, and the police.

The chamber also rejected a proposal to impose a duty of care on crypto providers in the same way as gambling operators, and another one to study prediction markets as a separate category under gambling law. Votes on lowering the gambling tax rate to 34.2% and on how to choose beneficiaries of charity lotteries were postponed.