Dutch Ad Ban Will Hand the Stage to Illegal Sites

The Netherlands is preparing a near-total ban on online gambling advertising, and the lawyers who work in the market think it will do the opposite of what it promises. Legal operators already hold only about 49% of Dutch gross gaming revenue, and trade bodies put the black market at roughly a quarter of all gambling activity in the country.

The package proposed by State Secretary Claudia van Bruggen in June 2026 goes well beyond advertising. It would end sign-up bonuses and free bets, impose a deposit limit that follows the player across every operator, and strengthen the CRUKS self-exclusion register.

No Evidence It Works

Justin Franssen, partner at Franssen Tolboom, was blunt about where this leads. “What you ultimately achieve with a total ban is that you hand the entire stage to illegal operators,” he said, adding that “there is no evidence that it will succeed.”

Asked whether the Dutch government had quietly abandoned channelisation as a policy goal, Franssen said “yes, I think it has, and actually, not even that quietly.” He said the regulator itself has acknowledged the falling legal share and advised against a total ban.

What Channelisation Actually Means

The channelisation point is the whole argument in one word. Channelisation measures how much of a country’s gambling runs through licensed operators, and it is the number every European regulator has spent a decade trying to push upward. A government that stops treating it as the primary goal has quietly changed what it is optimising for.

This is not the first tightening. Role models were barred from gambling ads, untargeted advertising was prohibited from July 2023, and sports sponsorship was outlawed from July 2025. Legal market share has fallen through all of it.

Denmark and Italy Already Ran the Experiment

The comparisons other markets offer are not encouraging. Morten Ronde, outgoing director of Danish trade body Spillebranchen, said “the growth of the unlicensed market is massive” and put Danish channelisation at 70% in 2025, down from 90%.

Quirino Mancini of WH Partners pointed to Italy, where illegal gambling has been estimated at 22 billion euros in the years since its 2018 advertising prohibition.

The Dutch social-media picture already looks like a market where the licensed side has left the field. Around 95% of gambling ads shown to Dutch users come from unlicensed operators. Meta platforms carried more than 70,000 gambling ads in the fourth quarter of 2025, over 95% of them from unlicensed sources, with fewer than 5% removed.

Ban the licensed operators from advertising and that ratio does not improve. It just loses its denominator.

The Part That Did Work

There is an awkward counterexample buried in the same policy area, and it is worth being honest about. The deposit-limit rules introduced in 2024 produced real numbers. The share of players breaching their monthly allowance fell from 9.7% to 2.2%, and average monthly losses dropped 31%, from 116 euros to 80 euros.

That is a meaningful harm-reduction result from an intervention aimed at the licensed market, and it lands in the same place as Norway’s care-call data, where a phone call moved more player behaviour than any advertising rule has. The distinction is that a deposit limit changes what a player can do inside a regulated account, where the operator can be compelled to enforce it. An advertising ban changes only what a licensed operator may say, while the unlicensed side carries on saying whatever it likes on platforms that remove fewer than one ad in twenty.

Where CRUKS Fits

The CRUKS strengthening is the piece least likely to be argued with, since a self-exclusion register only works if the operators a player can reach are inside it. Every player who moves offshore is a player CRUKS can no longer protect, which is the same problem the advertising ban runs into from a different direction.

Dutch trade body VNLOK now puts the illegal market above one billion euros a year. The proposal still needs primary legislation, which Franssen suggests could take two years or more. That is two years for the gap to widen before the policy even starts.