SA should not try to prohibit online gambling but should rather provide licenses to “four or five” operators who adhere to strict legal standards.
This is the view of Professor Basie von Solms, research professor in the Academy of Computer Science and Software Engineering at the University of Johannesburg. He was speaking during a workshop hosted by the National Assembly’s trade and industry oversight committee on the challenges of drawing up laws on online gambling.
Von Solms referred to Italian law, which allows internet gambling by licensed operators and for adverts linked to legal licensing and warnings to consumers.
“We should license four or five people under very strict compliance methods and we should… make it very clear that, if you go through these licensed people, you will be covered by the gambling board or whatever agency that will be dealing with this.”
Von Solms has previously spoken out strongly against prohibiting access to online sites, saying this would be impossible.
Online gambling is illegal in SA and a Pretoria High Court ruling in 2010 made it illegal for online gambling sites to offer their services in SA, even if their servers are hosted outside the country.
The National Gambling Board’s position paper on online gambling was discussed by the committee’s working group last month.
Issues included licensing online gambling in other jurisdictions and the recommended approach for SA.
The gambling board holds that licensing online gambling operators forms an integral part of the regulatory environment, which should ensure a manageable number of licences to be considered for online gambling.
Input from the departments of Trade and Industry, Communications and other players demonstrated that online gambling could not easily be legislated against.
Committee chairman Joan Fubbs said that with rapid advances in technology, online gambling was an issue that had to be dealt with. “We’ve got a drug problem… we’re soon going to have a gambling problem. But online gambling is not something that can be legislated tomorrow.”
Earlier, Jabu Radebe, acting director-general in the Department of Communications, who is responsible for cybersecurity and internet governance, said the fundamental question was: “What do we regulate when we regulate online gambling?” He added: “Are we regulating to legalise it or are we regulating to ensure it doesn’t happen?”
In regulating online banking, it was important to take into account the levels of players in any online transaction. The first of these – the internet access and service providers – are regulated by legislation and the industry code of conduct.
The second level – entities responsible for hosting, data processing and content delivery – was not regulated at all, Radebe said.
“When we talk about regulating online gambling, what is it that we intend regulating? Internet access and service providers? Web hosting, data processing, ‘the cloud’? Internet search engines and portals? E-commerce intermediaries?”
Pieter Smit of the Financial Intelligence Centre said online gambling carried specific risks.
It was not face-to-face business, and so impossible to verify customers’ physical appearance against IDs. “We will need to rely on new technologies to verify identities of players.”
He added that regulators needed to supervise licensed operators and identify unlicensed or illegal operators and deny them access to the SA market. - Cape Argus