Online gambling operators hoping to secure licenses in the Netherlands’ regulated market will have to purge their customer databases acquired prior to the market’s liberalization.

Last week, Minister for Justice and Security Sander Dekker published responses to legislators’ questions regarding the final draft of the country’s online gambling regulations. (Full text of the responses can be found here, in Dutch.)

Among the revelations, Dekker says the government believes the COVID-19 pandemic shouldn’t delay the Remote Gaming Act from formally taking effect as planned on January 1, 2021, with all new online licensees launching simultaneously on July 1, 2021. But Dekker acknowledged that “the possibility of some delay … cannot be entirely ruled out.”

Some of the less positive answers addressed the sizable Dutch customer databases that internationally licensed operators have built up over years of serving the market without local permission. Dekker says this gives these operators a clear advantage over operators who evidently lacked the foresight to build their own databases.