Invited speaker: Kate Bedford on online gambling

Professor Kate Bedford will be presenting her work on the implications of regulatory innovations in online gambling for debates about harm.

The following is her abstract:

An Affordable Wager: The wider implications of regulatory innovations to address vulnerability in online gambling for our debates about harm

The UK’s gambling regulator, the Gambling Commission, is introducing a raft of new regulatory measures to address gambling harm, including affordability checks on online players that rely on cross-operator data sharing. My talk seeks to understand these measures, and their limits.

I will recap what we already know about differentiated restrictions on access to gambling for adults, including as manifest in recent state-industry efforts to deploy online gambling technologies to identify and preempt gambling harm. I will then summarise agreed and proposed changes to British online gambling regulation since 2019, focusing in depth on affordability checks for players and the related imperative to develop a ‘single customer view’ of play.

Finally, I will outline two grounds for concern about the measures, rooted in the industry’s enthusiasm for affordability checks, linked to the profit-making potential of the data to be shared, and the implications for groups of customers who may already be disadvantaged and hyper-surveilled. I raise these concerns in an attempt to identify better, more systemic solutions to gambling harm, in the UK and elsewhere.