Gambling is a matter of the country
When gambling, many hold their hands open. The providers of the games, of course, but also the federal states, districts and municipalities, which earn a lot from taxes. It was correspondingly difficult to negotiate a new gambling contract under these conditions. Because federalism also applies here. As with educational policy, the federal states are also responsible for gambling – and the battle over the gambling law was reminiscent of the debates about a central high school diploma.
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Nonetheless, in 2011 fifteen of the sixteen federal states agreed on a new state gambling treaty that made online gambling illegal. Only the state government in Schleswig-Holstein of the CDU and FDP broke away and also approved casino operations on the Internet. This led to the strange situation in Germany that online games of chance were advertised nationwide on television, which were actually forbidden outside of Schleswig-Holstein.
Since online gambling is closely linked to online sports betting, the major providers relied on the market power of football and became major sponsors of the DFB. At this point, at the latest, it was clear that a ban on online gambling could no longer be upheld. The contract was actually supposed to be changed in 2018, but the federal states could not come to an agreement.
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Agreement with consequences – the new “GlüStV”
In technical German, the term GlüStV is used, an abbreviation that hardly makes sense for the term “State Treaty on Gaming”. Responsible for this GlüStV are the “foreign ministers” of the federal states, i.e. the heads of the state chancelleries who negotiate those laws in which the federal states have to agree on a common line.
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Such a common line was struggled for a long time in gambling, because the interests are very different. Highly populated federal states such as North Rhine-Westphalia, Baden-Württemberg or Bavaria have a multiple of the direct and indirect gambling income of the smaller states.
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The trend is towards online gambling
Accordingly, a lot is at stake there, because the trend is clear: just as the music industry, cinema and retail are experiencing the surge in digitization, it is now also affecting the gaming industry. Playing the lottery is just as old-fashioned among young people as betting on horses. This is also shown by current figures.
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