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7 long-term trends towards less channelisation in Sweden might well have been accelerated by the recent moves. A knee-jerk political reaction to the pandemic is therefore likely to be much more long-lasting on the health of the regulated sector.
CRITICISM FROM MANY CORNERS
The most damning verdict on the measures as introduced by the government came from the regulator, the Swedish Gambling Authority( SGA, or Spelinspektionen), which said the measures would be unenforceable.
An obvious issue was that of players with multiple accounts, who will have the ability to circumvent restrictions imposed on any single account. While the Swedish Equality Commission proposed a staterun central portal through which all account information could be correlated, the idea was dismissed by the SGA on the grounds that this would represent a huge escalation of government monitoring that many might find uncomfortable.
Moreover, it pointed out that such a move might contravene both Swedish and European data protection laws and that any central database would be a public document and therefore all information would potentially be obtainable through freedom of information requests.
November 2020