The EU online gambling companies will head to the WTO the dispute over U.S. enforcement actions against them. That’s what Lode Van Den Hende, the outside counsel for the Remote Gambling Association, confirmed.

This would make possible for the EU to give sanctions on the US, also if it could take years to pass through the WTO litigation system.
An EU trade official, who wanted to stay anonymous, said that the European Commission should decide by the end of the year whether start the WTO case or not. He also claimed that the EU team and the representatives of the U.S. Trade Representative’s office met the Justice Department and other US agencies.

In 2006 the US market has been shut down by making illegal the payments to online gambling sites for banks and credit card companies. Since then the European Internet gambling companies lost billions of money in market value. After the UIGEA passed in 2006, European companies like PartyGaming and 888 withdraw from the US, but probably they will be prosecuted for activities before then.

The EU commission began investigating in March this year whether Washington was allowing US online companies to operate freely and at same time choosing EU companies for enforcement actions.
The Caribbean country of Antigua and Barbuda accused the US, in an earlier case, that its restrictions on Internet gambling were a violation of the services market-opening commitments that Washington made in 1994 in the Uruguay Round world trade pact.
First the US tried to explain that they never wanted the online gambling services to be legal, though they were part of the pact.

After the argument didn’t really work, they changed their commitments under the WTO rules. That wasn’t as easy as it seems, because they had o negotiate with other WTO members who had online gambling interests, like the EU. Washington and Brussels made a deal last year but the details weren’t public.