As Thailand‘s coalition government moves to revive its long-delayed Entertainment Complex Bill, policymakers across Asia are confronting a question that extends far beyond casinos: when legal gambling options are restricted or prohibited, where does consumer demand actually go?
Recent developments in Europe offer a revealing answer
The choice is usually framed as a binary: legalise and regulate, or ban and enforce. Yet the evidence from regulated Western markets suggests prohibition rarely removes demand. It redirects it. The term regulators use is channelization, the share of total gambling activity that flows through licensed, supervised operators rather than the unregulated grey market.
In the Netherlands, that share has just fallen below half. The Netherlands Gambling Authority reported channelization dropping from 51 percent at the end of 2024 to 49 percent in the first half of 2025. For the first time, the country’s illegal online market, estimated at around €617 million in that period, overtook licensed operators by revenue. Stricter deposit limits and higher gambling taxes, both intended to protect players, appear to have pushed a meaningful share of them toward sites with no protections at all.
That is the paradox at the centre of the regulate-versus-prohibit question. Tighten the licensed channel too far, and players do not stop. They leave for operators beyond any regulator’s reach.
What that licensed channel is meant to provide explains why the gap matters. Behavioural researchers such as Nottingham Trent University’s Mark Griffiths have long argued that the structural features of a product, above all its event frequency (how rapidly a game allows repeat bets), are what drive harm in vulnerable players.
In a regulated market, that risk is managed through enforceable safeguards: deposit and time limits, self-exclusion, reality checks and problem-gambling screening of the kind catalogued in iGamingCare’s safer-gambling tools. On an offshore site, a banned or self-excluded player simply registers again, and none of those controls follow them.
European policymakers are responding by funding the evidence base rather than retreating. In May 2026, UK Research and Innovation backed a new national programme to study gambling harms of exactly this kind.
For legislators in Bangkok, Manila and beyond, the lesson is less about morality than plumbing. Thailand’s bill was shelved late last year before its current revival, and the Philippines is still reckoning with the fallout of its offshore-operator ban. Prohibition does not switch demand off. It decides only whether that demand sits inside a system that can see it, or outside one that cannot.
