Encore...

I see more operators are pulling out of France. Some of them, of course, are doing so in order to apply for a licence, but others because their product offering is banned under the new legislation.

Specifically, Betclic has shut down its casino;

Sportingbet has blocked access to French customers while applying for a licence;

Paradise Poker has blocked access to French customers. And it is rumoured that BET365 is to close French accounts.

Meanwhile - quelle surprise! - the PMU have applied for a sports betting licence

Two thoughts spring to mind.

First, any lingering doubts from those among us who still believe in fairies that the French legislation is designed to protect the encumbent player must finally have exploded. The PMU is not obliged, as others are, to close its existing business while it goes through the application process.

The other is that experience has shown that it is actually remarkably difficult to win an account from another operator, because standard levels of customer lethargy mean that however good and competitive your product, people still tend to stick with their existing provider, because it's just too much like hard work to change. Famously, this is why people keep their bank accounts, on average, for longer than they keep a spouse.

This means that all those customers who are having their accounts closed, who will then go to open an account wherever they can, will be relatively unlikely to return where they were once their first operator is licensed. They have to go through the account opening process, submitting details, and perhaps having Know Your Customer checks done as well. Some simply won't be arsed.

This would be wonderful for France if they all, instead, opened with the PMU in the interim; but as the PMU offers neither innovation nor value, the chances are that they will, instead, open with an operator which is acting in breach of French law: in other words, in the black market.

Makes a lot of sense, this French law, non?

Dunkirk?

As French legislation moves ever closer, more and more operators appear to be lining up to suggest that it simply isn't going to work.

An op-ed piece in Le Monde the other day, signed jointly by Betclic, Bwin, and Unibet, laid out the reasons to be fearful. Isabelle Parise, co-chair of Mangas Gaming, told the IGaming 360 conference in Madrid yesterday that there are "many things that are dreadful" in the legislation, which, as it stands, is "the worst you can imagine". And Gigi Levy, CEO of 888.com, threw into a results presentation yesterday the thought that it would be more difficult for foreign operators to get a French licence than it will be for French ones. He commented that his company operates happily under its Gibraltar licence by the terms of European law, which seems to me to indicate that they plan to continue to do so when the law comes in, just as the amiable and eloquent Patrick Partouche suggested would be true of his eponymous outfit a few weeks ago.

At Betfair we had the latest in a long series of meetings about France this morning, pondering how absurd and ridiculous the new law is, and discussing whether our since-foundation stance of complying with national legislation obliges us to withdraw from the market until we are in a position to apply formally to operate, if it ever becomes commercially viable to do so. It would be an arduous and depressing task to contact our French customers with that sort of unhappy news; but the law as it is written would require us to close accounts and block French IP addresses, with risk of arrest for non-compliance. Operators who do comply with it would have to pull out of France.

Absurd and ridiculous, though, the law unquestionably is.

The simple fact is that we know, and customers know, that there are plenty of work-arounds for IP blocking, should people chose to use them; and without operator co-operation, the chances of the French government enforcing their legislation - short of sending the police randomly into people's front rooms and catching them on their computers - is zero. Operator co-operation will only come from those with brand names to protect, so the law will shut out precisely the sort of company that ought naturally to be welcomed in.

Anyone else who wants a bit of the action in defiance of the French government has the playing field wide open, so the black market will flourish. By France's own estimates, it already equates to around 5,000 sites, even before the addition of new rogue operators which are likely to pop up in the way that music file-sharing sites did when Napster first got banned. The music industry has struggled to recover from that position ever since, but the French have chosen not to learn from past mistakes. Instead, they will deny people proper choice and competition and force those who want it to find it in the illegal market. They are failing their citizens in consequence, and it's a shame to see it.

Meanwhile, should you be sunning yourself on the Cote d'Azur this summer and realise you've forgotten to place your weekend's bets on any sport back home with the account you opened in London, unlucky. You can quite legally call your bank which is licensed in England, order from your local bookshop at home, or change your utility provider online while you think of it - not to mention whatever other uses you might want to put the internet to while you relax on your hols. But you can't both adhere to the law and type in the URL of your betting account and place bets in your own country on your domestic sport, because in their wisdom, the French say that's interdit.

Looks like it'll be Tuscany for us this year, then.