Will Norway Reverse Ban on Online Gambling?

Although neighbor Sweden and other nearby countries have gone in one direction by completely legalizing online gambling, Norway - which is not a member of the European Union - has cracked down on its citizens by effectively banning the activity.

Follow this link to Online Casino Reports Norway for more on online gambling in Norway.

So is there any chance of the Norwegian government reversing the ban sometime soon? Unfortunately, it appears that the answer is probably no.

Citizens of the Scandinavian country can currently bet online, but only via the two state gaming companies, Norsk Tipping and Norsk Rikstoto, which now offer their games on the internet.

But to ensure it was only via those monopolies that Norwegians gambled, the government passed a law in December 2008 similar to the controversial UIGEA law in the United States that prohibited the processing of payments from Norway to unlicensed offshore gambling sites. Such a move, of course, would not have been so easy were Norway a member of the EU.

As in the US, the onus is on credit card companies and financial and other institutions to prevent Norwegians from transferring payments to and from remote gambling websites.

Despite the ban, there is no guarantee residents of prosperous Norway, which has one of the highest percentages of Internet use in the world, will be perturbed by the ban. A new report from Germany, where online gambling is also effectively banned, has shown that Germans gamble online anyway, in defiance of their lawmakers.