Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | May 2011 24 All Aboard Is there scope to rationalise online betting and gaming regulation in the Philippines? Fast work—the Philippines is a leader in online gaming A wide-ranging review of gaming policy announced last year in the Philippines by the country’s incoming president Benigno Aquino included asking whether there were any grounds for dovetailing the development and regulation of online and land-based gaming. The question came up recently when Inside Asian Gaming spoke to Jose Mari Ponce, Administrator and CEO of Cagayan Economic Zone Authority (CEZA), on the fringes of the iGaming Asia Congress organised by Beacon Events at the Grand Hyatt in Macau. “When the President instructed PAGCOR to look at the land-based operation, his order also asked for a review of the relationship between online gaming and land-based, and how that could be developed to generate more revenue,” says Secretary Ponce. The country has been a trailblazer in embracing and licensing new technology for gaming and betting services—aimed both at offshore and onshore markets. It has led to some of the world’s leading offshore online betting brands choosing to operate from the country. But the Philippines market lead has created some overlapping of jurisdictional competencies as the industry and the delivery technology has developed. An example is that currently in the Philippines there are two licensing authorities covering online gaming (three if you include the country’s National Telecommunications Commission, which oversees the provision of mobile telephony services including 3G services capable of accessing Internet-delivered gambling services). Thankfully operators only need one licence from one regulator at any one time. The question is who gets to issue it. Some observers say the multi-agency approach encourages competing fiefdoms within the industry, with one regulator sometimes seeking to exert control over bits of another’s business. For the purposes of this discussion the two relevant Philippines bodies covering online gaming services are CEZA—via its master licensor, a commercial company called First Cagayan Leisure and Resort Corporation—and the Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corporation (PAGCOR). PAGCOR wears two hats as a regulator and an operator of land-based casinos and is the ‘senior’ of the two bodies. It was set up 33 years ago to regulate the land-based industry. That was at a time when the Internet was little more than a computer communication network for university academics. First Cagayan was set up under the CEZA framework (itself designed to help an underdeveloped province in the northeast of the main island of Luzon). By the time CEZA’s Interactive Gaming Act (2003), was passed by lawmakers, the Internet was a well-developed medium for