6 new French licenses… what about online casinos

On June 8, the ARJEL (Autorité des Jeux En Ligne) published the name of the 11 companies which have obtained the 19 first French licenses on online poker, sports bets and horse races.
You can find the list of these companies on a precedent blog titled A focus on the new panorama of French online gambling.
Friday June 25 2010, the ARJEL has granted 6 new licenses to 5 new companies.
That is how LIL Managers limited (friendbet.fr) and Electraworks SAS (partybets.fr and gamebookers.fr) can now legally offer online sports bets.
Reel Malta Limited (pokerstars.fr), Iliad Gaming SAS (chilipoker.fr), Partouche Gaming France (partouche.fr) and Electraworks SAS (partypoker.fr, actpoker.fr and luckyjeux.fr) have alsobeen granted an online poker license.
This news item gives us another occasion to browse the world of French online gambling.
As you surely already know, online casinos remain illegal in France.
That is why the main companies are abandoning this market.
Renowned websites such as BetFair, William Hill, Casino Tropez and Casino 770 do not accept any new players and even delete the accounts of their customers.
These online casinos all belong to large companies which are not ready to break the law.
If you have a French IP address when you visit a Casino Lemonade page about one of these websites, a message will warn you that you cannot be a member and will offer you to get redirected to 3 other online casinos on which you can play.
Unfortunately, as they leave France, these websites are taking away with them the experience they acquired in the dozen years they have been around for.
Instead of these reliable and experienced websites, new less law-abiding companies are flourishing, just as in the US in 2006 when the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA) banned online gambling in the US.
Because of this massive surge in new websites which are still untrustworthy, it is a shame that the French government did not choose to regulate online casinos as they regulated online poker, horse and sports bets.
However, since gamblers will logically keep on playing on foreign casino websites, the authorities might soon realise their own mistake in a couple of months.
In order to offer a safe legal framework to internet users, the government could soon decide to legalise online casinos, and maybe even bingo and other online games.
In the meantime, you can drown your misery on some websites recently put in place.
Among these, we selected 3 which seem trustworthy, safe and offering high quality games.
These are: Ruby Royal, EUCasino and Win Palace.
We can also mention the excellent 7Red.