While most European gambling debates still run along a familiar script — operators accusing regulators of legislating by headline, regulators accusing operators of resisting oversight — Prague has spent the past year testing a different model. The Institute for Gambling Regulation, which represents roughly 95 per cent of the Czech Republic's licensed market, describes itself not as a lobby but as a standing forum bringing operators, addiction specialists, behavioural economists and government officials into the same policymaking process.
Its flagship initiative, a data-sharing system called IRIS, shifts the unit of analysis from individual operators to individual players. Because Czech gamblers frequently hold accounts across multiple licensed platforms, harmful patterns that are invisible to any single operator can become visible once behaviour is tracked, pseudonymously, across the market as a whole. Legislative changes effective 1 October 2025 gave licensed Czech operators explicit legal grounds to share this pseudonymised data for player-protection purposes — with use restricted from marketing or competitive applications by design, and without building a centralised database of identifiable gambling histories.
The stakes are not abstract. Czech authorities estimate illegal, unlicensed gambling costs the state around $15.9m in lost tax revenue annually, with players losing roughly CZK 14.5bn a year to operators outside the regulated system. IPRH director Jan Řehola frames the project as a bet that better information, not simply stricter law, is the more durable lever against that black market.
Whether the model succeeds is still an open question — IRIS is young, and its efficacy has not yet been independently assessed. But as a growing number of European regulators grapple with cross-border platforms and multi-account behaviour that individual operators cannot see in isolation, the Czech experiment is being watched as a possible template beyond its own borders.