The possibility of updating the guidelines to a new version has faded, and after the parliamentary window of the Budget Law has passed, Agcom returns to dealing with game advertising.
Following the entry into force of the new Budget Law which – despite the hopes of some and the concerns of others – discarded the proposal from various parties regarding the overcoming of the famous Dignity Decree, attention immediately returns to the regulation and sanctioning of game company advertising. The responsibility once again falls to the Communications Authority (Agcom) which – as ItalianGamingNews.it learns from institutional sources – is about to issue a directive aimed at resolving the various interpretative doubts that remain in managing this now so complex and articulated matter, which sees two decrees of equal level (the Dignity and legislative n.41 related to the reorganization of online gaming) coexist, albeit with partially opposing principles, but without nullifying each other.
For this reason, as we reported in recent months, the same Authority had worked on drafting a new version of the interpretative Guidelines on the ban on advertising and promotion of gaming, in an attempt to update them to the new context imposed by decree 41, which allows the possibility of promoting responsible gaming.
However, the process initiated internally by Agcom was halted at its inception, with the first draft of the new guidelines not passing the scrutiny of the Authority’s Council, pending an opinion from the organization’s Legal Service to confirm its necessity and actual interpretative validity. It then stalled completely once the matter was reviewed by the European Court of Justice first, and then by the Italian Parliament. Agcom’s legal opinion was therefore used in these forums, instead of resulting in a new operational measure.
Now that the parliamentary process has once again been interrupted and the much-discussed repeal of the Dignity Decree, often hoped for by some in politics (as well as in sports or culture), Agcom intends to take up the matter again, but without necessarily resorting to the new guidelines, instead publishing a directive whose purpose could be similar if not even broader.
A “directive” is indeed a political-administrative or strategic measure by which a public administration defines orientations, general criteria, and guidelines to which its future activities or those of the subjects under its regulation must adhere.
Therefore, such a measure does not directly regulate specific cases, does not create immediately binding obligations for external recipients, but serves to guide the administrative and interpretative action of the Authority. Its function would still be to establish strategic objectives, priorities, and intervention criteria, as well as to guide the exercise of regulatory, sanctioning, or supervisory powers and ensure consistency and predictability of administrative action.
It is therefore a general administrative act, often classified as a “soft law” or programming act which does not usually assume regulatory effectiveness like a regulation but internally binds the administration that adopts it, also influencing stakeholder behavior. In the specific case of Agcom, therefore, the use of directives serves to indicate interpretative criteria of sector regulations, guide future regulatory resolutions, signal to the market or operators, define intervention priorities and areas of particular attention. The process for the new measure should start in these days, after the legal office’s opinion was received at the end of December and could materialize by the end of January or the beginning of February.
