Online poker players in France woke up to more bad news today when they learn that a French court has ordered ISP providers to block all unlicensed poker and gaming websites. This is just the latest grievance French online poker players can file since online poker was legalized and regulated in the country –what should have been a victory for poker players has turned into a massive defeat.

First there was the malaise of going from PokerStars 50,000+ player base to PokerStars.fr’s player base of 1,000 players –the same held true for all online poker companies who set up shop in France and were licensed by the government.

The next bump in the road occurred when French poker players staged a sit-in over extremely high rakes that came about from the poker sites having to pay exorbitant licensing fees, not to mention the cost of setting up a new platform specifically for French players.

The ISP companies argued that blocking certain sites was difficult to set up, inefficient, would slow the network and could lead to blocking legal sites, in addition to the blocked sites simply moving to another Internet address.

You can expect the ISP companies to appeal the ruling.

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Tags: French online poker players, PokerStars

This entry was posted on Friday, August 13th, 2010 at 9:56 am and is filed under Poker Industry News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.