From a player’s point of view, would you trust an affiliate site that promoted a casino not on the whitelist?
The whole point of this regulation is to improve player confidence which can only be a good thing.
If a program doesn’t make an effort to get on the whitelist, they’re sending an implicit message to both players and affiliates. Would you still want to promote them in that case?
At the moment, there are a lot of big companies left out in the cold. They won’t allow that to continue. There’ll be a bit of a time lag and there may well be a lot going on behind the scenes, but the situation should be clearer in a month or two.
Keep your lawyers and players happy and just promote those programs who come up to scratch!