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Here’s an interesting story about the possibility of online gaming regulation in America. It’s taken from the Congressional Weekly website:
Login required, care to share the cliffs notes?
Sure, here it is:
Internet Gambling: Who Holds, Who Folds?
By Joelle Tessler, CQ StaffGambling in the United States has until now been left to the states to regulate, except when it leaks across state lines. The surge in Internet gambling, however, has thrown open the casino doors and set off a mad scramble among states, federal agencies, Congress and even an international trade group for control of a lucrative business that might be beyond any control.
Online Wagering’s Rise
Legislatures in North Dakota and Nevada, for instance, have considered licensing (and then taxing) online gaming companies — moves that would have made those states hubs for the Internet gambling industry. But both shelved the idea after the Justice Department warned they would be violating a 44-year-old federal law barring interstate wagers using telephone lines. The department has used that law to try to prosecute online gaming companies, even though most operate from places such as the Caribbean and South America.
James Kasper, the legislator who wrote the bill to legalize online poker in North Dakota, is incensed by Washington’s position — a position backed by many conservatives in Congress. “The Department of Justice stuck their nose into a states’ rights issue,” Kasper says. “They have no business telling any state what to do.”
But states with a deep aversion to gambling, such as Utah, are having just as much trouble getting their way. It is virtually impossible to keep Internet gaming out of an entire state — or contain it within a state’s borders, for that matter. And the World Trade Organization ruled this spring that the United States is practicing trade discrimination by prohibiting on-line gambling in general while exempting Internet wagering on domestic horse races. The WTO says it should be all or nothing and wants foreign gaming companies to have open access to the U.S. market.
Those are fighting words in places like Utah, which has banned all forms of gambling. “This is a world body that no one in Utah voted for that could have dictated to us here in Utah a public morals issue,” says state Attorney General Mark Shurtleff. “The WTO should have no say in how we govern our state.”
State officials across the country, already frustrated by the difficulty of taxing electronic commerce, now worry they are losing the tug of war over Internet gambling. And as online games of chance proliferate across national and state borders, state officials fear they might eventually lose authority to regulate and tax gambling of all kinds.
“Before the Internet, gambling could be controlled inside jurisdictions,” says Eugene Christiansen, head of a consulting firm that advises the gaming industry. “But the Internet has created the first borderless global market. And it’s very, very hard to imagine a future in which this goes in reverse.”
Booming
