Without reading the specifics of the bill, this is my current opinion.
The US has made it illegal for US banks to transfer money to online gambling sites, and they have some sort of provisions for sites that have links to gambling sites out there.
First, who does this affect? Primarily it affects banks, but that affects the individual gambler since it will be just a tad bit harder to deposit money with an online casino. It also affects affiliate sites hosted on U.S. servers and run by U.S. citizens since they are now not allowed to link to online gambling sites for fear of aiding and abetting (there are several ways around this of course).
Second, what are the real threats to the entire affiliate industry (since plenty of us are not based in the U.S. already).
These would be the biggest threats I see:
1) Neteller and the other intermediaries are included as part of the sites that are banned from money transfers by U.S. citizens. This makes it more difficult for casual gamblers, but the people who really want to play will find a way around it.
2) Online gambling sites voluntarily stop taking wagers from U.S. citizens. We have already seen this action by 888 and Party Gaming. The interesting thing is that it only seems to be publicly traded companies that have alot to loose by having the DOJ breathing down their necks that are taking this action. What will be interesting to watch in the coming weeks is how the privately held companies react, especially the one’s that have 90% of their revenues coming from the U.S. This will be more telling to how this all shakes out. Obviously, the affiliate marketer wants the U.S. gambler to be able to play, but at the same time, if every site volutarily stopped taking wagers from the U.S. then the affiliate industry wouldn’t have any risk since an affiliate couldn’t possibly aid and abet when there isn’t anything illegal happening in the first place. But, there will always be some sites willing to take bets from the U.S. Of course this severly impacts the industry as upwards of 60% of online gambling funds come from the U.S. For the affiliate this means diversifying into markets outside of the U.S. — less lucrative, but high growth potential.
3) All online gambling sites are blocked from U.S. IP’s. This is the big one really, since theoretically, a would-be U.S. gambler would no longer be able to access the sites to play at. There are some huge difficulties with this one however as there are free speach and censorship issues that the U.S. population isn’t very keen on. This could actually be a good thing for affiliate sites, since the code that is used to link to the site could be setup to re-direct in a way that the gambler can now get to the site, when they could not get to the site by directly entering the URL. The thing that would really suck is if Google and Yahoo decided to police the Internet themselves and not allow any sites with links to known gambling websites. Again, there are censorship concerns here for certain, so it doesn’t seem likely that it would happen, but it could.