I have always been against Barney Frank’s way of regulating the industry.
If the US casinos are allowed to go online (forget about the offshores, no one will let them in, except maybe a few of the publicly traded) there will be some affiliate business. But if you think Bodog is hard to sign up under, wait till you see the MGM’s requirements.
One thing that comes to my mind which will stop 99% of the affiliates to advertise legal online casinos are the affiliates themselves. Imagine that MGMOnlineCasino.com lets you sign up under them and an underage gambler visits the casino through your banner. Considering this is America, the parents will sue the casino and the affiliate. Then the casino will sue the affiliate for “advertsing to minors”, criminal charges may be brought against the affiliate for promoting gambling to minors etc.
There is no good way to prevent an MGM ad to be displayed on anything but quality websites except by having crazy sign up conditions. Most likely MGM would rather pay for banner display on high traffic adult oriented websites, such as bullzeye.com, than to sign up small affiliates which could do a lot of harm and bring a bag full of lawsuits.
I think if this happens, we would just continue to advertise the “illegal casinos” as we are currently doing – so no change by Frank’s bill…