It is plausible to believe that the US Justice Department is placing the same pressure as they did 2 years ago on the Media companies and the Online Advertising Firms (like Google and Yahoo).
It is also plausible to believe that ALL ISP’s have systems that can filter. From my understanding, China is one region that is prolific at filtering websites from ISPs.
This is potentially a devastating scenario if all US based ISP’s filtered out Gambling traffic.
From a business perspective, here is my suggestion:
1) Keep doing business as usual. It is a possibility at this time, but not a certainty that the filtering will be permanent.
2) Start considering and working on other business models for other industries. Diversify your income base. That is never a bad thing.
3) Lets consider for a second the filtering yesterday morning was a permanent move across the USA. Small Online Gaming firms with a majority of US based players would shut down their operations relatively quickly. But that large ones (888, PartyPoker, Bodog, etc), would they shut down? I don’t think so. They would then target Europe and Asia, and spend most of their marketing dollars on that region.
I’ll make sure this is brought up at the Casino Affiliate Convention in Amsterdam next month. We’ll look at the scenario in detail. But, I would certainly consider this a warning of a potential future, and a HUGE wake up call for the affiliates and gaming operators.
Marc Lesnick
Conference Organizer
http://www.CasinoAffiliateConvention.com
April 9-10, 2006
Amsterdam