United States Online Gambling Laws - Untenable Hypocrisy

Author: G. Kingz

When one contemplates the strange legal position of online gambling in America today it is tempting to conclude that the United States is less the home of the free and more the land of the slaves. But do the citizens of the world's most powerful country even realize that their freedom of choice is compromised every time they turn on their own computers inside their own homes? It has certainly become more difficult to place a sports bet online or find an online casino that is willing to accept American players, but it is by no means impossible. A cursory glance at online poker sites such as Full Tilt or Poker Stars confirms the assumption that hundreds of thousands of Americans are still gambling on the Internet, despite the incoherent and uncoordinated efforts of legislators to prevent this very outcome.

The right to gamble online is not protected by the US Constitution, although one might feel that prohibiting the act tramples upon an individual's civil liberties. Only in America is it a right to bear arms but not a right to play blackjack on the Internet for money. This is not to say that gambling is illegal in America. Far from it, the United States is home to the largest regulated gambling industry in the world spanning lotteries, horse racing, land-based casinos, and tribal casinos. Thus, the argument that online gambling should be banned due to concerns about the welfare of the citizenry or moral qualms is obviously specious and ultimately laughable.

If there is truly a desire to protect the best interests of the people then regulation is the only answer that makes sense. An analogy can be drawn with the attempt to ban alcohol consumption all those years ago, whereby legitimate suppliers were driven away and the void was filled by a criminal element who provided the product at a higher cost and inferior quality. There were no winners. People kept on drinking, only now there was absolutely no way to protect them or generate revenues for the state by their actions. To attempt to criminalize online gambling will not stop the act itself, but it will encourage ruthless operators to step in after legitimate businesses are forced to retreat.

After the passing of the UIGEA it was only a question of marking time before scandals would descend upon the online gambling industry, and it came as no surprise that the rather relaxed island of Costa Rica would be the location of choice. The online poker cheating scandals at Ultimate Bet and Absolute Poker where millions of dollars were stolen from unsuspecting players is a testament of what happens without real regulation. But in order to understand the full scope of hypocrisy in the United States it is worth noting that some forms of online gambling are legal and strictly regulated.

America taxes, endorses, and profits from specific forms of online gambling. If you're betting on horse racing or buying lottery tickets online that's perfectly all right and those arguments about protecting people disappear. But if you want to bet on the same horse race with a bookmaker who is located in the United Kingdom or another sovereign state then you are breaking the law.

So, to clarify, online gambling that is not sanctioned within the United States is a social evil that cannot be allowed to persist, so it is really difficult to mount an argument that doesn't rely on money as the bottom line for what's really at stake here. The legality of online gambling is a matter for each state and the state legislators understand that it will be tricky to derive financial benefit if their voters are allowed to bet with operators that are based overseas. Even if the individual punters are taxed it won't compare to the big money that remains out of reach, namely the revenues amassed by the operators. So, if you're the governor of an in-bred state - let's say Kentucky as a random example - then the question is how do you extort your share of the online gambling pie? You don't want to regulate the transactions, you instead want to blackmail the operators by seizing their domain names and holding them to ransom.

For the vast majority of us gambling is a form of entertainment and an activity that does no harm to anyone else, but there is no doubt that for a minority gambling is an
addiction and there should be laws designed to protect those people from themselves. There is also a far greater and more pressing need to ensure that the gambling operators
provide fair and honest games and that they also pay out winnings and honour deposits. This can only be achieved with rigorous regulation and government oversight, as is the
case in the United Kingdom, which seems light years ahead of America on this issue.

One can only hope that with a new administration in the United States there will also come an evolution in civic ethics, and dare to dream, a belief in evolution as well. The
Internet has established a new level of personal freedom that could not have been imagined thirty years ago, and our societal laws must adapt to these changes. One proposition worth
betting on is that America will be the last nation to comprehend this inevitability.