| | |  | | | | Free Gambling
Free gambling is a huge money making industry in the US. In the past, free gambling could only be done legally at locations licensed by local and federal governments. The internet has changed that. Now there is no need to travel to Las Vegas. You can gamble for free from the convenience of your own home using your computer. Whether this is legal is in dispute. The most recent effort in the U.S. to prohibit Online Gambling failed when supporters were 25 votes short of the 270 they needed to pass the law.
This is the third bill to hit Congress in the last years and probably will not be the last. The U.S. Justice Department recently introduced its own legislation to ban online gambling and there may be another vote on the bill mentioned above. The reason for the new legislation is that the existing laws do not cover the Internet. There are gray parts in the regulation but a ruling in New York in July set precedence on the question of online gambling.
Most free online gambling sites exist offshore, in countries where gambling is permissible, and the free online gambling site owners are sure that what they are doing is legal. The establishment in individual states, where gambling is illegal say that if gambling sites aim for their residents, their courts have authority over the operation.
Basically, if you are American and you want to play free online gambling games, you have to leave the country. The number of countries granting Internet gambling licenses increases on a daily basis, and the small countries are moving the fastest. Once you get past recognizable names like Australia and Austria, the licensers of free online gambling sites tend to be sites like Cook Islands, Curacao, Dominica, Grand Turk, Mauritius, Saint Kitts, Trinidad, and Vanuatu." The goal of prosecutors and law makers has always been the casino operators, leaving their customers free to continue playing casino games. The results of a Poll reported by PC Magazine indicate that 12 percent of people who gambled online did it because it was illegal to do so in their country.
Even if laws are passed to make online gambling illegal the most recent and future legislation is expected to address the internet Service Providers (ISP's) that are not obligated to hand their of customers to the police. If free gambling operations stay offshore and tracking their customers remains difficult, it is predictable that business stay usual for online gamblers in spite of of the legislation that will be passed and when. |
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