| | |  | | | | Free Online Gambling
Free gambling is a multi-billion dollar 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 or Atlantic City. You can gamble for free from the convenience of your own home using your computer. Whether this is or should be legal is in dispute. The most recent attempt in the U.S. to prohibit Online Gambling failed July 17, 2000 when supporters were 25 votes short of the 270 they needed to pass the bill.
This is the third such bill to hit Congress in the last two 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 apparently don't adequately cover the Internet. There are gray areas in the law but a ruling in New York in July set precedence on the question.
Since most free online gambling sites exist offshore, in countries where gambling is legal, free online gambling site owners are sure that what they are doing is legal. The authorities in individual states, where gambling is illegal say that if gambling sites aim for their residents, their courts have jurisdiction over the transaction.
The bottom line is that if you're an American and you want to make your money in free online gambling, 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 familiar names like Australia and Austria, the licensers of free online gambling sites tend to be places like Cook Islands, Curacao, Dominica, Grand Turk, Mauritius, Saint Kitts, Trinidad, and Vanuatu."
The focus of prosecutors and law makers has been primarily on the casino operators, leaving their customers free to continue using the sites. 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 state.
Even if legislation is 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 over their subscribers to the police. If free gambling operations remain offshore and policing of their customers remains difficult, it is predictable that business remain as usual for online gamblers regardless of what legislation gets passed and when. |
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