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U.S. House to Vote on Anti-Online Gambling Act
SonicSpike writes to mention that the House is set to vote on an act designed to choke off the U.S. money flow to internet gambling. Though illegal here in the states, overseas operators are getting a good deal of business from individuals with U.S. bank accounts and credit cards. From the article: "The legislation would make it illegal for banks and credit card companies to make payments to these sites. It also allows law enforcement officials to force Internet service providers to remove links to the websites. Many major credit card companies already refuse to process such payments. Opponents of the bill, including online gambling sites and a new group representing U.S. poker players, noted the growing popularity of Internet gambling and predicted that people would continue to sidestep laws."
I guess they're just running true to form, though. They allow OTB and lotteries online, because they can tax those.
I bet $1 that online gambling will not be banned.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
Disclaimer: I make my income through Internet gambling. However, even before that, I just never saw the problem. Why is it so demonized over there?
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Don't know how it's in the US, but I don't wonder countries are against online gambling: not because of your health, or to prevent fraud, but because of all the money they'll lose their grip on.
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
You guys can't gamble on the internet? [Takes long drag from joint]. I thought the USA was the land of freedom..?
re:"Whatever happened to the land of the Free? If you want to gamble your money on-line, why shouldn't you be able to?"
Um - some boat people you sent our way got mixed up into our politics. The one's wearing belt buckles on their heads. Thanks for starting us out with the best and the brightest.
"The legislation would make it illegal for banks and credit card companies to make payments to these sites"
This will just cause the creation of middleman sites where you park funds with your credit cards and then they transfer the $$ to the online casino of your choice. Paypal would be a good candidate for this. If the govt get's on Paypal's case, then some offshore holding company will come along and for a 1-2% fee do this. The sad thing is that it will probably be owned by a casino and will drive the cost up another 1-2% just to get into a game.
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
What about the RPGs (Puzzle Pirates being the example that comes to mind first) that allow gambling within the game?
Money can be funneled in via purchases of credits/dubloons/tokens, which can then be used in gambling on games within the meta-game. I use YPP as an example because it just recently added poker to its arsenal, although it's had multiplayer gambling for years (especially in tournaments, where you don't even have to convert the dubloons into anything to use them as prizes).
Granted, the dubloons in YPP are meant for purchases of items such as clothing and swords, but they COULD still be used for gambling...
The power elite will impose whatever policy brings in more revenue for government. It's really that simple. Government is run as a business, and like any business, more revenue is always viewed as a good thing. The objective for the power elite is to maximize revenue and "market share" (control over the people), and that is exactly why every year there are thousands more laws on the books than the year before, and exactly why all governments tend to expand, and never reduce, their powers throughout their existence.
Take prohibition for example: sure, they could tax drugs and "allow" us our god-given right to voluntary association, but prohibition rakes in billions per year for government, and provides them with orders of magnitude more power than regulation and taxing, which can be leveraged for even more profit. Therefore, prohibition is here to stay, at least as long as big government is here to stay.
They will literally sit down and discuss how to maximize revenue and market share, like any business would, and the answer will be determined exactly that way. Don't you love being ruled by other human beings?
Which is where the idiocy begins. You can't tax something that's illegal. Well, you can, but not many people will fess up. Right now, with the betting going on overseas, the industry is pulling money out of the US economy and adding it to other country's economies. All taxes aside, the US economy is weakening because it is illegal to gamble online in the US, but not on servers outside the US.
IF the US were to legalize online gambling, and tariff the hell out of international gambling services, they could not only keep more of the money IN the US economy, but they could still tax the gamblers (capital gains) and the profits of the online casino.
Instead the government has created a situation where they are attempting to dictate morals to the majority aged citizens and are shipping our US dollars overseas for no good reason.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Actually, I think "the land of the free" is an intellectually dishonest catchphrase, in general.
We all would love to live in a Land of the Free. It implies we have absolute control over our own actions, and "there ain't nobody that can tell us what to do!" Reminds me a lot of that feeling you get when you turn 18 and start flipping the bird to all and sundry.
The problem is that our actions, when taken in public, can have an effect on an awful lot of people. Riding without a helmet? Great. When you wreck and live in a persistent vegetative state, the Insurance Company has to cover it. The problem is, I'm paying into the same insurance company you are, so my rates (may) go up, just because you were too stupid to put a hat on your noggin. Ditto with seatbelts, only now you may have 4 people in comas for the rest of their life, and the cost increases dramatically.
If there was no monetary pain to me, at all, because you didn't want to wear a seatbelt or a helmet, go for it. After all, it is your life. If you can ensure that I don't have to pay a cent more because you want to risk it, I'm all for you not wearing helmets or belts. Or, rather, I'm all for your freedom to do as you wish. It's not my fucking job to keep you alive. I may tell you you're stupid and to put a seatbelt on, but that's just freedom of speech. It's not like you have to do what I say.
Drugs and gambling are somewhat similar, but subtly different. The only downsides to these: people, due to their dependence upon either, breaking the law and stealing shit to fund their habit. The subtle difference is that, the act, itself, does not DIRECTLY (or as-closely-indirectly-as-seatbelts-do) cost me any money. I mean, the justification for outlawing drugs is a: social (we don't want drug use in our community), which is, in my opinion, the antithesis of a "free" community, or b: financial (we don't want drug users stealing our stuff), which, in my opinion, has some grounding. But the problem is that the habit, for all of its power over the person, is too indirect, in my opinion, to be banned. Example: if I'm a billionaire, and I want to sit in my mansion all day and do coke, who the fuck are YOU to say that's wrong? it's my life, it's my house, and I'm paying for it with my own money. Right there, whether you agree with drug use or not - doesn't matter. It's about freedom. Ditto with gambling. But when a crackhead steals my bike to pawn at a pawnshop to finance their need, I tend to get a wee bit pissed off. With that said, I'd probably be just as pissed off if it was just a bunch of punk kids on a dare. Or a hobo who thought he'd take up cycling for unspecified personal reasons. So really, in this instance, it's not the drug use, or gambling, that is bad, it's what people CAN do to finance it. Which is, in my opinion, a separate issue. They may be linked, but they're not one in the same. If you're Michael Jordan and you want to gamble away crazy moneys in Poker, go for it. You've got the money, and I'm not going to tell you what to do. But if you steal something of mine, then you're a thief, and you need a swift kick in the teeth.
Prostitution is way different. That's just the moral police acting like the world will end if they don't "protect the people". I'm old enough, thanks. I can think for myself. Are you going to protect me from credit card debt, too? No? Then shut the fuck up and sit the fuck down. Legalize prostitution. Tax it. Spend that tax money on setting up education programs for prostitutes. If they have a pimp who is abusing them, protect them. Mandate monthly checkups. STDs.
Nanny state, true. In some ways. However, sometimes your freedom to do something impinges on my rights. In that case, maybe a law is in order. Maybe it isn't. That's what public debate is *supposed* to be about. Instead, it's just a bunch of boiled down, trite sound bites strung together to rally the masses. Phooie.
When offshore gambling sites first popped up 10+ years ago, the quick and easy way to deposit money into them was via credit card. Around 6-7 years ago, most credit card companies started denying payments to any "gaming website". While they claimed they were taking the moral high ground, the real reason is having to deal with chargebacks. Since it is against the law to collect on any gambling debt in the US, you had people running up their credit card bill at gambling sites, then protesting the charge and the card companies did not have a legal leg to stand on -- they certainly couldn't take anyone to court claiming they were owed this money that they knew was being used for gambling. When the card companies started denying payments, people started using middleman payment processors. The processor of choice was Paypal. Fees were high, but often times you could get the sportsbook to pick up the fees if you made a deposit. In 2002, when EBay bought Paypal, they decided they wanted to stop handling any grey area business since they were a large company and didn't want the legal liability. This meant dropping payment processing for most porn sites and gambilng sites. The irony of this was that Paypal made its name in the industry (and its fortune) off of gambling and porn sites, but was now ditching them now that they had achieved a higher status. When this happened, Neteller -- an offshore payment processing company -- was the one who got the biggest boost in business. With even higher fees, they essentially did what Paypal was doing (though with much less regulation and customer service). After a few years many people found they could no longer do credit card deposits to Neteller, so most have resorted to actually making direct bank deposits from their bank to Neteller. Neteller is still around today and is still what most people use to make sportsbook deposits. Western Union is also a company many people use, but people have found more and more they are asking a lot of questions on who exactly you are sending the money to -- obviously the government is putting the heat on them as well. Over the years many other small payment processing companies have popped up... All of course unregulated, but with the lack of viable options for getting money into offshore books, people have taken the chance.
Eye On Gambling -- www.eog.com
Hey, don't blame us! We were setting the right example by persecuting them. After they ran away, how were we to know you guys would let them run your government?
There are non-regulatory solutions to alot of these things. Find an insurance company that insists on helmets and seatbelts, and charges more to those who ride without them. You say that prostitution should be legal, but the johns might be with your health insurance company. Thats going to cost you too.
The fact is, both of these things are costing you right now. You pay for the cops who are rounding up and babysitting these "offenders". You pay for the courts that process them. You pay with your money, and with lost freedom and privacy. (After all, they have to watch everyone to catch the offenders - ie driving checkpoints and undercover cops).
We've got laws dictating every little aspect of our behaviour. And I'm convinced we're little better off than we would be if we let people make their own decisions and suffer the consequences for them.
"Opponents cited the growing popularity of online gambling." How is this relevant? Law making should not be about whether something is popular or not, but whether it's desirable or not. It's as though, when Moses came down from the mountain with his commandments, the thieves' guild had expressed opposition, noting the current popularity of theft - popularity wouldn't necessarily make it right.
Note, I'm not coming down for or against online gambling, just making the point that its popularity is a specious argument when it comes to legislation.
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.