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US Faces $100 Billion Fine For Web Gambling Ban
Stony Stevenson writes with the news that the World Trade Organization is seeking billions of dollars in compensation from the United States from their ban on internet gambling. The view of the WTO is that the US has reneged on commitments to the organization. "The disputed concessions arise from Antigua's victory earlier this year when the WTO ruled that the US violated its treaty obligations by excluding online Antiguan gaming operators, while allowing domestic operators to offer various forms of online gaming. Instead of complying with the ruling, the Bush administration withdrew the sizeable gambling industry from its free trade commitments. As a result, all 151 WTO members are considering seeking compensation for the withdrawal equal to the size of the entire US land-based and online gaming market, estimated at nearly US$100 billion."
Good!
Look, whether or not you agree with gambling, surely any reasonable person can see that the situation as it is now is simply untenable.
Gambling is allowed in some places (Las Vegas, Atlantic Ctiy, etc.) but not in others. Worse, in yet more places some forms of gambling is allowed (Bingo, horse racing, dog racing) but not others (blackjack, poker, etc.). Worst of all, in some places, such as the place where I happen to live, some gambling is allowed in the form of lotteries, but it is completely owned and run by the state government monopoly.
And to add to the madness, we now have laws on the book that say that online gambling is okay, but only on horse racing (thanks to a strong lobby) and within state lines?
I'm not averse to some sort of regulation to ensure that online casinos aren't cheating, but this sham of acting like gambling is an issue of morality so that government can use it as an excuse for avoiding competition is ridiculous. As long as the US continues its patchwork enforcement of laws based on outdated concepts of how people should and shouldn't live, we deserve to pay what amounts to a $100 billion annual Stupid Tax.
I still think that they ought to be allowed to violate US copyrights as an appropriate punishment. When the government (i.e. you and I, incidentally) is paying the $100 billion, people won't really care. But if corporate America starts losing money, I think you'll start seeing some rather dramatic changes very quickly.
US Congress in the pocket of US gaming industry association. The WTO is in the pocket of International gaming association. Good fight. Promises great action. Wanna bet who is going to win?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The U.S. ain't goin to pay.
My page.
Can we just apologize for banning online gambling, and promise to put it back? I would be happy to do that.
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
WTO 1: Gentlemen, I propose we send a message to the US by fining them infinity billion dollars!
WTO 2: That's the spirit, Bob! But I think a real number might be more effective.
Congress passes a law to protect US citizens from unscrupulous gambling operations that are not subject to the same kind of regulations that Casinos in the U.S. must meet -- and the world responds via the WTO by trying to extort $100 Billion dollars from the U.S. -- which means taking money from every citizen and company in the U.S. that pays taxes to support offshore companies right to not live up to regulations that make it more difficult to cheat the gamblers out of all their money -- and each of us will pay for that whether we as individuals or companies gamble or not.
Though not hopeful, I think the U.S. in this case should tell the WTO to go pound rocks.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
... Ten bucks says, the US gov never pays up.
They were originally going to fine the US $1 million, but were informed that this was not much money at all.
Who enforces this fine?
If your neighbours roof is flying past your window, you know it's cyclone season.
The Poker Player's Alliance is encouraging people to fly to Washington DC for two days later this month to lobby congresscritters for legal online poker.
I dunno if the WTO's statement will help or hurt this effort, to be honest. There might be a backlash.
Gifts for Geeks - Stuff that really matters!
It's because we didn't actually ban gambling. If the U.S. had just banned all forms of gambling, that would have been fine and the WTO would have accepted that with no problems. But instead, we banned only certain specific forms of gambling (e.g. Internet poker and casino games) while specifically allowing others (e.g. brick and mortar casinos, horse and dog racing, fantasy sports betting) and even protecting some as a governmental monopoly (state lotteries). It's the U.S.'s schizophrenic way of simultaneously banning and allowing gambling that's had the Antigua and the WTO complaining for so long.
Now that's an interesting point. Since only the government of the USA can represent the states in international relations, it may well be that the USA has signed up for a treaty obligation for which it has not been granted specific power. In the old days where the gambling had to be physically located in a geographical location, this was easy to enforce. Now we have the situation where gambling crosses physical boundaries (falling within the purview of the federal government), but the power to regulate it remains with non-signatory bodies (the individual states).
Thus, could the states compel the USA to repudiate the treaty, if the USG acted outside its constitutionally limited power?
--Ng
The thing is here that the US has been very very aggressive in enforcing WTO rules when they're in its favour. It's all very well saying how terrible the WTO is in this case, but trust me, the rest of the world has been saying pretty much the same thing every time a ruling goes the other way, and the US wins fair trade in something somewhere. The fact here is that the US allows online gambling. But only if the gambling company is based in the US. The justification given is that gaming companies outside the US aren't regulated, but this is a false argument: external companies could easily be required to conform to US regulations when they operate in the US, but the US has chosen to ban them entirely. This is against the rules. Every other country in the world that allows online gambling is forced to allow US online gambling companies to operate in their country. Why should the US be any different? To put it another way, let's apply it to another industry.... let's say.... selling software online. And put the same conditions in place: Now US-based software companies are free to sell in the US, provided they conform to US law, but offshore all software companies are banned from selling in the US, on the grounds that they might not conform to US law. I work for a software house based outside the US that sells software to US-based firms. If we were banned from operating in the US, while our US-based competitors were allowed to operate there, as well as compete with us in our own country, we would be justifiably upset. This is the position that offshore gambling companies are in now. They're happy to comply with US regulation, but that just isn't enough; the US won't allow them to operate. The point is that for fair trade, the same rules must be applied to onshore and offshore companies. If the US did this, there would be no suit.
China bans it internally as well as externally. Same with Germany: It doesn't matter if you are German citizen or not in that example.
The US in this case only bans it if you are not in the US. Which is exactly what the treaty the US signed with the WTO said we won't do. (Not just on gambling.) If the law applied equally to US and non-US gambling there would be no problem.
The WTO does not have a problem with any of their member nations banning something. It only has a problem when you try to shut other countries out of your markets intentionally, while keeping the local companies in them. This is the point of the WTO, and it benifits the US in many cases. It's why the USA pushed for the formation of the WTO, and for countries to sign the treaty the US violated.
The US is being stupid, and is going to pay for it. It is that simple. If the US wanted to ban online gambling, then it should ban online gambling, not just everyone else's online gambling.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
Gambling is an immoral tax, and for the WTO to try and enforce that on America's poor constitutes an attempted invasion by the people of Antigua. I think we should bomb every nation that hosts offshore gambling. There's really no other way, at this point, to protect Americans from sinners around the world.
This is my sig.
The Wire Act of 1961 made it illegal to place an interstate or international wager: And more recently they passed the "Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act" as a rider to a must-pass spending bill, which makes financial institutions responsible for policing online wagering: The UIGEA is at the heart of the WTO dispute. The bill is intended to illegalize gambling, not by making gambling illegal (something they cannot do) but my making it illegal to transfer money to and from gambling sites and the banks they work with.
Basically, our goddamned government insists on sticking its nose in a place where it doesn't belong.
Fun with Anagarams! LADS HOST, SHALT DOS. HAS DOLTS. AD SLOTHS, HATS SOLD. ASS HO, LTD.
yea.. we should totally start letting foreign gambling sites take all our money away through gambling on sites we can't regulate. I don't think you understand how seriously gambling laws are enforced in the US and how much is done to make sure it is completely legitimate.
Internet gambling has not been banned in the United States.
I repeat, Internet gambling has not been banned in the United States.
It is illegal to transfer money to a gambling site. There is a fundamental difference. In this case, United States Citizens are in effect throwing away money to Foreign sources. I'm a conservative, so I'm against the Democratic socialist view of "tax everything", but in this case the US government should be seeing something back.
The money raised by the tariffs will go to the government's treasury, which means other taxes could be lowered. You aren't denying access to cheap goods, you change relative prices.
In this hypothetical example, Belgians would pay higher prices for beer imported from the US, but at the same time they could pay lower prices for beer made in Belgium. People working for American breweries would lose their jobs, and Belgian breweries would hire more people.
Domestic vs. international law
The United States takes a different view concerning the relationship between international and domestic law from many other nations, particularly European ones. Unlike nations that view international agreements as always superseding domestic law, the American view is that international agreements become part of the body of U.S. federal law. As a result, Congress can modify or repeal treaties by subsequent legislative action, even if this amounts to a violation of the treaty under international law. The most recent changes will be enforced by U.S. courts entirely independent of whether the international community still considers the old treaty obligations binding upon the U.S. Additionally, an international agreement that is inconsistent with the U.S. Constitution is void under domestic U.S. law, the same as any other federal law in conflict with the Constitution, and the Supreme Court could rule a treaty provision to be unconstitutional and void under domestic law although it has never done so. The constitutional constraints are stronger in the case of CEA and executive agreements, which cannot override the laws of state governments.
The U.S. is not a party to the Vienna Convention. However, the State Department has taken the position that it is still binding, in that the Convention represents established customary law. The U.S. habitually includes in treaty negotiations the reservation that it will assume no obligations that are in violation of the U.S. Constitution a position mandated by the Supreme Court's 1957 ruling in Reid v. Covert. However, the Vienna Convention provides that states are not excused from their treaty obligations on the grounds that they violate the state's constitution, unless the violation is manifestly obvious at the time of contracting the treaty. So for instance, if the US Supreme Court found that a treaty violated the US constitution, it would no longer be binding on the US under US law; but it would still be binding on the US under international law, unless its unconstitutionality was manifestly obvious to the other states at the time the treaty was contracted. It has also been argued by the foreign governments (especially European) and by international human rights advocates that many of these US reservations are both so vague and broad as to be invalid. They also are invalid as being in violation of the Vienna Convention provisions referenced earlier.
If you post it, they will read.
Believe what you want about how abortion should have panned out, but the Supreme Court put the final nail in the 10th Amendment's coffin with the Roe v. Wade ruling. If you want to change that, vote for a Constitutionalist.
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signed
-The World
You can't take the sky from me...
"It was trying to protect domestic corporations and tax revenue."
This is not accurate. The legislation that was passed does exactly the opposite.
Had this been the real reason for the legislation, then taxation and regulation would have been the outcome, but banning the industry totally just opened the market to less scrupulous offshore operations, guaranteeing that domestic corporations couldn't compete AND preventing the gathering of tax revenue.
The UIGEA had ONE and ONLY ONE reason for being passed, it was a desperate attempt by a desperate incumbent to appeal to his religious constituents, in order to pave the way for future political advancement.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Frist
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UIGEA#Internet_gambling_provisions
I only go to buffets for the unlimited soft serve.
I think that the problem that the WTO has is that the US allows US vendors to sell gambling activities to people who do not live in the US.
The do NOT allow US citizens to purchase gambling activities outside of the US.
The US believes something similar to:
If you sell a product to your neighbour - this is ok.
If your neighbour sells you the same product, this is illegal.
But, I may be over-simplifying.
The Internet destroyed that paradigm. You can now interact virtually in a socially meaningful way with nearly anyone else in the world. You can gamble with your neighbor, or someone on the other side of the world. You can view a girl in Russia at home as your own personal nudie bar. And of course your Internet business can run on a server in your den with nobody (except the curious geek) being the wiser. This whole controversy is due to trying to apply laws built for the old paradigm to the new paradigm. What's needed are new laws for the new paradigm.
As of yet, material products cannot be transferred over the Internet. So illegal substance distribution laws can still operate under the old geography-based paradigm. If we ever invent Star Trek-style replicators, those laws will have to change as well.
And as a side side note.... who is the largest legal importer of coca leaf into this country?
Any guesses?
Yup! The Coca Cola Company! They still use it to produce coke... both kinds! They extract the coke and sell it to the Big Pharma companies for use in medicine, and then use the leftovers to make their product.
Its hard to say which coke is more vile. Both are habbit forming, though the liquid stuff has a far worst nutritional outlook.... all that sugar....
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"