Gambling Internet Laws are Changing — in Some Places

So gambling Internet laws in the US now reflect an old way of thinking, a thinking that gambling should be kept a scarce resource which could be controlled, and which would hold down the actual amount of gambling done by the US citizenry.

This revolution in Internet access has affected all areas of life. That means that not only gambling, but also pornography has penetrated the American home in a way that it was not available in the past. Without the Internet, one got one’s porn in a plain brown wrapper delivered by the US Postal Service, usually with a skeptical mail man looking at it in a quizzical way. Now, one can go to free or paying porn sites and download hours of videos and thousands of pictures of varying quality.

Internet gambling is the same thing. If someone wants to play blackjack or poker online, one doesn’t care if a server that resides on the next block or halfway around the world offers it. The experience of gambling is the same — as a result, gambling Internet laws don’t prevent people from gambling online. Rather, they just deny revenues to local and state governments, revenue that moves by the magic of the Internet from 100 Main Street to Bangladesh, or the Caymans, or Vladivostok.

What a world we live in! The legislators who had all the keys to preventing our citizens from doing what they wanted with access to illegal things are now finding themselves powerless in the great democratizing force called the Internet. If someone wants to gamble, he or she can do it without leaving their front door. And if they can’t do it through a US site, they’ll do it with a site somewhere else in the world.