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The first independent gambling guide
to the best online casinos!
New Mexico Expert Discusses Online
Casinos
New Mexico policy
expert J.D. Bullington wrote a column this week and called online
casinos a “Den of confusion.”
Online casinos are very popular worldwide and much has been written in
recent months about the regulation of online casinos and the boom of
online casinos in the US and abroad.
Americans continue to wager billions of dollars on online casinos and
poker rooms and sports books but the United States Department of Justice
still considers online casinos illegal.
Recently, besides Bullington’s writings, The Wall Street Journal also
weighed in on online casinos and the industry by clarifying the laws
about online casinos and interviewing members of Congress in a debate
about whether or not online casinos should be legal or not in the United
States. These exclusive Wall Street Journal interviews helped clarify
the online casinos struggle and battle too.
Bullington, in his piece on online casinos, showed that the internet
gambling industry is a $12 billion dollar industry and that the appetite
to wager on sporting events and online casinos is insatiable.
He also said, “I say our appetite because I seriously doubt if just one
person with a computer and a love for gambling is responsible for taking
the industry from $3 billion in 2001 to where it is now.
To give you a comparison, the entire pornography business in the United
States brought in $12.6 billion in 2005, with about $2.5 billion
generated through the Internet.
Everyone talks about how big the online porn industry is. I've got news
for you - the Internet portion of the gambling industry alone is now as
big as the entire porn industry in this country. And the revenue
estimates are projected to double by 2010.
But wait, you ask. Isn't online gambling illegal? Well . . . yes, and
no, kinda, sorta, maybe. Who knows? If Congress and the states are
considering a new set of laws making it illegal, then it must be legal,
right?
No, not exactly.”
So if online casinos are not illegal, then everything is OK, right?
Not quite, according to Bullington. He continued his online casinos
examination, “The U.S. Justice Department has insisted for several years
that online gambling is against the law. The justification for that
opinion stems from the federal Interstate Wire Act of 1961, which
prohibits individuals from engaging "in the business of betting or
wagering knowingly or using a wire communication facility for the
transmission in interstate or foreign commerce of bets or wagers or
information assisting in the placing of bets or wagers."
This would seem straight forward enough, except there was no such thing
as an Internet back then.”
The senior policy advisor said, “If you play poker on the internet or
spin a cyber roulette wheel, are you competing against people in a
contest or mathematical odds? If it is the latter, then it can be argued
that you are not technically involved in a contest, and therefore not
doing anything illegal.”
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