A new bill that would outlaw Internet gambling in the United States was attacked Thursday for a provision that the American Civil Liberties Union says would force Internet service providers to act as online cops.
Online gambling, which defies traditional state jurisdictions, has caught the Department of Justice with its pants down. So far, the department has been unable to establish any adequate plan to police cyberwagers. While the Interstate Wire Act of 1961 prohibits the use of phone lines to place bets across state lines, the question of whether the act applies to online gambling remains unsettled. The issue is further complicated by the fact that many online casinos have moved their operations offshore.
The bill introduced Thursday, the Internet Gambling Protection Act by Senator Jon Kyl (R-Arizona), tries to give teeth to government prohibitions against online wagers. Besides criminalizing all gambling and specifying that virtual casinos cannot evade gambling laws by offering "prizes" rather than cash, the bill holds ISPs liable for providing access to gambling sites once state or local law enforcement agencies have notified the ISPs that such activities are taking place.
Prosecuting crime on the Internet "is extremely difficult," says Vincent Sollitto, a spokesman for Kyl. "This is one mechanism to help law enforcement keep a clamp on some of the offshore activity that's making it impossible to restrict online bets."
Although only a handful of online casinos currently exist, the phenomenon has been generating a good deal of heat and light in the form of press coverage and concern from politicians who fear that home gambling will eat away at America's moral fiber. "Gambling erodes values of hard work, sacrifice, and personality," Kyl said as he introduced his anti-gambling bill.
But however small the current universe of online casinos, proprietors of the gaming industry, who rake in US$550 billion-a-year, are eagerly looking to plumb the Internet's financial possibilities, which at least one analyst has predicted could amount to $10 billion a year by 2000.
But critics charge that making service providers responsible for providing access to Web sites places them in the position of policing content rather than simply acting as carriers.
"The notion of using ISPs as regulatory mechanisms is hardly novel," says Chris Hansen, an ACLU attorney. "It's what happens in China and Singapore. And even if they aren't held responsible until after they are notified by law enforcement, it still puts them in law enforcement's shoes."
Although current federal regulations criminalize sports-wagering online, those laws are perforated by giant loopholes. For instance, off-track betting has taken off on the Web because of the Interstate Horse Racing Act of 1978, which makes interstate simulcasting of horse racing legal.
As with many other Net-inspired jurisdictional snarls, state courts are addressing the issue on a case-by-case basis, a situation Kyl hopes to correct with his bill. "Gambling is either heavily regulated or expressly prohibited in the states," Kyl said. "On the Internet, it is neither."
The Gambling Protection Act is co-sponsored by a bi-partisan group of senators: Democrats Bob Graham of Florida, Dianne Feinstein of California, and Tim Johnson of South Dakota; and Republicans Charles Grassley of Iowa and Tim Hutchinson of Arkansas.
