WASHINGTON, DC – The U.S. House of Representatives is scheduled to vote Tuesday on a bill that would ban the use of credit cards to pay for online betting, as well as provide law enforcement officials with the authority to block access to gambling websites with the help of Internet Service Providers.The bill would provides some exceptions to the online gambling ban, like wagering on horse racing and the operation of certain online lotteries, according to reports in the Associated Press.
While the bill is supported by representatives of the major American professional sports leagues, the horse racing industry, many conservative family, and anti-gambling activists, others are critical of the loopholes and what they see as selective enforcement.
“If you’re going to support legislation that is supposed to ‘prohibit gambling,’ you should not have carve-outs,” said executive director of the Traditional Values Coalition, Andrea Lafferty.
“Somehow we find ourselves in a situation where Congress has gotten in the business of cherry-picking types of gambling,” said Representative Robert Wexler (D-FL)
Wexler’s opposition to the bill may have less to do with issues of fairness than in some specific loopholes that the legislation does not include. Wexler tried unsuccessfully to include exemptions for dog racing and jai alai, popular sports to wager on in his home district in Florida.
Others oppose the legislation on an ostensibly more principled basis.
“I think the [bill] is a great infringement on liberty,” said Representative Barney Frank (D-MA). “When it comes to an individual decision on how to spend your own time and money, that’s not my position, that’s not my business. I am skeptical of people who want to protect people from themselves.”
Meanwhile, on the opposite side of the country, at least two gambling-related magazines have sent notices to their subscribers stating that due to a recently passed ban on online gambling in the state of Washington, the publications will no longer be delivered to subscribers there.
According to reports in the Seattle Times<./i>, subscribers to Casino Player and Strictly Slots magazines in Washington received letters from the publishers stating “(I)t is with deep regret that we must inform you we must cancel all subscriptions to Washington State.” The letter cites the reason for the cancellation as “new state laws regarding the legality of online gaming.”
In addition to banning online gaming, Washington’s new law changed the penalty from a “gross misdemeanor” to a felony.
The law states, in part, that whoever “knowingly transmits or receives gambling information by telephone, telegraph, radio, semaphore, the internet, a telecommunications transmission system, or similar means, or knowingly installs or maintains equipment for the transmission or receipt of gambling information shall be guilty of a class C felony.”
The portion of the law which likely led to the gambling magazines canceling the subscriptions of Washington-based subscribers stems from the definition of “gambling information” under the law, the dissemination of which is also prohibited.
“In the application of this definition, information as to wagers, betting odds and changes in betting odds shall be presumed to be intended for use in professional gambling,” the law states.
The law does provide an exception to the “gambling information” clause for “newspapers of general circulation or commercial radio and television stations licensed by the federal communications commission,” but does not specify an exception for gambling magazines.
