By David Silverberg.
Digital Journal ― Does it make sense to protect people from their own vices? If online gambling is such an unnecessary evil, as a recent U.S. ban claims, what’s to stop the government from sheltering our fragile minds from online nudity or violent video games or the word “shit” written in emails?
A quick recap for those who didn’t dig around for the most buried news story on Friday: The U.S. Congress passed a bill to ban online gambling from coast to coast, making it illegal for banks and credit-card companies to process payments to online gambling sites. According to Reuters, government regulators are expected to build a “coding and blocking” system to identify and stop payments to these sites.
Bravo, U.S. Congress. You are effectively sheltering us from a recreation most would deem fun, and very few would call addictive. You are also slashing jobs with this bill and crippling stocks by as much as 70 per cent. Payment processing companies are also going to feel this law’s ripple, hurting even more jobs and thus more families.
What is the U.S. trying to prove here? If it really considers gambling to be that much of a problem, why is it banning it online and not the thousands of bricks and mortar casinos? Oh, right, they make billions of dollars in royalties, and there's no real way to collect from online casinos run from Banana Republics. In that case, ban 'em.
This online ban makes Uncle Sam seem like a bully father trying to warn their kids that betting on sports, playing poker and spinning a roulette wheel is risky behaviour that could gateway into other more serious vices. Then again, if online gambling is in the crosshairs of the feds this time, won’t other recreational pastimes also get the banned-in-the-U.S.A. treatment?
Watch out, Rockstar Games — your Grand Theft Auto franchise could be next. And high-risk language using four-letters words that aren’t “Bush”? Expect Congress to eye expletives with a more jaded outlook in light of the ease in which the gambling bill passed.
What the ban will also do is force online gambling companies to push their services onto Asia and Europe. No big deal, right? Essentially, the $12 billion US global market for online gambling will be spread outside the U.S. even more so this coming year, turning overseas countries into free-will utopias where anyone can place a bet on a deck of cards without facing recrimination from the feds.
It’s a shame the U.S. has been so short-sighted with their policy on online gambling. They still don’t see the logic of the old libertarian maxim, “If what I do doesn’t harm anyone else, why can’t I do it?” So far, the U.S. is looking more like a curmudgeonly old fart than the progressive leader you’d expect from a superpower.
In one word — pathetic.
