US to Legalize Online Gambling?

Pfft. Without getting into the politics on either side, mediamatters.org is to the left what mrc.org is to the right.

1 user agreed.

Yes, you certainly have a right to your feelings. And now I see where they come from.

You actually believe Fox news, Rupert M's propaganda machine for Cheney's mob? And then you say you based your decision "on more than Rush Limbaugh." More than? How can anyone with a straight face make any decision based on the lies that sexually perverted, drug-addicted convicted felon spews?

We obviously are talking right past each other. G'night.

If they legalize gambling then I have no problem with SL allowing it back. I keep thinking of the schoohouse rock song about how a bill gets passed into law. It might take a while or never happen.

Banks should stay forbidden though..

doesn't matter much if they legalize it or not... if the credit card companies won't support a platform that allows it, LL is very unlikely to change their mind about allowing it.

/me watches the thread go right over a cliff

there's no chance the US government will legalise online gambline and even if they did there's no chance that SL would allow gambling online here.

OK, but if that DID happen I've often thought about setting up a proper gambling commission that could report on the winning percentages of different machine and areas.

I think the only way to really do it in SL would be to get a collection of trusted agents to go to each casino secretly, maybe with alts, and place bets on random machines. Then you could publicly report the winnings. So you'd end up with a list that you could sort by machine name or gambling establishment and officially recorded win rates. It would be expensive to run of course so someone would have to pay for the service. You may be able to get gamblers to pay for the data or casinos to pay to be on the list or both!

Online gambling will only be legal if they can tax it and regulate it, so won't happen in SL where you can script our own odds on gambling machines or play 3 anoymous alts against some poor sucker in poker. Or earn lots of money through anymous alts without paying tax.

You are much more charitable than I. I was thinking "That flushing sound you hear is this thread circling the bowl".

You mean when there was a Republican president and it was not a filibuster proof senate with Dem's in the controlling majority...

I thought the bill to allow credit card payments for online gambling is restricted to only government regulated casinos... it doesn't allow just anyone to start an online gambling site (web or SL).

Don't expect the outcome on gambling to neatly follow party lines. It is more driven by state interests than policy interests (because it is quite honestly more of a local issue than federal issue). Barney Frank isn't supporting this bill because he's a Democrat; he's supporting it because Massachusetts stands to make money from it.

You assume I watch fox news and listen to limbaugh, I never said I did either of those. Typical liberal thinking, if you're not one way, then you're the other. In reality I get my news from many sources.

;0 if they really want to create a reliable new tax-revenue bracket, they need to legalize pot. there's no virtual substitute. and it's -real- gnp revenue, past the high even... many 'greenable' industries via hemp.

They create a new gambling continent and invite PKR in to run it.

The states never had jurisdiction over online gambling to begin with. Online gambling is an interstate activity and the Commerce Clause places it squarely in the jurisdiction of the federal government.
Online gambling, with the exception of sports betting under the Wire Act, is not and has never been deemed illegal under federal law. No federal prosecution of online gambling outside of sports betting has survived at the appellate level.
Gambling is already in SL. It never truly left and traditional gambling games were supplanted with superficially altered slot machines. There are huge slot machine parlors throughout SL. You may not have noticed because the business model was already developing towards hosting the casinos on estate sims or entire mainland sims by the time the SL gambling "ban" was implemented. If LL were to ever allow the old forms of gambling back into SL you probably wouldn't notice them anymore than you notice the slot machine casinos that are in SL now.

Didn't see this reported anywhere else.

http://www.texasinsider.org/?p=8937

Internet Gambling Bill May Get a Sporting Chance

By Kathryn A. Wolfe, CQ Staff

Rep. Barney Frank might have come up snake eyes in his previous efforts to legalize Internet gambling but he’s stepping up to the table again with a bill that would authorize the Treasury Department to regulate online wagering.

And there’s another shooter in his corner: Jim McDermott , D‑Wash., who sits on the Ways and Means Committee, introduced a bill (HR 226 that would provide for the collection of associated tax revenues.

Both bills were introduced May 6.

Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat and chairman of the Financial Services Committee, took pains to suggest that his prime motive for introducing his bill was to ensure Americans’ freedom to spend their money as they please.

“The government should not interfere with people’s liberty unless there’s a good reason,” Frank said. But he also acknowledged that, in a time of economic turmoil, the additional revenue wouldn’t hurt.

McDermott’s chief of staff, Mike DeCesare, said that over 10 years, the revenue bill could put $43 billion in federal coffers and even more in states’. It would establish a 2 percent tax on deposits made into Internet wagering accounts.

Undoing Earlier Laws
Frank’s bill would establish a regulatory procedure through which online gambling outfits would have to be licensed in order to accept bets from players in the United States, as long as the state in which a gambler lived did not bar the practice.

This would largely do away with a 2006 law (PL 109-347), pushed through by the Republican leadership as part of a larger port security measure, that was aimed at choking off online betting through restrictions on payment processing.



Comments:
Even with this bill, the return of the independent casino is a long shot. A person would have to make enough money to justify getting "regulated". And it looks like the gamblers themselves would be taxed at 2% of money wagered, the section in the article is kinda vague and I don't care enough about the issue to track down the bill.

Despite the title of the article you quoted, nothing within the article suggests exactly why this bill has a better chance than past bills. (And for this, an assumption that "Democrats are in charge" doesn't do it for me- not every issue is subject to the simple assumption that Democrats and Republicans always seek to do the opposite of the other.)

I would agree with your guess that the costs of getting whatever "license" would be required would discourage all but the big players to get involved (leaving Second Life out of it).

Further, the bill also respects state restrictions against gambling. That would put Linden Lab in a bit of a bind since it has no way of tracking whether or not bettors are complying with their local laws. I'm sure that Linden Lab's lawyers would probably advise that the potential legal liabilities are more trouble than it's worth.

Plus, Linden Lab would have to actually have a way distinguish gambling transactions from other transactions (to report to the IRS to help them collect a gambling "sin tax." Everything about this does say it's a long, long, long shot that gambling will come back to Second Life in the form it used to exist.

I'd love to hear what he and his cohorts feel IS good reason.

Anyhow, I'm an avid RL casino goer and enjoy horse racing as well, I don't care for online gaming as it lacks the atmosphere, but he is right, people should be allowed to spend their money as they wish. So regulated online gaming sites are not a big deal for me, but I agree that I don't see too many SLers getting regulated so any champagne popping may be premature.

I take a different tack on it. LL will NOT allow gambling in SL even if the new legislation goes through. It opens too many doors for government to step in and tax /egulate everything in SL. Too much of a legal and paperwork hassle and expense for LL + probably alot of lost SL customers who suddenly find microtaxes on everything. Particularly non US customers.

I totally agree.

I don't think they'd want the headache of a deluge of fraud AR's every time SL borks transactions either.

I see what you did there.

I don't see this as an issue. When you bulk delete ARs it shouldn't matter.

Whenever THEY feel like it, of course.