News

Tuesday, 24 November 2009 04:51

Regulated online gambling in the United States may get its strongest supporter yet in Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, if that's what his bosses decide.

Land based casino gambling revenue has suffered drastic drops over the last two years and the trend does not appear to be changing. With the economic recession far from over, casino bosses are looking at the Internet as a viable means of halting the slide and turning financial losses into profits once again. To that end, the money men responsible for financing the Nevada Senator's political campaigns may decide that the time is right for him to put his weight behind Barney Frank and his bill to regulate Internet gambling.

Historically, the casino owners of Nevada have given their full support to the laws created to attempt to ban online casinos from operating in the US as they were always seen as competition. However, with their land based businesses now in crisis, there is an urgent need to locate alternative sources of revenue that are free from the huge overheads and operational costs that dog mega-resorts. Slowly, the focus is turning toward online casinos to potentially provide that alternative.  

The head of the American Gaming Association, Frank Fahrenkopf has noted a shift in his base's outlook on Internet gambling from being solidly against to becoming neutral over the last few years. At the Global Gaming Expo being held this week, he told of the examining of Internet gambling's possibilities having a very good chance of being a major issue at the next meeting of the group in December.

So far, Harry Reid has managed to consistently avoid all links with Barney Frank's attempts to regulate Internet gambling. He even pressured the withdrawal of Senator Ron Wyden's health care legislation amendment that would have tied tax revenue obtained from Internet gambling to health care funding. Reid said that he did not want a subject as controversial as online gambling to be interfering with the health care bill. However, health care coupled with abortion had already created far more controversy with the bill than online gambling could ever do. In fact, the massive funding that Internet gambling's regulation would generate may have made the public far more amenable to those subjects once they had been linked.

At the time, analysts believed that Reid was merely reacting to his contributors' wishes by rejecting the licensing of online gambling operators. However since the AGA seems to have altered its own views on the subject, there is finally a powerful legislative voice that may push Frank's bill in the right direction.