For a long time, I’ve been a little surprised that the US/WTO online gaming case hasn’t gotten more mainstream press. Now the tide may be turning. This LA Times editorial is a case in point:
ANTIGUA AND BARBUDA, former British colonies on the eastern edge of the Caribbean Sea, are smaller than Los Angeles and less populous than Burbank. Yet they may be able to force the world’s most powerful government to change its gambling laws.
Not since 1960 has it been legal under federal law to place or take bets on sports using interstate or international phone lines. The Federal Wire Act of 1961 and subsequent measures also have been interpreted to ban online gambling as well, or at least gambling on sports. At issue is whether those laws constitute “arbitrary and unjustifiable discrimination” against foreign firms.
Do they? Antigua and Barbuda argue that they do — and the World Trade Organization agrees. So do we.
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So the U.S. faces trade sanctions from the WTO unless Congress does one of two things: Either acknowledge that betting on horses from overseas is no greater threat to the nation’s moral fiber than it is at an OTB parlor, or make OTB parlors illegal.
Maybe it doesn’t have the stomach for either. If so, then Antigua and Barbuda may want to ask the WTO to ponder why allowing the interstate sale of lottery tickets — a form of state-sponsored gambling — is any less hypocritical than the U.S. stance on thoroughbreds and trotters.
If this editorialist had read Cutting the Wire, he/she would have known that federal efforts to ban interstate gambling go back to the turn of the century, and that the Wire Act was the culmination of a half-century of agitation over the race wire.