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A Fundamentally Flawed Bill

The Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA) was passed in late 2006 with little fanfare – it wasn’t until online casinos and other internet gambling companies were forced out of the U.S. market that citizens and other international nations began to express concerns about the UIGEA. The U.S. Department of Justice immediately used the powers gained by the UIGEA to prosecute any online casinos industry related company that it had feasible control over – Neteller namely. Concurrently, the U.S. was involved in a series of World Trade Organisation (WTO) disputes over the legality of the new U.S. offshore online gambling ban according to international trade policies. All of this over an Act that most are now deeming highly flawed and altogether ineffective.

With newly proposed UIGEA regulations garnering intensely negative feedback from online casinos organizations and more importantly, the U.S. banking industry, there are serious questions as to whether there are any regulations that banking and financial centers could reasonably enforce across the millions of daily banking transactions that occur in the U.S. A follow up report by the American Banking Association to the proposed regulations cited the UIGEA as seriously flawed, and the reported even noted that the online casinos regulations and ban had “no prospect of practical success” as written.

But that’s not where the criticism ends, New Jersey District Judge Mary L. Cooper seems to agree with most in the online casinos industry and beyond in observing that the UIGEA has some fundamental flaws. The lawyer for the interactive and online gambling trade group iMEGA, Eric M. Bernstein, observed on the Judges recent ruling, “Judge Cooper found that banks, credit card companies and other payment system instruments are exempt from criminal sanctions under UIGEA, significantly undercutting UIGEA’s enforcement mechanism. Her ruling echoes the growing consensus of opinion that UIGEA is a fundamentally flawed statute.”

And as Bernstein notes, most in the industry, online casinos gambling and beyond feel that the UIGEA has some serious issues and that the United States would be better served with a study on the effectiveness and feasibility of licensing and regulating the intenret gambling industry.