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December 19 - The online gambling sector, which until recently remained hopeful that draconian legislation in the USA that prevented them from doing legal business with Americans would be overturned due to economic pressure, received the worst possible news yesterday. The EU and the USA have indeed forged a new trade pact, but at the direct expense of online gaming firms, who have been abandoned and used as nothing more than expensive bait.
It's a 101 lesson in political expediency, with the victims of injustice left out in the cold and the parties involved walking away fatter and richer than ever before. For those of you not following the online gambling saga in 2007 here is a very brief synopsis:
Online gambling firms based outside of America found their businesses assaulted by the passing of protectionist laws in the USA, which banned them from accepting Americans. The UIGEA bill cost those companies untold billions in lost revenue.
The WTO ruled that these laws broke treaties that the USA had signed with the rest of the world, and ordered the USA to change their online gambling regulations or face severe penalties. The EU led the charge and looked set to impose heavy sanctions on the USA unless those policies were altered.
A compromise was reached, however, when America offered to open up new trading avenues to the Europeans in other sectors unrelated to online gambling. So now if you're an Austrian who owns a storage company or a Frenchman with a courier service you can toss your funny hats in the air and rejoice with Teutonic or Gallic glee, depending. The EU has carved out new trading opportunities for your businesses, which will swell the EU coffers, which after all is the only thing that mattered in the first place.
The USA gets to keep their protectionist walls up as high as they like, and for now those walls look very permanent indeed. They made a few concessions in dinky sectors, but the big cash cow remains sacred unto their own online gambling purveyors, such as the various State lotteries and horse racing websites.
This is how politics works boys and girls, so we'd all better get used to it. If anyone thinks that Antigua's original and outstanding dispute will be sorted out any differently you'd better guess again. The islanders will also be brushed aside with a few hundred million dollars and some shiny beads. The future of legalized online gambling in the USA looks bleak.
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