Newsweek Attacks Governments' Hypocrisy Towards Online Casino Industry
11 Jan 2007
Newsweek magazine, one of the most popular publications in the entire world, will release this week an article concerning the hypocrisy of the worldwide governments which support land-based casinos and horse-racing but oppose online casino sites. The article, titled "Moral vs. Money", was written by Silvia Spring and it deals with various European countries, including France, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands and Sweden. According to the author, the main problem with those countries is the fact that they protect gambling monopolies (many times run by the country itself), while discriminating the online casino industry.Actually, it's not that hard to understand why those European countries are acting against online casino sites. In Europe alone, the state casinos and lottery monopolies generate more than 31 billion dollars a year and they are afraid that online casino sites will cut down their profits. Basically the same happens in the US, where private casinos alone generate more than 30 billion dollars a year. It shouldn't come as a surprise, then, that the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act doesn't touch those casinos.
Morality, needless to say, doesn't really play a part when it comes to money: "It's ridiculous to say that you're concerned about the dangers of gambling when you let regular casinos to operate but ban online casino sites" says legal expert Paul Renney. But even with all those countries trying to fight the online casino industry, their chances of success are low. More than 2,000 online gambling sites exist on the Internet, and more than 3 million people in Europe regularly bet online, with that number only growing as time goes by.
