Cybergamer: Internet gambling ban won’t work

Thursday, Oct. 16, 1997 | 11:20 a.m.

Sen. Richard Bryan wants to ban Internet gambling, but some industry experts believe the most serious bid to regulate online casinos is coming from Down Under.

Michael Toohey, managing director of Australian Gaming Specialists, said Australia began investigating Internet gambling issues in May 1996.

Meanwhile, Americans "have failed to grasp it and say they'll ban it while Europeans have stuck their heads in the sand and called it a small issue" unworthy of serious study.

Toohey was among panelists assessing the potential of Internet gambling at the World Gaming Congress & Expo at the Convention Center Wednesday.

It was the second Internet gaming panel conducted at the convention, which has drawn more than 20,000 delegates from 80 countries worldwide. The show concludes today.

In a Tuesday session, the Internet Gambling Prohibition Act of 1997, co-sponsored by Bryan, D-Nev., and Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., was discussed with broad skepticism.

At that session, the Bryan proposal was deemed unenforceable and that passage of the bill would "completely wall off the rest of the world from the United States in terms of the Internet."

Bryan's staff said the senator is simply attempting to get a grip on a growing problem before it gets out of control.

Toohey said the Australian Gaming Ministers established a task force to study the controversial issues of underage players using the Internet gambling websites, using credit to bet, compulsive gambling, privacy and money-laundering problems. The group also was charged with studying taxation and licensing.

The Australians are expected to consider legislation regulating Internet gambling in the first or second quarters of 1998. But Toohey admitted that the biggest problem facing the proposal is that regardless of the merits of the legislation, Australia can't expect other nations to comply.

"We're expecting a lot of cooperation from countries in the Southern Hemisphere, but that's about it," he said.

Although legislation hasn't been drawn or debated, the Australians are looking at potential revenues of taxation through regulation and it appears they would try to ban credit-card betting or set loss limits as a means of thwarting compulsive players.

Technological advancements in computer user identification are occurring that could ensure that children don't wager on the Web. Toohey noted that some countries, like China, are instead developing software that would block certain websites, including gambling pages.

Toohey is skeptical that would work, since he said there are about 200 million Web pages in existence and it would be difficult to write software to block everything.