Nelson Rose on the proposed regulations...
Proposed Internet Gaming Regulations And Players
Gambling and the Law®
The federal government has issued proposed regulations to enforce the ban on money transfers for unlawful Internet gambling transactions. The most important thing for online poker players to know is that nothing has changed. And nothing will, for many, many months.
The proposed regs are the result of a bill rammed Congress through last year. Then Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R.-TN) attached his Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act to the SAFE PORTS Act. Frist refused to let Democrats even read the bill. If they didn’t like it, they could vote against port security.
A good indication of how quickly the law was written is that it does not even have a good acronym. Since UIGEA is unpronounceable, I’ll call it Prohibition 2.0.
Prohibition 2.0 is often characterized as outlawing Internet gambling in the U.S. Although it scared the bejesus out of publicly traded companies, it actually does only two things: It creates one new crime, being a gambling business that accepts money for unlawful Internet gambling transactions, and it calls for new regulations for banks and other payment processors.
What it doesn’t do is make it a crime to play poker on the Internet. It doesn’t directly restrict players from .....