IP filter to block gambling ?

[rainmaker]

Well, our government in Norway continue their pursuit for online gamblers. This if from a Norwegian newspaper yesterday. I translated it automatically so errors may occur
(All Norwegians can of course play on a betting site that is owned by the Norwegian government. They offer sportsbetting, lotto etc...)

..................................................................................................

Minister of culture Anniken Huitfeldt (Ap) are considering closing Norwegian internet user out from foreign gambling sites.

More and more Norwegians leave money on foreign gambling sites despite the fact that it is from this summer was banned for banks to transfer funds to game companies. Proportions are now as large as before the ban came into effect 1. July last year.

Well 4 percent of people over the age of 18 playing at foreign sites. It is the main conclusion of a survey Sweepstakes audit this week sent to minister of culture Anniken Huitfeldt.

Huitfeldt won't give up the fight against the commercial game giants.

"We want to consider using filtering IP addresses against the game companies that are undesirable in Norway. Such measures is done for instance in Italy, Estonia and France. A unanimous congresses in Denmark have also adopted IP filtering of gaming sites, "said Culture Minister.

 

[rockycatt]

not a good sign when the big brother scenario shows up at your front door

if they must they will make a criminal out of a honest man

 

[rainmaker]

not a good sign when the big brother scenario shows up at your front door

if they must they will make a criminal out of a honest man

In that case, I expect that the forum members will come and bail me out of jail

 

[vinylweatherman]

Do they seriously think this will WORK

Since players WANT to play, and the operators WANT their custom, they will find ways around this, and every time the ISPs do something, a way around it will follow.

The US has not managed to stop it, and neither have France or Italy. All they do is make it harder, but also to drive it further underground, and thus further out of reach of any regulation that would protect the player from getting screwed.

Stopping it completely may entail crippling the internet, which will become so full of errors down to unintended consequences of all this "filtering & blocking" that it will become LESS useful over time for the LEGITIMATE uses in a given country.

 

[rainmaker]

I see that this case has been listed under "Casinomeister news" some days ago, with a slightly more detailed article :


NORWAY ACTING AGAINST ONLINE GAMBLING SITES?

25 February 2011

Press reports that ISP blocking is now a possibility


The Norwegian media, led initially by the newspaper Dagbladet, is reporting that Culture Minister Anniken Huitfeldt is actively considering ISP filtering to block foreign internet gambling operators.

The report comes amid news that increasing numbers of Norwegians leave money on foreign gambling sites and gamble online despite legislative moves since July 2010 to block financial transactions with offshore gambling sites.

The reports note that Norwegians are back gambling online in numbers as big as before the financial measures were imposed. A survey attributed to the Norsk Tipping state gambling monopoly claims that 4 percent of Norwegians over the age of 18 are currently gambling at foreign sites.

The audit has apparently been forwarded to the Culture Minister, who is quoted as saying that the government continues to oppose unregulated online gambling.

"We want to consider using filtering IP addresses against gambling companies that are undesirable in Norway, she said. Such measures have been successfully used in Italy, Estonia and France, and the concept has found favour in Denmark, Huitfeldt added.

The liberal publication Liberalen opined in an article that it was impossible for politicians to shut out citizens from foreign gambling sites, and that introducing ISP filters amounted to internet censorship.

The proposal breaks completely with the liberal values that should be bipartisan consensus in Norway, the editorial concluded. Liberal leader Ove Vanebo attacked the idea, saying that similar moves in Thailand had not been successful.

ref:

https://www.casinomeister.com/stati...RWAY-ACTING-AGAINST-ONLINE-GAMBLING-SITES.php

 

[lots0]

Great example of Stupid Government protectionism in action...

They make criminals out of their own citizens and cut them selves off from great source of revenue.

Most all those off shore casinos would be happy to be licensed, taxed and pay fees to the government, in exchange for access...

More money less hassle and your not making criminals out of your citizens... It makes sense... No government will ever do it...

 

[jstrike]

This sounds like the same thing Australia is going to start doing next year. It doesn't mean they're going to come after players. All it means is that they will start using a system to block certain addresses from players in the country.

In most cases, you can get around this by using a proxy server in another country. Or use tor, or something else like that, although tor is probably too slow for most online gambling. Also, depending on how the government actually sets it up, they might only be filtering by the domain name. That means you could use the numerical IP address and get to the same site.

There's no way they can really stop it. Even China, where every single bit of information goes through their firewall, can't completely stop online gambling. There are servers live inside mainland China that relay to a certain gaming network right now, and charge enormous fees to the operators for the privilege. I don't know how they manage to keep them online, probably through some kind of underground arrangement.

The point is, though, that this is the government acting like a mafia and trying to have a monopoly on the gaming market. That should not be the government's place in a free society. You would think that with all that oil revenue, the Norwegian government wouldn't need to resort to these kinds authoritarian censorship tactics. Ah, well.

 

[Simmo!]

You'd hope politicians would be half-intelligent They put their own residents at risk this way by making the playing field level for the rogues the USA being a great case in point.

The most sensible thing - because let's face it, it's only about money - would be to offer a licence to operate for say, 25% of the profit derived from their resident's play, insist on an Alderney/IOM licence to remove the burden of "officiating" and hey-ho they get cash for almost no outlay, the player gets protection, legit casinos can choose to participate and get positioning, the rogues get ousted.

Oh and they don't criminalise a large percentage of their own population for entertaining themselves in the privacy of their own homes with their own hard-earned money.

 

[jstrike]

Simmo, that's the most sane, logical suggestion I've heard in ages. It's no wonder governments won't take it

What your suggestion would also do, is it would remove the protectionism from these kinds of national bans. It would mean that smaller, but honest/proven/licensed casinos would be able to operate in the national market, not just the few huge operators who can afford to lobby the legislature and lay out millions up front. It would make it possible for there to be honest competition, instead of the only competition being rogue by definition. Legitimate casinos would be willing to pay a vig based on national earnings to the gov. It's a fair deal. It means if you don't earn much in that country, you're not wiped out by having to pay a flat fee. I love it. But like you said, basically, when the gov't drives out all the honest operators from the market, there's nothing left but rogues. And they either don't understand that, or they just don't care because it fits into their plan to monopolize legitimate gaming and channel it all through their sticky fingers.

If it were just about the governments making money, there's no reason why your way wouldn't be the best way for countries like Italy, France and Norway...but I think the problem is it's not really about governments making money, and it's definitely not about making consumer choices safer from rogues. I think underneath it all, it's that certain government ministers are making back door deals, and lining their own pockets. If they were doing this on the import of bananas, the WTO and the EC would go nuts over it. The only reason that hasn't happened is because its members have accepted that this kinda balkanized landscape is going to happen everywhere now, because like a feudal arrangement or the mob, the local bosses reap more personal benefit this way.

 

[Self Made]

"We want to consider using filtering IP addresses against the game companies that are undesirable in Norway. Such measures is done for instance in Italy, Estonia and France.

It's neither used nor successful in those countries. I know the Italian market best. They only block domains there. The Italian "underground" poker market is probably the biggest in the world. Players there just use alternate domains or an alternate DNS server like Google's. An Estonian told me he used Google's DNS for the same purpose. I don't know what they do in France.

 

[jetset]

The Italians did a complete about turn on their controversial ISP blocking initiative and the prohibitionary route some time ago.

By opting instead to adopt the regulatory approach, the Italians have built a lucrative and successful licensing jurisdiction for online gambling, albeit nationally restrictive as is the case in France (a model that seems to be increasingly the nation-by-nation trend in Europe).

There's a drive to harmonise European regulations at present but who knows how long that will take.

The Aussie government doesn't seem to heed its own commissions, taking political decisions rather than practical ones - for example the Productivity Commission recommended regulating online gambling, but the government have gone the other way...and the ISP/internet censorship component of their efforts has been widely condemned but appears to be stubbornly followed regardless.

I get the feeling the Norwegian government has the same sort of obdurate mentality...and it's trying to protect Norske Spil as well.

Government interference is imo screwing up the internet globally and steadily eroding the freedom and entrepreneurial spirit it used to epitomise. I guess it was too much to hope that they would keep their involvement at a minimum when there is this political control-freak element and national protectionism rampant everywhere.

 

[jstrike]

Government interference is imo screwing up the internet globally and steadily eroding the freedom and entrepreneurial spirit it used to epitomise. I guess it was too much to hope that they would keep their involvement at a minimum when there is this political control-freak element and national protectionism rampant everywhere.

Agreed. The trend isn't restricted to gaming. Look at Skype's situation, or the same thing with RIM. Governments from Dubai to the Home of the Brave are demanding they rewrite their software and rewire their networks to allow eavesdropping. Regulations that used to exist only in the strictest totalitarian regimes are increasingly meshing with the ad hoc patchwork in the rest of the world. You could almost say that rather than the Chinese internet opening up, the rest of the internet is slowly starting to resemble a balkanized version of many Chinese models.

All of this regulation puts a much heavier burden on startups in any internet sector, whether you're starting a casino or just trying to ship shoes from one state to another (let alone one country to another). Governments always wanted to tax and control the internet in their jurisdictions, but increasingly they've found the legal and technical tools with which to do it.

I think if it gets bad enough in the first-world countries where most internet users still reside, then something like Freenet, but more advanced, with massively distributed parallel processing on top of distributed storage, will arise. A system that's a P2P cloud where each user is also a processing node. But any kind of distributed overlay is by definition a lot slower than what we're used to, so its use only grows in inverse proportion to freedom on the open network. And so far, no one's done it. The closest thing was YouServ, but no one would have dreamed of using that for financial or privacy-sensitive transactions. Possibly no one's figured out how to solve the trust problem to make a processing network like that effective, safe and tamper-proof, which is why we're still relying on the client-server model where the servers have to live in some physical jurisdiction and the clients have to go through hoops to get there from another jurisdiction.

My prediction though is that this will pan itself out over the next ten years. The tighter the governments grip, the more savvy users will slip through their fingers.