Senator Suffers Setback in his Quest to Outlaw Online Casino Gambling
20 September 2005

While scores of people around the world enjoy online gambling, there are those who have been opposed to internet gambling from day one, and are still trying to put a stop to it. One such individual is Senator Jon Kyl, R-Ariz, who sought to ban online gambling when it was still in its early stages of development. To his dismay, Kyl has watched an approximate 20 websites of 10 years previous exploded into the over 2000 online gambling sites of today.

Kyl recently stated on the Senate floor, that the amount of money that was in the online gambling industry when it first began is trivial compared to the now hundreds of billions of dollars it accumulates. In his efforts at the Senate, Kyl was hoping to slap on an anti-Internet gambling amendment to a Justice Department spending bill. His legislation objective was to put a cap on the online casino industry by making banks and credit card companies refuse payments from online gambling websites.

The problem which put a dent in Kyl’s legislation occurred last Thursday when an unnamed colleague pointed out that the nature of Kyl’s legislation was not in order according to the appropriations bill. Although the colleague who made this argument was not present, the person who delivered their objection was Senator Barbara Mikulski, D-Md. She herself did not know the name of the colleague much to the disappointment of Kyl, who was hoping to work out a compromise with the individual. Nevertheless, Kyl has not come close to giving up his goal, and intends to return with his arguments about online gambling; although it has not been confirmed if the Senator will continue to pursue the legislation further this year.

There is no question that the Justice Department hasn’t heard the last of Kyl, because even though Internet gambling is technically illegal in the U.S., bettors are not prosecuted, and the State attorney general is not able to enforce state laws due to the fact that the Internet has no state borders. Kyl sees Online gambling as a serious danger, because he believes it is extremely addictive and there is no supervision, which means teens, and young adults have easy access to the sites. In other words, in his opinion, it’s completely out of control.

For now, we’ll have to wait, but it’ll be interesting to see what happens the next time Senator Jon Kyl, R-Ariz takes the Senate floor.