Despite UIGEA, US Visitors to Online Casinos Grow Rapidly
Despite a two-year-old ban against online casinos in the US, unique visitors to online gambling sites by US residents climbed eleven percent last month. Even as the Bush administration underhandedly imposed midnight regulations implementing the UIGEA, over sixteen million Americans used the Internet to call up online casinos, according to a market research company.
Using a scale called the Media Metrix measurement service, comScore found that one and a half million more US residents went to Internet gambling sites in November than October. To put the sixteen million in perspective, all retail sites in the November start to holiday shopping season totalled just over nineteen million US visitors.
Advocates of the ban against online gambling have insisted the UIGEA is necessary to prevent underage gambling and to protect consumers. But the ban has apparently blocked almost no one, as the numbers of US online casino patrons are huge and growing.
All the prohibition has achieved are negative results. A black market has been created, with no regulation to guard consumers against fraud or identity theft. Children are not blocked by regulating software. Legitimate businesses leave the US market, while shady outfits harboring criminal activity, including money laundering, operate unchecked.
While the stated goals of the anti-online gambling faction may be noble, simple numbers indicate the ban is a dysfunctional method to reach those goals. Legalization and regulation of the Internet gaming industry would be a simpler program to achieve more notable results, including less burden on the US financial system. Not even Spencer Bachus could claim sixteen million online gambling patrons to an unregulated environment in a month to be a satisfactory consequence of the prohibition of online casinos
