1. Do you think that the UIGEA unfairly discriminated against offshore gaming companies?
2. Some in the gaming industry oppose legalizing online gambling on the grounds that allowing people to play at home contributes to social ills. By contrast, proponents of legalization assert that regulations are needed to protect consumers who will play whether it is legal or not. Should concerns about the erosion of social values dominate the discussion of Internet gambling? Or should the debate focus on consumer protection?
3. In the final analysis, is the regulation of online gambling a federal issue or a matter that should be left to individual states to determine?

Mankind has engaged in gambling for many centuries. Archeologists have unearthed six-sided dice dating from around 3000 b.c. Ancient Egyptians played a game resembling backgammon. On the Indian subcontinent more than 3,500 years ago, there were public and private gambling houses, dice games, and betting on fights between animals. Farther east, Asian cultures also have a rich and long tradition of gambling. As cultural artifacts, playing cards had their primitive origins in Asia.
When Europeans arrived in North America, they found that the native peoples had been gambling in a variety of ways for centuries. Of course, the European settlers and colonists were no strangers to gambling themselves. They brought with them a penchant for gambling in various forms, including card playing, dice games, and lotteries. Even the Puritan settlers played cards.
Much of America’s Revolutionary War was funded from lottery proceeds. Likewise, several of the nascent nation’s new universities, including Columbia, Yale, and Princeton, were founded with substantial financial assistance from lotteries. America’s connection to gambling has continued throughout its Civil War, two World Wars, and the emergence of Nevada as the home of iconic “Las Vegas–style” gambling.

Gambling in the Digital Era
Today, gambling has gone global. This is not surprising, given gambling’s prevalence through time around the world. The Internet Age is creating new opportunities for gamblers as well as challenges for those wanting to limit the spread of and access to gambling. It is no longer necessary to be physically present in a casino or at a horse track to place bets on blackjack, sporting events, and horse racing. “Virtual” casinos now offer gamblers a wide range of online gaming opportunities.
In the 1990s, online casinos proliferated as Internet entrepreneurs sought to satisfy the worldwide demand for online gaming. Rodolphe Durand, a strategy professor and author of The Pirate Organization, has noted that, in Europe, these organizations originally operated in the “pirate space” as offshore activities because gambling “onshore” was illegal. Only later were the rules, regulations, and laws framed to allow a legitimate industry to flourish in Great Britain, France, and other European countries. Today, in fact, these gambling companies are based outside the United States because of questions about the legality of such activity under state and federal law. Some, including Gibraltar-based Party Digital Entertainment Plc and 888 Holdings Plc, are publicly traded corporations.

Industry Regulation in the United States
Despite its long history of gambling, the United States has also engaged in strict regulation of the industry. The surge in Internet gaming triggered efforts to ban such activity and to prosecute the principals of the so-called offshore online casinos. This regulatory action has angered governments in various countries, especially smaller countries where the online casinos are based. One country, Antigua and Barbuda (Antigua), filed a claim with the WTO in 2004 arguing that U.S. laws and policies pertaining to online gambling violate the terms of a fair trade agreement known as the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). Antigua claimed that the United States discriminated against foreign suppliers of “recreational services,” including Internet gaming. The claim was based on the following argument: Even as it maintains a number of federal laws that prohibit offshore Internet gaming, the United States exempts off-track betting on horse races over the Internet from these same federal laws. According to the suit, this situation benefits domestic interests at the expense of offshore casinos.