Countries Head to U.K. for Online Gambling Summit

Representatives from more than 30 countries visited the United Kingdom today to talk about regulating online gaming. The United States was not one of them.

The U.K. is holding the online gambling summit to create international standards for the regulation of the online gambling industry.

Sometime in the second part of 2007, online gambling will be legal in the U.K. The country's Department for Culture, Media, and Sport is reaching out to both online gaming companies and other countries to ensure that any online gambling that goes on in the U.K. is regulated to be fair and safe.

The U.K. is by far the largest and most powerful country that plans to tax and regulate the online gambling industry. On the other side of this ideological ocean is the U.S. Although some form of gambling is legal in just about all of its states, a majority of U.S. lawmakers refuse to look at online gambling except as an illegal activity.

Last week, the Department for Culture, Media, and Sport's secretary, Tessa Jowell, had some harsh words for the U.S.'s decision to attempt to curb online gambling. Click here to read about it.

At a press conference today Jowell said the gambling summit was an act of acknowledging the power of Internet gambling, and that there are three ways to deal with online gambling.

"When it comes to looking at gambling, you have three courses of action," she said. "Either let the free market operate unfettered, prohibit, or regulate. We have developed a framework for regulation."

The framework was established by U.K. politicians when they passed the Gambling Act of 2005, which created rules to regulate or restrict all forms of gambling in the U.K. The Act was established to keep gambling crime-free, make sure that gambling is fair and open, and to protect children and vulnerable adults.

Ironically, supporters of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act claim that the only way to keep gambling crime-free and to protect children is to prohibit online gambling altogether by trying to stop the money flow between Americans and online sites, which is what the UIGE Act will attempt to do.

This goes against the thinking of Jowell and proponents of taxing and regulating online gambling in the U.K.

"Of course we also want online gambling companies to come onshore. We will welcome them here because we believe that by allowing those who want to gamble to do so over the counter, not under the counter, is the best way to protect children and vulnerable people and keep out crime," Jowell said. "The risks of prohibition, I think, are very well established. Our concern is that if Internet gambling were to be prohibited, it would be driven underground and precisely the kind of protections that we want to extend to people would be impossible."

Jowell envisions that online gamblers will recognize that sites located in the U.K. are among the safest in the world. Online companies that choose to relocate and abide by the regulatory rules created by the U.K. will not be permitted to do business with countries that prohibit online gambling within the scope of international law.

But international law can be fuzzy. For example, the World Trade Organization, which oversees international trade law, has already ruled against the U.S. in a case that Antigua and Barbuda brought forward. Antigua and Barbuda claimed that the U.S.'s efforts prohibiting online gambling violated the free trade agreement that members of the WTO are suppose to abide by. Antigua and Barbuda is gearing up for a second round of lawsuits against the U.S. because the U.S. has ignored the WTO's ruling. Click here to read about it.

Preceding the gambling summit, the Department for Culture, Media, and Sport released the results of an online gambling study it commissioned. Jowell had this to say about the statistics and the gambling summit:

"This research shows that online gambling is on the rise and there is a need to do something about this at a global level, as well as in the U.K. I want to secure international support for agreed standards of regulation. That's why I called the summit today"

Some of the more interesting stats of the study are:

• There are nearly 1 million regular online gamblers in Britain alone who make up nearly one-third of Europe's 3.3 million regular online gamblers.
• Europe's regular gamblers stake approximately £3.5 billion a year - an average of £1,000 each.
• There are now online 2,300 sites across the world. A large number of these are based in a few key nations, with Antigua (537) at the top of the pile and Costa Rica in second with 474.
• The U.K. currently has 70 online betting sites, but no gaming (poker, blackjack, roulette, etc.) sites.
• Women are becoming increasingly important in the remote gambling market. During the World Cup, about 30 percent of those visiting key U.K.-based betting websites were women.

Check back with CardPlayer.com for more news about this summit as it unfolds and click here to visit our page dedicated to the UIGE Act legislation.

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