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[FYI] Cato:"INTERNET GAMBLING Popular, Inexorable, and (Eventual
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- Subject: [FYI] Cato:"INTERNET GAMBLING Popular, Inexorable, and (Eventual
- From: Horns@t-online.de (Axel H. Horns)
- Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 09:31:44 +0100
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http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-336es.html
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Cato Policy Analysis No. 336
March 8, 1999
INTERNET GAMBLING
Popular, Inexorable, and (Eventually) Legal
by Tom W. Bell
Tom W. Bell is an assistant professor at Chapman
University School of Law and an adjunct scholar of the
Cato Institute. He is coeditor with Solveig Singleton
of
Regulators' Revenge: The Future of Telecommunications
Deregulation (Cato Institute, 1998).
Executive Summary
The Internet offers new and better access to something that
American consumers demand in spades: gambling. Lawmakers
and prohibitionists can neither effectively stop Internet
gambling nor justify their attempts to do so. In the long
run it will, like so many other forms of gambling, almost
certainly become legal. In the short run, however, Internet
gambling faces some formidable opponents.
As a market activity devoted to the pursuit of happiness,
Internet gambling draws support from neither Democrats nor
Republicans. As an upstart competitor to entrenched
gambling interests, both public and private, Internet
gambling threatens some very powerful lobbies.
Not surprisingly, Congress has been considering bills that
would prohibit Internet gambling. But the architecture of
the Internet makes prohibition easy to evade and impossible
to enforce. As an international network, moreover, the
Internet offers instant detours around domestic bans.
Consumer demand and lost tax revenue will create enormous
political pressure for legalization, which we should
welcome if only for its beneficial policy impacts on
network development and its consumer benefits. We should
also welcome it for a more basic reason: as the Founders
recognized, our rights to peaceably dispose of our property
include the right to gamble, online or off.
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Volltext unter
http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa336.pdf