The bill, which will now go to the Senate for approval, seeks to
address the anomaly that online betting in the US, though already
illegal, accounts for half of the $12 billion market worldwide. It
bans the use of credit and payment cards for gambling, making it
illegal for banks and credit card companies to make payments to
gambling sites.
The status of online gambling has been confused in the US. A
1961 law designed to prohibit inter-state telephone betting has
been used by the Justice Department to prohibit online betting from
within the US, but its approach has met with only limited success,
with US citizens betting billions of dollars a year on the
internet.
The new law seeks to make the illegality of online betting
absolutely clear. "Gambling in the United States is illegal unless
regulated by the states,'' Bob Goodlatte, one of two Republican
representatives sponsoring the bill, told the House Rules
Committee. "This legislation honours and recognises that."
Congress voted by 317 to 93 to pass the bill, and it will now
progress to the Senate, where previous attempts to pass similar
laws have failed.
Though the bill aims for clarity, it has caused concern with its
exemption for online gambling on horses. A 1970s law that permitted
inter-state horseracing bets was updated as the Internet
Horseracing Act, which specifically permitted horse race
betting.
But the Justice Department has still pursued cases under the
Wire Act against horserace gambling sites, despite the more recent
law's legalisation of it. That confusion will not be cleared up by
the bill. A proposed amendment to extend the ban to horse racing
was defeated in Congress.
Another exemption is given in the bill to online state
lotteries. Individual states rely on the lotteries for income and
lobbied to keep the lotteries legal. Democrat Barney Frank opposes
the bill.
"In general, it seems to me, if people want to do it, we should
let them,'' Frank told Bloomberg News. "We are talking about
criminalising people's individual behaviour because some of us
disapprove of what they are doing.''
