First some excerpts from http://www.internetnews.com

On a vote of 317-93, lawmakers approved legislation that would force banks and credit card companies to cut off payments to the estimated 2,300 gambling sites located outside of U.S. jurisdiction.
The bill exempts state-sanctioned online gambling on horse racing and lotteries. Interesting?

Democrats complained the "carve outs" for online horse racing and lotteries underscored the "hypocrisy" of the legislation.

"Millions of Americans will continue to gamble with offshore sites," Rep. Shelly Berkley (D-Nev.) said. "This bill makes (gambling) illegal simply because they do it online. It's ridiculous to think this will stop online gaming." At least someone in our government has common sense.

Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.) added that the legislation would create an enforcement "nightmare" for credit card companies since it is often difficult to detect just what a credit card charge involves.

Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) taunted Republicans by urging them to vote to ban all types of online gambling.

"Let's do it completely and not continue to fool the public," he said.
Berkley then introduced an amendment to the bill that would ban all online gambling. It was defeated largely along party lines, 297-114. I wonder why?

End of Excerpt

This new legislation is waste of tax payers money – ironic isn’t it? Let’s face it; the real reason why the government is making this futile attempt to stop online gambling is all about the billion of dollars that they are unable to tax.

So they have decided to use the banking institutions to enforce this new legislation. What a joke; trying to put the burden on banks and credit cards institutions to police online gambling activities is both counter-productive and costly.

Even if our banking institutions were successful stopping online gambling credit cards transactions, it wouldn’t stop online gambling. Why? Because there are so many others alternative online payment options available (NETeller and FirePay to name a couple).

But here’s the real deal: The big boys in Las Vegas want a piece of the online gambling action. They are trying to level out the playing field before getting our government to regulate online gambling. Stay tune!

There will be some online casinos sites not accepting US visitors:
The current online gambling companies who license their software from Playtech and/or Publicly Traded will most likely no longer accept US visitors – at least for the moment. The good news is that this represents a very small number of online casinos.

Playtech Corporate states that it continues to receive legal advice regarding the impact of this legislation. Whilst Playtech is not an operator of online gaming nor a payment processor, the Board accepts that if this legislation becomes effective there would be a material impact on certain of its licensees and therefore on Playtech's revenues.

Since Playtech is now receiving over 50% of their revenue from Asia and other countries outside of the United States, it was in their stockholders best interests to take this action. They will be back in the US market as soon as the dust settles.

Online Gambling companies, who realize that this new action by our government is an attempt to scare off some of the competition, are not backing down. In fact, I predict that they would move aggressively to fill the void of the online casinos that were using Playtech software for their platform.

In all, for most of the 2,300 online casino sites it is busy as usually.

Dr. JA Nelson
http://www.allcraps.com
http://www.likegambling.com
http://www.pokerhighlo.com
http://www.bingohits.com
http://www.casinosurfs.com