UNITED STATES—Internet gambling has been living in bit of a grey area in the law worldwide. In Canada for example in 1970 the anti-gambling atmosphere was softened thanks to the Criminal Code, which was amended to exclude gambling as illegal. Fifteen years later the Canadian provinces were granted the right to decide on their own whether they will prohibit poker or gambling in any form. The result was many new lotteries and casinos.
So, today online gambling in Canada is under debate, but it’s still not illegal. It is not legal either, so the atmosphere around there is pretty much relaxed. In fact, numerous Canadian provinces have started running their own online gambling sites, so Canadians today can enjoy this list of Canadian online casinos among the many in peace. The Kahnawake region is even a reputable licensing jurisdiction for online casinos.
In the USA on the other hand, the debate about online gambling has many negative overtones. Politicians and Congress members fight against online gambling with all of their hearts, but in the end it’s evident that their wallets will actually suffer if online gambling is regulated. Many of them have strong ties to people in the land-based casino industry that donate lots of funds to their political campaigns, so you get the picture why you can’t gamble online like the Canadians.
Nevertheless, there are still online casinos that accept American players and bother to offer them means of getting money into the casino accounts. You can enjoy this this is at your own risk though because none of them is hosted within the USA, which would be illegal. All of them are hosted overseas or in Kahnawake, and although many of them are reputable and proven, there is still that little bit of doubt about them. Of course, if they were hosted within the USA they would be regulated with federal laws and players could enjoy a better protection against rogue online casinos.
So, instead of the government to offer its citizens safe online gambling conditions like in the case of the United Kingdom for example, the government is driving its citizens to off-shore suspicious online casinos where they are left to the mercy of the casino itself. Instead regulating online gambling and tax it, the government is making it further illegal by trying to ban even fantasy football betting sites.
In the UK for example, online casinos, sports betting, poker and bingo sites must acquire a license from the Gambling Commission if they want to operate within the United Kingdom. The Gambling Commission has even set a list of good licensing jurisdictions in case if players want to gamble at online gambling sites that are not licensed in the UK.
In United States it’s all the other way around. Instead of progress, there is much regress and no one knows when everything will settle for the interest of both the government and the people that want to gamble online. But, not all is hopeless, because states have been showing signs of interest in regulating online gambling as a way for tax revenue.
