The House Committee on Financial Services approved HR 2267, Rep. Barney Frank’s Internet Gambling Regulation and Consumer Protection and Enforcement Act. This bill, which passed by a 41-22 vote, would regulate internet gambling activity in the US and require licensed operators to put in place safeguards to protect against underage and problem gambling.
Chairman Frank’s legislation, introduced in May 2009, would establish a regulatory and enforcement framework for licensed gambling operators to accept bets and wagers from individuals in the US. The legislation reinforces the rights of each state to determine whether or not to allow online wagering within that state and to apply other restrictions on the activity as determined necessary.
As a companion to Rep. Frank’s bill, HR 4976, the Internet Gambling Regulation and Tax Enforcement Act of 2010 introduced by Rep. Jim McDermott (D-WA), would ensure the collection of license fees and taxes on regulated Internet gambling activities.
According to a Joint Committee on Taxation tax revenue analysis, regulated internet gambling is expected to generate as much as $42 billion in federal government revenue over its first 10 years. Additionally, a recent analysis by H2 Gambling Capital predicts that online gambling regulation would create as many as 32,000 jobs over its first five years.
An amendment by Rep. John Campbell (R-CA) was approved to further strengthen the legislation’s consumer protections, including a requirement for licensed operators to have each customer choose his or her loss limits before being able to play on-line.
The legislation has the support of 69 bi-partisan co-sponsors. Support for the legislation was also announced last week by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Financial Services Roundtable, and the National Association of Federal Credit Unions.
“The Committee’s bi-partisan vote to approve Chairman Frank’s legislation is nothing short of historic,” said Michael Waxman, spokesperson for the Safe and Secure Internet Gambling Initiative. “With Congress bitterly divided and only a handful of bi-partisan bills coming out of the Financial Services Committee, we’re pleased Committee members from both sides of the aisle were able to come together to advance this important legislation.”
The House Committee on Financial Services announced today that the Internet Gambling Regulation, Consumer Protection and Enforcement Act (H.R. 2267)—legislation introduced by Chairman Barney Frank (D-MA), pictured left, that would regulate gambling in the United States—will be marked up on Tuesday, July 27, 2010 at 10:00 am in Room 2128 of the Rayburn House Office Building. The mark up, which comes on the heels of yesterday’s hearing on the legislation before the full Financial Services Committee, is a critical next step for the bill to become law.
The legislation, introduced by Chairman Frank in May 2009, would establish a framework to permit licensed gambling operators to accept wagers from individuals in the U.S. Since its introduction, a bi-partisan group of 69 co-sponsors has signed onto the legislation. A recent analysis by H2 Gambling capital predicts that Internet gambling regulation would create as many as 32,000 jobs over its first five years.
In May 2010, the House Committee on Ways and Means held a hearing to discuss a companion piece of legislation to the Frank bill introduced by Rep. Jim McDermott (D-WA), the Internet Gambling Regulation and Tax Enforcement Act of 2010 (H.R. 4976). This legislation would ensure the collection of license fees and taxes on regulated Internet gambling activities. According to a tax revenue analysis conducted by the Joint Committee on Taxation, regulated Internet gambling is expected to generate as much as $42 billion in federal government revenue over its first 10 years.
“This mark up demonstrates that Congress is serious about moving Chairman Frank’s bill forward and establishing a strict regulatory framework for Internet gambling activity,” said Michael Waxman, spokesperson for the Safe and Secure Internet Gambling Initiative. “The passage of this legislation would be a win-win as it will protect consumers, create an estimated 32,000 new jobs over five years and provide federal and state governments with as much as $72 billion in new revenues over ten years.”
For more information please visit www.safeandsecureig.org. The Web site provides a means by which individuals can register support for regulated Internet gambling with their elected representatives.
On July 20 I wrote about an article at PokerTableRatings.com reporting that PokerStars froze ten player accounts following an internal investigation proving they were bots, not real people. Over the past few days, I’ve thought about this incident, and it seems to raise more questions in my mind than it answers. You can read all about it here: http://www.pokertableratings.com/blog/2010/07/bot-ring-discovered-on-poker-stars/
It’s clear to me that these were rather amateurish bots. They did not play well, and while they generated a combined win of $57,839 during their run of more than 8 million hands, they earned the underwhelming sum of seven-tenths of a cent per hand.
In fact, if these bots were playing at a brick-and-mortar casino against the very same opponents they confronted online, they would not have been winners at all. Because of the higher rake in live casinos, they would have lost money! When you combine that with the fact that they were able to be traced because they left a very visible digital signature—they played identically, with no randomization programmed into their artificial intelligence to throw the bloodhounds off the scent—I have to wonder whether catching these ten offending accounts represents only the most visible tip of a much larger iceberg that few of us have seen.
I’m absolutely certain that guys who have more sophisticated skills when it comes to artificial intelligence could design bots that are significantly harder to trace, and that a better class of bot would beat these low-limit games for more than a penny a hand.
If that’s the case, there may well be a profusion of bots online that have yet to be ferreted out because they are better designed than these rather amateurish efforts, and are played and managed in a way that deflects attention by lessening the myriad observable patterns that can be examined when seeking out online bots.
I’m not sure, and I don’t want to be viewed as an alarmist, or a guy who is crying wolf when there might not even be anything there. But it seems naïve to believe that PokerStars caught the only ten bots playing on their sites, and that none of the other popular online sites have bot issues.
The fact that these bots were uncovered at all seems to be a combination of good investigative techniques coupled with rather amateurish bots that were easily detected and caught. I don’t know if the poker industry has a bigger problem than just these ten bots. I’d like to think not, but I can’t be sure and have no evidence upon which to base any reasoned assessment. Still, I’d like to think that the leading online poker sites are doing absolutely all they can to protect their players—and their sites—from online bots. But are they? Inquiring poker players want to know.
What do you think?
Congressman Barney Frank’s bill, HR 2267, entitled the Internet Gambling Regulation, Consumer Protection, and Enforcement Act, seeks to repeal the Unlawful Internet Gaming Enforcement Act, (UIGEA) and legalize and regulate Internet gambling in the United States.
The Massachusetts Democrat’s bill was heard in the House Financial Services Committee, which Frank chairs, but has been in limbo ever since. Frank has continued to claim that he wants to go forward with this bill, but the committee has more pressing business, given the state of the economy. He finally scheduled a hearing for HR 2267 on Wednesday July 21.
The hearing, however, is only a half day and no mark up has been scheduled for July 21. As a result, another hearing will be required for the committee to vote on Frank’s bill prior to it going to the House of Representatives for debate.
John Pappas, Executive Director of the Poker Players Alliance (PPA), said, “We appreciate Chairman Frank calling another hearing on HR 2267. We hope this is the final step toward an eventual vote in his Committee on this legislation before the August recess. The PPA and the poker community stand ready to secure its passage.”
Joe Brennan, who chairs the Interactive Media Entertainment and Gaming Association (iMEGA) had comments that were a little more pointed than PPA’s, saying, “Hearings are nice; they keep the ball in the air. What’s needed are votes: committee votes, floor votes. The i-gaming lobby has been working too hard for too long. It deserves more than a hearing.”
I share Brennan’s opinion. While a hearing is nice, I’m not expecting any real action as a result of it. In fact, without a vote, this hearing is nothing more than batting practice.
