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No. 336

March 8, 1999

INTERNET GAMBLING

Popular, Inexorable, and (Eventually) Legal

by Tom W. Bell

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 happi-

ness, 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 architec-

ture of the Internet makes prohibition easy to evade and

impossible to enforce.  As an international network, more-

over, the Internet offers instant detours around domestic

bans.

Consumer demand and lost tax revenue will create enor-

mous political pressure for legalization, which we should

welcome if only for its beneficial policy impacts on net-

work development and its consumer benefits.  We should also

welcome it for a more basic reason: as the Founders recog-

nized, our rights to peaceably dispose of our property

include the right to gamble, online or off.

____________________________________________________________

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).