Business press missed story on online gaming

TheStreet.com’s Mark Fuchs argues that coverage last week about Congress clamping down on the online gaming industry missed an angle that would have been a good business story.

Fuchs wrote, “But there was something wrong with the coverage we saw in the wake of Congress’s passage of the Unlawful Gambling Enforcement Act on what would become online gambling’s own Black Monday — with shares in companies like PartyGaming and 888 Holdings losing more than half their value — and afterward. Virtually all that was talked about were the terms of the restrictions, ‘It’s a crime to use a credit card for online gaming,’ and the financial carnage (see those plummeting stock prices). The media also updated us on where assorted online gaming executives were in their various states of house arrest.

“But what we didn’t hear is what people who make money with the realization that Washington legislation is never ironclad know: How are online gamblers going to get around this? Offshore money orders? Overseas credit cards? Bookie runners who use dastardly new programming on their own computers, absorbing the risk? Dastardly new programs in your own house, and you’ll blame it on the dog if caught? Swiss banks? Swiss cheese? Will World Trade Organization legislation press against this lame new bill?

“The point is I don’t know yet. But something is always out there when heavy-handed legislation is thrown down the gullet of a public that mostly wasn’t asking for it.”

Read more here.