Peer-to-peer gambling

First it was pretty much just music (widely shared with file-sharing technology). Then porn, viruses, and spyware (see our "File-sharing realities for families"). Now casinos are using P2P technology in a big way. "Peer-to-peer betting, which has been increasingly popular in Europe, Asia and Australia, is one of the fastest-growing online gambling enterprises," the New York Times reports in "Gambling Sites Offering Ways to Let Any User Be the Bookie." The US-based P2P gambling service that will illustrate this phenomenon will be Betbug, set to launch July 21. It's "remarkably similar to file-sharing programs like Kazaa and Morpheus, which let people exchange music and other media over the Internet. Anyone downloading the Betbug software will be able to propose a wager, then reach out to everyone else on the network to find a taker for the bet." The US Justice Department has lately been after offshore Internet gambling casinos, but Betbug's creators use a similar argument to that of the file-sharing networks: They say they should be exempt from US law because they're not acting as a central bookmaker - just making software available to users who choose what they want to do with it. Just to hedge their bets, though, they're basing Betbug in Toronto. Of course, where child Net users are concerned, file-sharing networks with no central databases or participation in the goings-on are passing the buck to parents.