New law against online gambling

It's interesting to note the degree of power US law has on the very international Web – at least on the gambling part of it. "On a Black Monday for the online gambling industry, companies that operate Internet betting sites and payment systems lost billions of dollars in market value after the US government moved to criminalize the processing of online wagers," the International Herald Tribune reports. Over the weekend Congress passed a law "that would make it a crime to use credit cards or online payment systems to make bets over the Internet. The US is "by far" online gambling's biggest market, according to the Herald Trib. And a San Jose Mercury News blog reports that "PartyGaming PLC, the world's biggest online gambling company, saw its stock price drop 60% since the market opened Monday, knocking a tidy $4 billion off its valuation." President Bush is expected to sign the law in a couple of weeks. In light of this, you may be interested in the story in Staysafe.org of a 19-year-old paying his way through college playing online poker. Later in the week a former New Jersey attorney general told an online gambling conference that this laws was "drafted haphazardly and risks driving millions of gamblers underground onto unregulated Web sites," Reuters reports. He said the US's 10 million online gamblers aren't going away because of the law.