U.S. ban sparks Web gaming crisis

[faisj]

LONDON, England (Reuters) -- Online gaming firms faced their biggest-ever crisis on Monday after U.S. Congress unexpectedly passed legislation to ban online gaming there, threatening jobs and hitting stocks by as much as 70 percent.

Britain's PartyGaming Plc, operator of leading online poker site PartyPoker.com, and rivals Sportingbet and 888 Plc said they would likely pull out of the United States and warned on future profits.

PartyGaming's shares fell 59 percent by 0725 GMT, while Sportingbet lost 64 percent, 888 was down 45 percent and gaming software provider Playtech fell 55 percent. Austria's bwin.com Interactive Entertainment fell as much as 22 percent in the first few minutes of trading.

U.S. Congress unexpectedly approved a bill early on Saturday that would make it illegal for banks and credit-card companies to make payments to online gambling sites.

More:
http://edition.cnn.com/2006/BUSINESS/10/02/uk.betting.reut/index.html



Oh my God.... : (
My fabulous account holds 1000+ gambling/poker/casino domain names
and I was already feeling a huge drop in income...

 

[patches]

I think the value of my only gamble related name just went up - www.GambleCheat.com[/QUOTE] I like my PokerOnTheRun.com

 

[faisj]

But, the result is that the normal customer (end user).
(not searching all the details we are finding now)
still has the feeling (all) online gambling is not allowed
hence; traffic has reduced.

As long there is no clear statement (from the us gov.) what is allowed and what is
not the customer will focus at; offline gambling... or perhaps spend time at other
leisure/financial aspects.

(small note: looking at my 1000+ casino domain names I see a huge drop in traffic.
I hope it will rebound but, I guess nobody knows if the customer (end user)
will gamble (online) anytime soon.)
IMO

 

[verbster]

Good time to invest in the proxie server business...lol.

 

[Weber]

I can drive to a U.S. casino in a few hours and gamble to my hearts delight where the federal government has some jurisdiction, but congress is telling me that they don't want me to gamble online, where they don't have jurisdiction. What are these characters up to? They take a good percentage of your money without asking and then try to tell you how to spend what you have left, which IMO is unamerican, if not unconstitutional. So far the U.S. population (Including millions of "illegals", which you can thank Congress and local authorities for doing little on that issue for decades) have played right along. I wonder if they snuck this into another bill (like so many others) to get it passed?