Associated Press Update 1: WTO: U.S. Should Drop Gambling Ban 11.10.2004, 11:50 AM
A World Trade Organization panel said Wednesday the U.S. government should drop prohibitions on Americans placing bets in online casinos - a ruling that could open the United States to offshore Internet gambling. The 287-page report confirmed the preliminary ruling the panel issued in March in a dispute pitting the United States against the tiny Caribbean nation of Antigua and Barbuda, saying the ban represented an unfair trade barrier. Richard Mills, a spokesman for U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick, called the report "deeply flawed" and said Washington would "vigorously" contest the ruling before the WTO's seven-member appeals body. John Ash, Antigua's ambassador to the United Nations, welcomed the ruling. "We believe that throughout the proceedings, we presented convincing evidence and persuasive arguments," he told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from New York. Ash said Antigua will fight the U.S. appeal just as hard. "We're prepared to see this all the way through," he said. Antigua filed a case before the WTO last year. It contended that U.S. restrictions on Internet gambling violated trade commitments the United States has made as a member of the 148-nation WTO. Antiguan authorities also had argued that restrictions that barred U.S. residents from betting at offshore casinos were harming their country's efforts to diversify its economy. Antigua has been promoting electronic commerce as away to end the twin-island nation's reliance on tourism, a sector hurt by a series of hurricanes in the late 1990s. U.S. trade officials disagreed, saying that negotiators involved in the Uruguay Round of global trade talks, which created the WTO in 1995, clearly intended to exclude gambling. "Throughout our history, the United States has had restrictions on gambling, like many other countries," Mills said. "Given these restrictions, it defies common sense that the United States would make a commitment to let international gambling operate within our borders." Antiguan officials estimate that online casinos employ some 3,000 of the 67,000 residents of Antigua. The current legal status of Internet gambling in the United States is in dispute. Some site operators have been prosecuted under the 1961 Wire Communications Act, which was written to cover sports betting by telephone. The General Accounting Office has estimated there are 1,800 Internet gambling operations. Virtually all of them are based outside of the United States, posing an enforcement problem for U.S. authorities. Washington has 60 days to file an appeal to the WTO's trade judges, who then must issue a final ruling within three months.
