Tag Archives: government
How Will the 2010 UK Elections Affect Internet Bingo?
The 2010 elections in the UK brought about a partial victory for the Conservative Party and Prime Minister Gordon Brown tendered his resignation ending 13 years of Labour rule and paving the way for David Cameron to become Prime Minister. The Conservatives are still twenty seats short of the 326 seats needed for a majority. The gaming industry including the internet bingo industry is waiting for the mini manifesto promised to the gaming industry. Will the new Conservative government be better for online bingo? No one seems to know for sure.
Traditionally Conservatives have viewed gaming as an industry that needs to be controlled by limiting supply and marketing efforts and tight regulation and taxation. The Labour government has not been good for the bingo industry as a whole. The smoking ban and high levels of taxation crippled the land based bingo industry resulting in thousands of job losses. Earlier in 2010 the Labour government lowered the bingo tax a paltry 2% but the industry remains the most highly taxed in the gambling sector. Conservatives have remained silent about their intentions towards the bingo industry. At a Bingo Association meeting a shadow minister from the Tories said that the bingo tax is unfair and that the issue will be addressed when the time is right.
Some in the internet bingo industry fear that the new government could see the lucrative internet bingo market as a further source of tax revenue and could possibly raise taxes on internet bingo companies operating in the UK. Further taxation could easily drive internet bingo providers offshore resulting in a drop in tax revenue from the industry. Some commentators believe that the Labour party views the bingo sector as “a target for taxation” while the Liberal Democrats recognize the importance of bingo as a social activity.
Writing for the bingo oriented website Bingo Supermarket, author Jayne Wilson called for the online and land based bingo industries to join forces and stated, “[We] would urge online bingo operators to form an alliance in the form of an online Bingo Association in order to tackle and raise awareness of potential issues that will come around once the Government find its feet and start looking for a way to bring in revenues to service the country’s debts.” Experience has shown that by and large the government views the bingo and gaming industry as a handy source for tax revenue. While a hung Parliament may be bad for the country as a whole it could turn out well for the internet bingo industry.
Calling All Millionaires. Building an Online Poker Empire (Page 1 of 2)
The internet has opened doors to miraculous opportunities. Every person around the world can literally become your customer if you have the right product or service to offer them. Many people have become wealthy because of the internet, but some have become mega wealthy.
The online gaming industry has produced multiple Billionaires over the last 7 years. That’s billionaire with a B. Take Ruth parasol, the co founder of Party poker (Party Gaming). Ruth standed to make an additional $683 million the day her company went public. Then, there is Calvin Ayre. He founded the Bodog sports book empire. Bodog takes hundreds of millions of dollars in beting action each year.
There appears to be a shroud of mystery around the legality of online gaming. At times, the United States government has intervened and tried to police the world as one nation. The interesting thing to note is that there are many variables to setting up and doing business as an online gaming company. US citizen or not, the US government has only gone after sports book and sports book processing companies.
In the past 7 years, US citizens contributed most of the online gaming revenue globally. In the past two years, things have really started to change. Regardless of recent US law changes, US players really haven’t slowed down with online gaming. Online gaming is growing at a cancerous rate. This is because of internet broadband expansion on a global basis. Citizens from other countries across the globe are starting to place wagers online. They are finally able to do so because of high speed internet access availability..
If every US citizen stopped placing wagers online today, the online global gaming industry would still grow at an alarming rate. What’s even more interesting, is that NOT one US citizen has ever been prosecuted by the US government for taking wagers online from non-us citizens outside of this country.
Thanks to client language software (software that runs in different languages), it is now possible to market gaming globally and successfully. You can be a US citizen, and legally own and operate an online casino, poker room, and or sports book, providing that NONE of your customers are in the United States, or are US citizens.
The recent US law banning US poker may get repealed this month. You can learn more about that by researching the UIGEA repeal ACT to be held on September, 26th, 2007. Not to mention, it looks like the government will never go after poker rooms due to the public unrest involved against the law. There are at least 5 large successful poker rooms that still take US players. They promote their poker sites all over television with US poker celebrities as their spokesmen. They are Poker Stars, Ultimate Bet, Full Tilt Poker, Absolute Poker, and Doyles Room. One of the founders of Doyles Room is Doyle Brunson. Doyle lives in Nevada and doesn’t hide under his bed. The only type of gaming site that the US government has ever gone after is a sports book. The only type of processing company the US government has ever gone after is a processing company that would process the sports books deposits/withdrawals.