Ruling on casinos is unclear

The Associated Press

Friday, April 8, 2005

GENEVA Antigua and Barbuda and the United States both claimed victory Thursday in a trade dispute
over whether Washington should drop prohibitions on Americans placing bets at online casinos.

Antigua said a World Trade Organization ruling meant that the United States must drop restrictions
on online gambling. But U.S. trade officials said that the ruling supported their argument and that
the limitations could remain in place.

Mark Mendel, legal counsel for Antigua, said the WTO ruling meant that U.S. authorities would have
to treat Antiguan online casinos in the same way as traditional gambling outlets.

But a U.S. trade official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the ruling meant that Washington
did not have to lift restrictions on Internet betting.

"This is effectively a win for the United States, as it seems to say that if we tighten U.S.
Internet gambling restrictions, we'll be fine," the trade official said.

The WTO ruling has yet to be made public.

Antigua filed the case in 2003, contending that U.S. restrictions on Internet gambling violated
trade commitments that the United States had made as a member of the 148-nation WTO.

U.S. trade officials disagreed, saying that negotiators involved in the Uruguay Round of global
trade talks, which created the WTO in 1995, intended to exclude gambling.

Antiguan authorities also 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 a way to end the twin-island nation's reliance on tourism, a sector
hurt by a series of hurricanes in the late 1990s.

The current legal status of Internet gambling in the United States is in dispute. No federal law
prohibits gambling, which is regulated by state law. But in many states, gambling is banned or
permitted with restrictions.

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