online gaming

The Interesting Issue of Minnesota’s Expansion of Online Lottery Sales

Andrew Adams III

The State of Minnesota has offered online sales of the Daily 3 & 4, MegaMillions, PowerBall, and other lottery tickets since the fall of 2010. Now, Minnesota is poised to offer online sales of scratch-off instant games in the new year (Click here). Minnesota Public Radio this morning reported that these new online scratch-off games will, soon after introduction, contain bonus games that utilize “reels” (Click here). Minnesota Governor Dayton is also renewing his calls for a state-run casino, this time at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport (Click here). The Minnesota State Lottery has also created an online portal for its players club, Lucky MN, that looks a lot like ones seen on casino websites (Click here).

Minnesota is becoming an interesting case study of how expanded forms of state-run gambling, especially online-based gambling, is impacting tribal brick-and-mortar casinos. The tribes in Minnesota have perpetual compacts with essentially no percentage of revenue remitted to the state. In the three years that I’ve lived in Minnesota, I’ve gotten the impression that folks within state government feel they “missed the boat” on getting a compact fee out of the tribes nd perhaps this expansion of gambling is a way to redeem that perceived missed opportunity.

Marketa Trimble Proposes International Convention on Internet Gaming

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Marketa Trimble has posted her paper, “Proposal for an International Convention on Online Gambling,” on SSRN.

Here is the abstract:

The proposal, which will be published as a chapter in a volume from the Internet Gaming Regulation Symposium co-organized by the William S. Boyd School of Law of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, in May 2012, presents the outline of an international convention (‘Convention’) that will facilitate cooperation among countries in enforcement of their online gambling regulations while allowing the countries to maintain their individual legal approaches to online gambling. Countries continue to vary in their approaches – some permit and regulate, and others prohibit online gambling, and even countries that permit and regulate online gambling approach the issue differently. Countries cannot enforce their own online gambling regulations without assistance from other countries – specifically, the countries where online gambling operators have their operations and/or their assets. Under the proposed Convention, national online gambling regulators would cooperate in the exchange of necessary information, in the licensing and standardization of technological requirements for online gambling operators, and, most importantly, in assisting with the enforcement of foreign country regulations by imposing geolocation and filtering requirements on online gambling operators. The chapter discusses the challenges that the proposal faces and suggests that the challenges can be overcome. Recent events in the online gambling world, such as ‘Black Friday,’ demonstrate a pressing need for effective international cooperation among Internet gambling regulators, and the proposed Convention, by providing a solution to the vexing problem of enforcement of online gambling regulation on the Internet, can provide the impetus for national discussions on online gambling.