Can online gambling come back?

An article on MSN: Democrat proposes lifting federal ban on Net gambling talks about how a Democratic politician has proposed to lift the ban on online gambling.

While I’m not a huge fan of online gambling, I do believe that it should be legal and that the government should never have stepped in, in the first place. It would be far more beneficial to the government to regulate or tax online gambling than to completely ban it. I have read several stories in the past few months of gambling operators being arrested and business being raided because they were still involved in online gambling. I think that there are so many places that tax money would be better spend than this.

Onto the business side of the issue, the government was very effective with banning it because they effectively regulated banks from allowing US consumers to make transfers to or from an online gambling business. I know that a lot of online gambling websites went under, not to mention a huge loss in revenue from businesses that advertised, supported, or provided services online gambling companies. Hundreds if not thousands of people have lost their jobs because of this.

Looking at the issue from every side, I can really find a single group that was involved with the online gambling business (users, websites, or service providers) that at any point actually wanted the government to shut it down. Seems like the only group that possibly benefited from it were the casinos in the US that lost business from the online companies. In addition to this, the government attached the bill that banned it, to a port security bill that had absolutely no chance of being overturned. The fact that there was never a direct vote on actually shutting down this multi-billion dollar industry shows exactly how much trust the group who added it to the bill had in it being passed.

The actual chance of the bill being overturned is fairly low, but it is nice to see that someone higher up actually has taken notice to the absurdity of the situation.