Rep. Goodlatte’s Internet gambling prohibition bill is nasty.

As has been discussed here, not only does it ban online gambling, it also bans linking to sites where online gambling takes place. And not only that, but the bill requires financial institutions to set up invasive (and, most say, impossible to implement) mechanisms to track every financial transaction you make. Particularly bothersome are ACH transactions, the favored method of payment at most gaming sites. ACH transactions leave a more generic paper trail than credit card transactions. For banks to get to the point where they could track these kinds of transactions would require a level of familiarity and intimacy with your buying habits that ought to make all but the most ardent police-staters skittish. One gaming industry rep describes the requirement as “know your customer on steroids.”

In addition to the privacy concerns, there are also more general concerns about deputizing private businesses to start monitoring and policing the activities of their customers. We got into this mess, of course, with money laundering laws. Now we’re seeing the same M.O. applied to Internet gambling. I wouldn’t be surprised to see it soon applied to porn sites, too.

And then there are the compliance costs. Why should banks, credit card companies, and cash transfer companies be forced to foot the bill for Rep. Goodlatte’s moral crusades? The answer, of course, is that the government simply can’t police the Internet without deputizing private corporations to do its dirty work. Goodlatte’s prohibited by the Constitution from monitoring what you do online. But he can certainly hold your bank responsible for not adquately monitoring how you spend your money. So that’s what he’ll do.

I’ll have more on Rep. Goodlatte later. For now, you might ponder a quote Goodlatte gave in today’s Congress Daily. The article (not available online, sorry) is about a GOP rally in support of various policy proposals aimed at boosting e-commerce. In this case, Goodlatte was speaking in support of anti-tax, anti-regulation proposals I’d probably generally support. But his comment takes on a particularly ironic significance when you consider the great lengths to which the congressman is willing to tolerate government interference when it comes codifying his owm morality into law:

“Republicans get it when it comes to high-tech issues,” said Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., co-chairman of the House Internet Caucus. The top goal, he added, is “to get government out of the way.”

Give that some 70 million people have wagered money online in this country, I’d say that when it comes to high-tech issues, Republicans pretty clearly don’t “get it.”

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 2nd, 2006 at 7:08 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Gambling and Poker, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.