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American Casinos Would Strike Gold Online, Says Academic

How America misses out on $190 billion per year because of prohibition...

Tuesday 22nd June 2004

An American academic has said that US casinos and would be likely to net up to $190 billion a year by going online. Koleman Strumpf, an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of North Carolina, claims that, were Internet betting legalised in the US, casinos would capture a substiantal share of the bets placed by the American public with offshore sites (thought to be in the region of $20 billion a year), and would take about half of the $80 billion to $380 billion market in illegal bookmaking inside the country.

'The biggest advantage (the casinos) have is a known brand name,' Strumpf said. 'My guess is the big guys in Nevada could get 50 percent of this market if they went on the Internet.'

Strumpf is researching the economics of Internet gambling and online file sharing. He believes that online gambling should be legalised because it can’t be stopped and, as a result, the US economy is losing out.

'The United States is not the whole world, and with the Internet, national boundaries are pretty much irrelevant,' Strumpf said.




Source: OnlineCasinoNews