government regulation
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New bill would outlaw online gambling, heads to Congress this week
The US government may have opposed extensive net neutrality laws and regulation of ISPs in the past, but when it comes to online gambling, several politicians are calling for the ban hammer. If Senator Lindsey Graham and Rep. Jason Chaffetz have their way, it will soon be illegal to play slots on your smartphone. Today, the two introduced legislation to outlaw internet betting -- excluding fantasy sports and horse racing -- asserting that the activity is a potential national security threat, among other things. Gambling sites, co-sponsor Senator Dianne Feinstein claims, often don't screen for underage players. Supports of the legislation also cite the lack of oversight for criminal acts such as identity theft and money-laundering, and they naturally invoke gambling addiction as well. Notably, Las Vegas Sands titan Sheldon Adelson is supporting the bill.
LGJ: Revenge of the Regulators
Each week Mark Methenitis contributes Law of the Game on Joystiq ("LGJ"), a column on legal issues as they relate to video games: There's an old saying by Benjamin Franklin: "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results." By that definition, most of the attempts to regulate video game content are insanity. Most have taken the same approach, with the exception of Jack Thompson's last attempt in Utah, which at least took a new angle. It's for this reason that I'm always interested in new takes on the now tiresome idea of regulating game content, and when GamePolitics posted one such new research paper by Renee Newman Knake, Assistant Professor at Michigan State University College of Law, earlier this week, I took the time to read it. But when you boil down this "new approach," is it really something novel, or just more "insanity?" Well, that's what we're going to explore today. I do want to say, before I get started, that much of the legal analysis is relatively sound, and as many problems as I have with this paper, the author does deserve some credit for those parts of the analysis. The paper's main focus is a discussion of "ecogenerism," and thus my discussion will largely be a dissection of the notable flaws in this approach. However, it is worth noting outright that this entire paper either makes its agenda quite clear from the outset or frames the debate in a less than accurate way to make the discussion seem greater than it is, as it starts from the basic flawed premise that we have "proven" a "causal" link between media violence, specifically video game violence, and real world violence. Even a cursory read over sites like VG Researcher and GamePolitics indicate the contrary. The supposition further ignores any benefits games may provide. Most importantly, it still ignores many of the fundamental flaws in video game research that have been pointed out in great detail. And the paper even ignores the more recent FTC data on the sale of violent games to children in favor of outdated metrics in order to cast a more negative light. But even ignoring this, the ecogenerism argument still has some substantial shortcomings.
