Casino Magnate Openly Wants to Use Feds to Destroy Internet Competition

Imagine if McDonald’s, rather
than attempting to add
chicken wings to their menu, instead tried to deal with their
fast food competitors by trying to outlaw KFC. Who knows – maybe
they’d try if they thought they could get away with it. They can’t,
but casino magnate Sheldon Adelson believes he can use his fortune
to keep Internet gambling from becoming legal. The Washington
Post notes today the blatant, open corporate cronyism of a man
trying to cast a sinister light on Internet gambling in order to

protect himself from competition:

Billionaire casino magnate Shel­don Adelson, whose
record-breaking campaign spending in 2012 made him an icon of the
new super-donor era, is leveraging that newfound status in an
escalating feud with industry rivals over the future of
gambling.

Adelson, best known for building upscale casino resorts in
Nevada and more recently in Asia, wants to persuade Congress to ban
Internet betting. He says the practice is a danger to society and
could tarnish the industry’s traditional business model.

Nearly all of his competitors, including Caesars Entertainment
and MGM Resorts, disagree. They say regulated Internet gambling can
be done safely and can boost the industry.

Really, imagine people online giving you money and you not
needing to pay overhead for housekeepers and buffets and drink
specials and the whole Las Vegas/Atlantic City “experience.”

But that’s not where Adelson is at. He’s going to launch an
advocacy group, the Coalition to Stop Internet Gambling, and create
an advertising campaign to paint Internet gambling as evil, using
the same fears of online child predators that your local news
station does, to try to lure in nannyish supporters. For the
children, folks! We mustn’t allow Internet casinos to take money
out of Adelson’s pocket for the sake of the children!

Nevada, Delaware and New Jersey have legalized online gambling
to a certain degree, so Adelson may be trying to fight the tide.
Those rival casinos who support Internet gambling point out that
Adelson’s efforts would backfire, even if he succeeds, by
entrenching an Internet gambling black market:

“Sheldon’s approach would endanger everything he professes he
wanted to protect,” said Jan Jones Blackhurst, executive vice
president for government relations at Caesars Entertainment.
Adelson argues that a strictly enforced federal ban would
effectively shut down black-market gambling.  

Sadly, The Washington Post neglects to press Adelson to
give an example of a “strictly enforced federal ban” that had
successfully shut down any black market, ever, in American
history.

Read the whole story
here.