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You may have read my article yesterday entitled "ACLU Should Stand Firm in Kentucky Online Gambling Issue" where I reveal how the Kentucky Supreme Court ruled the commonwealth may seize some 141 online gambling-related domain names, something even our friends in China would never do.
iMEGA.org chief, Joe Brennan, Jr., fresh from Spring Break jaunt in Cancun, claimed this week that affected operators need not step on US soil in order to ensure their respective domain names remain out of the commonwealth's hands. This is good to know since it's practically a given that any operator who attempts this will be arrested and thrown behind bars. The last few online gambling operators we know of who arrived in the US were indeed taken into custody, not that this has stopped a few of these boneheads from trying.
So I am sitting here on my perch thinking back to 1998 when 21 online gambling operators were indicted and a light bulb went off in my head.
Each of these owner/operators gleefully used their real names in association with the business. Since those arrests, US-born owners have almost always used aliases and, in most cases, switched the ownership to local business entities (in places like Costa Rica where the majority of North American facing online gambling businesses are run out of).
Can the same concept be applied to the Kentucky crisis?
Brennan, Jr. seems to think so.
"An owner (individual or corporation) is not required to appear in court. An affidavit of membership in the association and ownership of an affected domain name will satisfy the court's standing requirements."
And since the commonwealth is going after the domains exclusively, the owner of the URL may not necessarily have any such ownership in the online gambling enterprise itself.
Brennan, Jr. could head down to Costa Rica in order to have his members provide iMEGA with the required affidavits. I would suggest he does this immediately, even if the wife does get a little pissy. There is no way I would tolerate my wife Sadhvi giving commands to the master of the household.
Whether this satisfies the court remains to be seen.
Not every online gambling company is a member of iMEGA and it is scary to think that probably only a handful of these 141 companies (some of whom already pulled out of Kentucky) will provide the needed affidavit. Players will wake up one morning and find the domain name is no longer functioning.
Jagajeet Chiba, Gambling911.com
