[DesertCat]

[ QUOTE ]
with all the talk about the US trying to potentially illegalize online gambling and poker (which i do not believe will happen)...but if they do, this is one way they could enforce it, unless i am overlooking something:

Unlike with napster and the music industry, it may be possible to cutoff the pokersite traffic, since all the pokersite servers have a distinct IP address.

If the feds were to simply order all the ISP in the country to prevent people in the US from connecting to those blacklisted IP addresses, wouldnt that shut the whole thing down??

What could the players or pokersites do about it??

[/ QUOTE ]

I don't believe the feds could ever get authority to block any IP addresses on a global network. Even if they could get the legal authority to do so (which would immediately be non-enforcible while it faces numerous constitutional challenges in the courts), how would they physically enforce it? Get every peering connection and router that connects to a foreign network to install special "fed" software that rejects certain IP addresses?

What would they do when the sites changed their IP addresses or created new sites with new IP addresses, and started providing proxy servers with new IP addresses?

It won't happen because they won't seek the authority. If they seek the authority, they'll be rebuffed by congress. If congress doesn't do it's job, the courts will. If the courts lay down, they will still face numerous technological and implementation hurdles that can all be countered by the sites.

It ain't going to happen...