If online poker became illegal, could the feds do THIS???

[PokerPaul]

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??

[whiskeytown]

The way the US infrastructure is set up, it can't just block the IP's - not without drastically changing the way it runs the internet. It can't block every ISP provider and route. and if you can't stop it at the ISP, you really can't stop it without sniffing source and destination traffic along the route which is IMPOSSIBLE to do - way too much data.

think about it - I can find details on ANY illegal activity on the internet - The thing is very resiliant to censorship - Even China has to fight tooth and nail to do it and they have a lot fewer users and routes into their country, methinks.

Corporations with lots of money have tried using the DMCA to remove info and sites they want, but they pop up all over creation - and don't get me started on thwat the WTO would say about it...

it's sorta like worrying about running out of salt water in the ocean...is it possible? If it is, we won't recognize ourselves when it's done. We certainly wouldn't be the land of the free anymore if the US took the steps necessary to stop online gambling. They'd have to trod over a lot of laws and precedents that have kept it going.

RB

[PokerPaul]

U make some good points, but its not like the salt in the ocean.

We're not talking thousands upon thousands of sites here, unlike porn or online casinos.

If they were to just block say the top 6 pokersites, thats just 6 IP addresses. Yet those 6 sites control probably 99% of the online poker market.

It would be a major blow..

[whiskeytown]

still gotta block every IP and every route. And if Costa Rica's only path is thru the US, I highly doubt the US could allow traffic to pass thru to other countries without it also being accessible to US residents....that would be one hell of an access list that I doubt ISP's could do.

As for myself, I'd go thru an anonymous proxy somewhere offsite from the US and hop into Costa Rica from there...


Without a doubt, they'd take a beating, but there's so much international business now, and I don't know for sure but I DOUBT Costa Rica's only path is in thru the US, and if the US did block it you know they'd find another way to get internet service to the island. That's one of their biggest revenue streams at this point.

and if Costa Rica wouldn't do it, the Pokersites would relocate somewhere outside Costa Rica where the US can only block traffic going into it's country, and not cut off the whole world. There's already a couple in the UK, right?

It would definately deter the average player...but as I can think in the world of a network engineer, some of us would find a way around it. There would be a FAST migration out of Costa Rica and some governments would be more then welcome to take them in and then we gotta block THEM too.

and I once thought the inability to use credit cards and the fear of technology would limit online poker's growth. Boy was I wrong....online poker players will find ways to adapt.

It won't be 2500 players at Pokerstars for the $215 but it won't be the death of online poker - not by a long shot.

And as Desertcat said, there are legal challenges.

But if you're asking can the US technologically do it? -I really don't think so...there will be hacks/loopholes/ and other ways to get around it -

RB

[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...

[smoore]

As a selfish thought, I'd love if this happened. I'd offer one-stop rakeback and guaranteed secure proxy connections from a redundant network around the world.

I'd get f'in RICH!

[3rdCheckRaise]

Blocking out 6 IP addreses on ISP level is no that hard however...there are always a bunch of free proxy servers outside of US that could be used to get whereever you need to get even if your local ISP is blocking that IP. If things will get that far you can be sure that all major poker sites will run a huge numbers of those proxy servers.

[ 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:[ QUOTE ]

In case you haven't noticed, it is illegal

[ 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:


[/ QUOTE ]

[ QUOTE ]

In case you haven't noticed, it is illegal


[/ QUOTE ]
Ummmmmmm......Not so fast, While you could be right its not nearly that simple. I am a law student writing an article on I-Gaming and have to say that courts have pretty much disagreed with you when it comes to poker and casino-style gaming. The Wire Act has been the statute the gov has used to prosecute online gamblers however the statute only explicitly mentions wagering on sporting events and related contests and has therefore only been applied in the sports-betting context. Recently, a federal court of appeals decision came down that the Wire Act does NOT apply to casino-style gaming and poker, despite the US department of Justice's unending claims that it does. So, if courts follow this approach then offering casino-style gaming and poker services to Americans is not actually illegal. Regardless, it is extremely unlikely that a bill outlawing I-gaming will be passed any time soon, so don't worry too much about this

Anyways, not sure this is really relevant to this forum...just thought it might alleviate some concerns

Regardless of whether the federal wire law can be applied, the law in many states could be applied more directly to find that on-line gambling is illegal in their jurisdiction. Add in some federal-state coordination to enforce these laws, and the issue of the original post could still be a problem.