By Gustavo Capdevila
GENEVA, Jun 24 2003 (IPS)

Antigua and Barbuda, a twin-island nation with a total territory of less than 300 sq kms and a population under 70,000, challenged the United States in the WTO Tuesday over the big bucks Internet gambling business.

The Caribbean nation’s delegates to the WTO (World Trade Organisation) complained that U.S. state and federal laws are barring gambling operators on the islands from offering their services to potential on-line clients in the United States, thus violating WTO rules on open markets for services.

In a presentation before the WTO dispute settlement body, Antigua and Barbuda asked for a panel to be set up to study U.S. compliance with the provisions contained in the General Accord on Trade in Services (GATS).

The United States has the world’s biggest gambling business, the foreign minister of Antigua and Barbuda, Ronald Michael Sanders, pointed out Tuesday in the WTO.

But U.S. ambassador to the WTO Linnet Deily defended U.S. rules that ban cross-border gambling.

Gaming has become one of the biggest electronic commerce activities, moving billions of dollars a year, according to Frank Catania, a consultant with the Interactive Gaming Council (IGC), an international non-profit trade association of over 100 companies involved in the Internet gambling industry.

In November 2001, Catania told a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee on crime that there were already between 1,400 and 1,650 websites for on-line gaming, and that the number was steadily growing.

The legal action brought by Antigua and Barbuda once again brings up one of the problems inherent to the Internet – the virtually unlimited freedom it offers for transmitting and gaining access to information, documents, sounds and images.

The Cato Institute, a U.S. organisation that advocates the protection of fundamental civil liberties, complains of a tendency towards the creation of a body of rules that would regulate electronic commerce and the worldwide web.

Clyde Wayne Crews, Jr. one of the directors of the Cato Institute, said the impression shared by his organisation and others was that the real motive underlying anti-gaming legislation is not protection from crime or protection of vulnerable individuals from unscrupulous people or groups, but the desire to legislate behaviour and control others.

But Republican Senator for Arizona Jon Kyl, the author of one of the proposed bans on Internet gaming, said the risk of a child getting hold of his or her mother’s credit card and gambling away the family home with a click of the mouse is real.

However, the controversy on the deregulation of the Internet has not yet made it to the WTO, where only economic and commercial arguments were heard.

Sanders described how Antigua and Barbuda, in the effort to diversify the country’s economy, had promoted the development of e-commerce. To that end, the islands invested in telecommunications infrastructure and introduced computer training courses in schools.

The industries that the government of the Caribbean nation attracted included on-line gambling and betting businesses, which provide jobs to thousands of young people, many of whom would otherwise be forced to get involved in illegal activities like drug trafficking, which is a veritable plague in the Caribbean, he said.

But Washington argues that U.S. laws prohibit gaming services from being offered to U.S. citizens from outside the national territory, Sanders complained.

After meeting with officials in Washington, the local authorities of Antigua and Barbuda felt that the United States had failed to respond adequately to their legitimate grievances.

In their effort to defend the jobs of the country’s young people as well as state revenues, they then turned to the WTO to ask that a panel be set up.

Deily responded that the United States does not see the commitments it assumed in the GATS as covering cross-border gambling services.

The U.S. representative said her country is seriously concerned about the ”financial and social risks posed by such activities to its citizens, particularly, but not exclusively, children.”

Although the United States blocked the creation of a panel to study the complaint lodged by Antigua and Barbuda, under WTO rules it will automatically be set up at the next meeting of the dispute settlement body, on Jul. 21.

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