U.S. Makes Deals On
Internet Gambling
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -
The United States has
reached a deal with the
European Union, Japan
and Canada to keep its
Internet gambling market
closed to foreign
companies, but is
continuing talks with
India, Antigua and
Barbuda, Macau and Costa
Rica, U.S. trade
officials said on
Monday.
"We are pleased to
confirm that the United
States has reached
agreement ... with
Canada, the EU and
Japan," Gretchen Hamel,
a spokeswoman for the
U.S. Trade
Representative's office,
said in a statement
several hours after the
EU had announced details
of the deal it had
reached with Washington.
The decision is a
disappointment for
European online gambling
companies who hoped a
case brought by Antigua
several years ago at the
World Trade Organization
gave them a foothold to
get back in the U.S.
market after being
kicked out by Congress
last year.
In an April 2005 victory
for Antigua, the WTO
said a U.S. law allowing
only domestic companies
to provide horse-race
gambling services
discriminated against
foreign firms.
But rather than open up
the U.S. online
horse-race gambling
market, Congress
tightened restrictions
on other forms of
Internet gambling last
year by making it
illegal for banks and
credit card companies to
make payments to online
gambling sites.
The Bush administration
also announced in May
that it was
retroactively excluding
gambling and betting
services from
market-opening
commitments it made as
part of the 1994 world
trade agreement, saying
that U.S. trade
negotiators had made a
mistake by not expressly
excluding them at the
time.
That opened the door for
the European Union and
other trading partners
to seek compensation
from the United States
in the form of increased
access to another U.S.
service market.
Hamel said the deal
reached with the EU,
Japan and Canada
"involves commitments to
maintain our liberalized
markets for warehousing
services, technical
testing services,
research and development
services and postal
services relating to
outbound international
letters."
European gambling
companies had argued the
EU was entitled to as
much as $100 billion in
compensation for being
denied access to the
U.S. market. But EU
officials never publicly
embraced that amount and
U.S. official called it
an exaggerated figure.
Hamel declined to say on
Monday how much the deal
was worth. "We're not
going to get into that,"
she said. |
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