Just before the 1997 Super Bowl, Jay Cohen founded an online sports betting company called World Sports Exchange (WSEX) on the Caribbean island of Antigua. Within two years there were 119 licensed sites operating out of the island, making internet gambling Antigua’s largest industry except for tourism. The sites were focused on sports betting, and many of the target clients were Americans. WSEX attracted the attention of the U.S. Justice Department, and when Cohen voluntarily returned to his native United States in 2000 to contest its attempts to shut WSEX down, he was jailed under a law prohibiting cross-state sports bets by telephone.
The U.S. government position was simple: internet gambling is criminal. It went after the Antiguan industry, taking actions against credit card companies and delivery companies to prevent American citizens from placing bets and successfully pressuring advertisers, including online advertisers, to refuse their ads. Was Antigua about...
James Supeene is a student at the University of Waterloo and a regular online poker player with a small but positive stash.
Tom Slee has worked in the software industry for 20 years. He writes about the intersections of technology, politics and economics and is the author of No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart: The Surprising Deceptions of Individual Choice (Between the Lines, 2006).
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