Massachusetts Gaming Commission Chairman Steven Crosby indicated that the state will probably have to move soon to set the table for online gaming, becoming the fourth state in the union to do so. The others states that allow it are New Jersey, Nevada and Delaware. Several other states are considering legalizing it.
The chairman made the comment at a sponsored a one-day forum on the subject of internet gaming in the state sponsored by the commission last week.
“The time is now, it’s upon us,” he said. “We can’t wait any longer, even though we’re still in the middle of casino licensing.”
But then he added, “We shouldn’t do anything seriously until the casino licenses are awarded. It’s only appropriate that they be at the table when we figure out where we’re going to go with Internet gaming.”
He said it was only fair that those casinos be consulted before online gaming is legalized, since it would affect them.
State Senator Stanley C. Rosenberg, who wrote the 2011 gaming expansion law, said he would probably following whatever recommendations the commission makes.
“It’s a new frontier,” Rosenberg said, according to the Boston Herald. “I personally don’t see how you avoid it. You can’t control the internet. When people turn on their computer they go where they want to go.”
He made the statements at a panel sponsored by the commission.
He added, “We’re just at the early stages of trying to understand how this actually works, and given that you can organize businesses inside the commonwealth, within the country, and internationally and set them up online, so we need to figure out how that all works.”
He agreed with Crosby that established interests should be considered before expanding gaming to the internet. “We don’t want to kill the goose that laid the golden egg on the state lottery and the new goose that is hopefully going to lay some golden eggs in the coming years, the slots parlor and casinos,” he said.
Steven Grossman, the state’s treasurer, and a candidate for succeeding Gov. Deval Patrick, agrees. “If the lottery does not enter this online market, other entrants—including commercial casinos, tribal casinos, commercial gaming companies and other states—will,” he said last week during the same forum.
Delaware’s lottery operates online betting in that state. In New Jersey, casinos such as the Golden Nugget offer online gaming to residents. All legal U.S. jurisdictions require Social Security numbers, mobile phone numbers and home addresses to verify identification and location. Delaware and Nevada recently signed an agreement to allow poker players to compete against poker players online, which has been compared to state lotteries pooling their play. The system is not yet operating.
Federal law allows individual states to legalize online gaming within their borders, and forbids sports betting.
John Riberio, chairman of an organization that is trying to repeal the 2011 laws with an initiative on the November ballot, criticized calls for expanding gaming even more.
“There’s no shovel in the ground yet to build the casinos or slots parlors,” he complained, “but already we’re talking about expansions of casino gambling. This is what happens everywhere in the country, casinos get a foothold and expand at all costs.”
Meanwhile, Rhode Island has studied starting online lottery sales and online poker in the state, but little movement has come on either front.
Speaking to the Providence Journal, Rhode Island Lottery Director Gerald S. Aubin gave some indications as to why nothing has been proposed.
Aubin said online lottery sales could cannibalize the state’s brick-and-mortar lottery outlets and wouldn’t bring in enough revenue to cover the costs of starting and overseeing sales.
On the other hand, Aubin said he thinks online poker could bring in substantial revenue, but it would take a voter-approved change to the state constitution to implement.
