Germany Shows How
Online Gambling Bans Don’t Work
January
22, 2010
It should be obvious by now
that when you try to ban something it only makes people flock to it
more. This has been seen in numerous ways where those people who are
interested in doing whatever it is that is banned are going to find a
way to do it no matter what. The United States has still not learned its
lesson. First there was prohibition and they thought they could get
people to stop drinking. They did stop drinking – where people could see
them – and simply took it underground instead. Then they tried to ban
online gambling, and all they managed to do was to make it even more
popular than it was before. People don’t like being told what they can
do with their money and what they can’t which is evidenced by the number
of people who still play at the online gambling sites.
But Germany decided to try it as well. On January 1st of 2007, the
country banned all online gambling. They were trying to keep all of the
gambling dollars within their country and create a monopoly for that
revenue. Obviously the European Commission and the European Union had
issues with that. But it didn’t work. Almost two million German
residents continue to participate in online gambling. Roughly 22% of
them play poker, which is roughly 400,000 players. The rest are playing
at the sports books and slot machines, and other various table games.
The report also found that 15% of their online gambling players were
female, which is shocking to them as they thought that those that were
playing were almost all male. But the real fact of the matter is that
people think that online gambling is stopped by the mere mention of a
ban. But what is really the situation is that those that didn’t
participate in online gambling before probably still won’t – but it
won’t stop them that did before.
