Should Online Gambling Be Completely Legalized?

[Marokai Backbeat]

The ease of online gambling makes me, like Crabcake, nervous about it, and so I really don't know. I support legal gambling, of course, in some form, but the ability to just pull out your phone and do it whenever just strikes me as scary. The need to physically go to a place seems like a decent regulation of gambling in itself, and may prevent people from taking it too far, but I'm probably wrong, and like BRTD said, it certainly doesn't stop people from creating some hacky loopholes anyway and doing it online regardless. Need to hear more arguments about the online side, specifically.

[Marokai Backbeat]

Gambling is like drugs and prostitution in that banning it just doesn't work.

It is a fact that gambling (internet or otherwise) is much more widespread in places where it is legal than where it isn't.

This could be applied to almost anything, though. It's also very likely a fact that prohibition of alcohol reduced overall alcohol consumption. Practically anything would be less common if you criminalized it. The issue is that it doesn't go away regardless of what you do, and creating the black market is substantially worse than what would exist if a broader, but safer market existed instead.

In this case, however, I'm not convinced that argument holds for online gambling. I don't really think the illegal market for online gambling is all that much of a social detriment, or that the consequences wouldn't be any less severe if they were made legal.