There is a good chance that laws to ban online gambling will be unenforceable as the new National Gambling Bill goes before parliamentary committees for debate.
Online gambling is not just regulated by the Gambling Act, as each of the country`s nine provinces also have their own gaming laws, while the Electronics Communications and Transactions (ECT) Act and the Reserve Bank Act touch on gaming by governing foreign exchange transactions.
The new Bill will ban Internet gambling and the advertising of online casinos. Not only the operation of an online casino, but also gambling at such a casino will be banned and criminalised.
According to IT attorney Reinhardt Buys, a February 2003 survey by the National Gambling Board found that 0.6% of South Africans gamble online (roughly 250 000 people). Merrill Lynch estimates 2001 online gaming revenues to have exceeded $7.106 billion worldwide.
Buys says the new Bill could run into unforeseen problems and is unlikely to eliminate Internet gambling. He says it is virtually impossible to police online gambling, and the law could drive online gambling underground.
Francois Vorster, marketing director of Piggs Peak Casino, says each of the country`s nine provinces controls its own gambling legislation, although the laws are broadly similar in implementation.
"For instance, the Gauteng Gambling Law says gambling takes place at the point of interaction. This means that if I gamble online in my office in Johannesburg, then it is illegal," he says.
However, the ECT Act, although primarily aimed at banking-type transactions, states that the point of interaction is where the server is located.
"If we had to turn off our servers, which are located in Swaziland, then one would not be able to gamble," he says.
Piggs Peak claims to be the only online gambling operation to allow rand-denominated gambling, so as not to contravene SA`s foreign exchange regulations. The actual casino is situated in Swaziland and that country is part of the SA rand common currency area.
Earlier, the South African Chamber of Business (SACOB) said: "SACOB believes this provision will be very difficult to police. One only has to consider the high rate of pornographic material and spam that is distributed via the Internet and the difficulty in combating it to be aware that the monitoring of material accessed over the Internet is an extremely difficult task, and as yet no appropriate solutions have been found."
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