Online betting is any type of betting conducted via the internet. This includes casinos, virtual poker and even sports betting. The first online betting venue opened to the public, was ticketing for the famous Liechtenstein International Poker Tournament in October 1994. Since then there have been online betting venues opening each year, but because of the highly competitive nature of online betting, many countries have created governmental regulation and licensing bodies to offer online betting services.
One of the biggest issues that face online gaming and online betting in particular, is that there is no regulating authority to police this industry. Gambling laws are usually more permissive in the US than in other parts of the world and this means there is a lot of grey area when it comes to gambling law. This grey area is the reason why there is so much illegal gambling and the fact that the police are actually unable to shut down a lot of online gaming sites. Illegal gambling takes place on a daily basis and police often find themselves powerless to stop this activity simply because the law itself is too vague and doesn’t make any specific reference to what types of activities constitute gambling. Gambling has always been considered an illegal activity but until recently it wasn’t illegal to do from home, in your own back garden.
Because the UK gambling industry has developed to such large proportions there are now literally hundreds if not thousands of different websites where you can go to place a bet. The problem arises when people in other countries come to the United Kingdom and wish to gamble online and find that the law here doesn’t permit them to do so. As in the United States, online betting is largely unregulated and there is currently no way that online gambling law will be improved in the UK until there is proper consultation between the government and the online gambling industry in the UK.