The Internets Is Tubes

Mr. Cringely decided to weigh in on the Internet Gambling Prohibition bill that was recently passed as a rider on the Safe Port Act. As usual, he is right on point. Read this excerpt and keep in mind how much money those nerds have to spend.

Any random group of 535 nerds is smarter than the 535 members of the U.S. Congress and able to circumvent ANY regulation if there is enough profit incentive to do so. Well the U.S. Congress has just created such an incentive where there was none before. And once these various payment schemes start appearing, what's to say some of them can't be equally used to finance terrorism? Of course they can be used for that purpose. Thanks a lot Senator Frist.

Here's a law that purports to end Internet gambling but will instead enable it, a law that is intended to make certain types of financial transactions harder to do but will ultimately make them easier, a law that says nothing about terrorism but will ultimately abet it, making us all less secure in the process.

There is, to my knowledge, no center for Al-Qaida hacking, nor is terrorism as an industry big enough to attract much third-party software development. But ally the interests of terrorists and Internet gamblers who all want to be paid, that's a $20 billion incentive to corrupt the world financial system -- an incentive that didn't exist before last week.

And what will be our institutional response to these obvious flaws when they come to light? More regulation of course! More scrutiny of financial transactions, not less. But as we've seen in recent years, this greater scrutiny often comes with lax or unequal enforcement, depending on your campaign contributions.

Once again, Congress is proposing to regulate something it ought not to -- something that in any practical sense is probably beyond its power. And the result will be only bad, not good.