Asad Mukhtar, a 27-year-old man who is currently employed in Karachi as a cook, is grateful for the free WhatsApp service from his cellphone provider Zong—one of the five largest telecommunications companies in Pakistan, owned by China Mobile. The service “has made communication with my family and friends back home very convenient and I don’t have to worry about data recharge to speak to them,” he told me recently. Millions of Pakistanis like Mukhtar enjoy free internet offers from their cellphone providers. And thanks to Facebook’s Free Basics initiative, which was intended to help people from developing countries get online,…

Canada is really not that much different than the United States when it comes to online gambling and gambling laws. Of course there are significant differences when it comes to politics, health care and many other social issues that divide these 2 countries but together, Canada and the US are very different than the rest of the world when it comes to self regulation of online gambling. Both federal governments have failed to capitalize on online gambling by regulating and licensing it. The United Kingdom has been the ideal online gambling model for both licensing and regulating the industry. While…

ThePOGG.com is an online casino portal that has over 1000 casino reviews and over 2000 online slots reviewed. They are one of the few sites to list as many RTP values for slots. RTP of course means return to player and is the inverse of house edge. So a 97% RTP would equal a 3% house edge so wagering $100 should yield an average return of $97. The 10 top list of slots by RTP are: Tropic Reels – 98.95% [Playtech] Ugga Bugga – 99.07% [Playtech] Cinerama – 98.94% [Playtech] Cinema Classic – 98.5% [MultiSlot] Mega Joker – 98.9% [Net…

It has been a while since we heard from Senator Lindsey Graham (R – S.C.) about trying an online gambling ban in the United States, so I suppose it was about time for him to try to revive his dead horse. Last week, Graham and Senator Dianne Feinstein (D – CA) sent a letter to U.S. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, asking him to reverse the Wire Act clarification issued by the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel in 2011, a decision which would effectively make online gambling completely illegal in the U.S. As readers may remember, the Wire…

The Federal Communications Commission released a plan on Tuesday that would roll back net neutrality, a move that will be welcomed by some telecom giants and internet service providers (ISPs), but which could cause serious problems for the online gambling community. The current net neutrality rules, which were put into place by the Obama administration, prohibit ISPs from giving priority to some websites or activities over others, or from blocking access to specific sites due to their content or source. Essentially, the rules dictate that the internet be treated as a public utility, with all the corresponding consumer protections. But…

Advocates of a federal online gambling ban are framing the recent legalization of iGaming in Pennsylvania as a clear signal that the federal government needs to involve itself in gambling at the state level, in a letter sent to the Department of Justice. The letter was co-signed by two of the usual suspects in the anti-online gambling movement, Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Lindsey Graham. This is far from the first such letter, and as usual, it’s riddled with mischaracterizations, conjecture and outright falsehoods. The pair open by saying the 2011 OLC opinion, “Reversed 50 years of interpreting the Wire Act…