There has been a lot of news lately about HR 6870. You may not recognize that particular bill that comes out of the House Financial Services Committee, but you have definitely heard of it under either the name Payments Services Protection Act or the name anti-UIGEA legislation. Both of these are equally valid ways of looking at it and in recent days it has been one of the most talked about pieces of legislation to go through the House of Representatives in the United States Congress. What makes it so important is not only the fact that it goes a long way towards nullifying the UIGEA online casino gambling bill, but also the fact that it was changed in a very curious way in order to allow it to pass.

HR 6870 is not the first attempt made by Congressman Barney Frank to get around repealing the UIGEA and allow it to work better by forcing the governments into regulating the businesses for which the UIGEA offers no compromise whatsoever. In fact, his first attempt to do that was a bill known as HR 6767, a bill that was struck down in the committee by a vote of 32-32. Now, there are a number of different people at that time that complained that the reason the bill was defeated was because of the fact that social conservative groups were forcing candidates into voting against their conscience and voting against the bill even though they knew it would set them against the mainstream of America. When HR 6870 passed 30-9 and many Republicans abstained from voting on it, this viewpoint seemed to be a proven one.

However, there is one major difference between HR 6767 and HR 6870 that tells a much different story. This difference is the fact that in the second bill, Barney Frank caved into the special interests of the various professional sporting leagues and left sportsbook websites out of the legislation. This ostensibly means that while all of the other online gambling institutions will no longer be directly subject to the UIGEA until strict and clear definitions of unlawful online gambling are established, online casino sportsbook websites will still be forced to follow the bounds of the UIGEA in all of their sports betting outside of specific exemptions such as horse racing that were already guaranteed in writing in the UIGEA.

Critics of the sporting industry are very quick to cry foul in this particular circumstance, citing the fact that sporting leagues are only interested in preserving as much of their own share of the pie as possible. Others also say that sporting leagues vitally need the money that gambling would provide, but do not want to seem like they want that money eagerly to the social conservatives that live in the country. Whatever their reason for doing so, the sports leagues appear to have won this round quite handily, much to the chagrin of people that want the freedom to be able to make bets on sporting events online.