I may do a more in-depth post at some point in the future but I think the thing many people are missing in all this Bodog/NewBodog mess is that this is an interesting legal tactic that will likely be used again in the future. 1st Technology LLC sued to have Bodog’s domain names rendered useless. Many people have speculated that is because they used a US based registrar. I’m guessing that those people are wrong.
It doesn’t matter if Bodog used ENOM, GoDaddy or some Costa Rican based registrar because the people who handle domain name disputes are the folks at ICANN. It’s not even a .com thing since ICANN basically has some sort of control over every top level domain (TLD) in use on the internet.
ICANN is a difficult to describe entity since they are technically a non-profit corporation but they act on behalf of the US government to handle tasks previously performed by the federal government. They basically renew their contract with the US Dept. of Commerce for the rights to manage the world’s internet traffic.
Now, if the implications of this haven’t started to settle in let me draw up a scenario for you. Louisiana sues XYZPoker.com for $100 million in unpaid tax revenue. XYZPoker.com who is located in some gambling friendly jurisdiction either refuses to submit itself to the court or tries to defend itself and loses. Either they cough up the $100 million or Louisiana can go to ICANN and demand that they turn off all domains owned by XYZPoker.com as a form of payment and to prevent any further violation of tax laws.
How about this; US DOJ points a finger at UB and says that they are in violation of the UIGEA and files against them. They convict UB of violations of the UIGEA and get a court order for ICANN to turn off all known UB owned domains.
Starting to see the picture?
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Hi, my name is Bill Rini and this is my poker blog. I've been blogging about poker and the poker industry since around 2003-ish. Like most people I started out playing poker as entertainment in home games whenever we wanted to sit around and smoke cigars, drink beer, and eat pizza, and needed a good excuse. I started playing online shortly after the first online card rooms opened and it wasn't long before I was playing 20, 30, or even 40 hours a week or more. One day I received a phone call about a program manager position at Tiltware which was the company that consulted to Full Tilt Poker on software development and marketing. After Tiltware I spent about 2.5 years working at Party Poker where I was the poker room manager.