GPWA Times - Issue 21 - May 2012
COVER STORY comes to pushing legislation; he gets cut out of the discussions a lot because the White House cuts a deal with the House, and it makes it hard- er for him to do things. But let’s spin it forward. Let’s just say it doesn’t happen this year, which is a realistic possibility. We don’t want that to be the case, but it’s a realistic possibility. Now we have the potential for the players to change. How does the players changing – a potential new president, the loss of Sen. Jon Kyl – how does that affect the process moving forward? Is there another reeducation round that needs to be gone through? And if so, how does that affect the timeframe of everything? PAPPAS: I don’t want to put anyone in a box on their position right now. I know it was sug- gested earlier that Romney is unilaterally op- posed to Internet gaming. I don’t believe he’s been properly educated on the issue to make an informed decision. I think he was put on the spot on a question that was asked [of] him at an event in Las Vegas: “What do you think about Internet gambling, do you like it?” Politicians are just going to automatically say no. But when the question is posed, “Do you prefer unregulated Internet gambling or regulated Internet gam- bling?” – because that’s the reality of the situ- ation – then I think the position of a lawmaker may become more nuanced in their response. We will need to do a lot of education from the top down, from the president down, if there is in fact a new president. There is going to be a new dynamic in the Senate, losing Senator Kyl. I think Senator Kyl is a Republican that, believe it or not, that we can work with on this issue be- cause he knows it, he understands it and he cares about it. There aren’t a lot of other Republican Senators who wake up in the morning and this is on the checklist of things they’re thinking about. So losing Senator Kyl I think is going to hurt in terms of having an ability to work with some Republican leadership on this. Losing Rep. Barney Frank is not great, although, to be clear, the ball has moved from the Financial Services Committee to the Commerce Committee, so he’s not really engaged in the Commerce Committee, and he’s in the minority now. He’s been a fantas- tic champion and really got us to where we are, but because of the PPA and because of some oth- er organizations, we’ve built a lot of other cham- pions, too, to kind of help fill the potential void. So it isn’t just Barney Frank anymore. We’ve got bipartisan support and other Republicans and Democrats are going to be able to step up and fill the void for Barney Frank. VN: So let’s wrap it up with two thoughts. One, if you were to assess the state of online poker in the U.S. right now, what is it? And the sec- ond question would be, what message would you send to American online poker players as to what they should be thinking about, what they should be hoping for and what they should be doing over the course of the next year and a half? PAPPAS: I think the best way to sum up the state of American online poker today is confu- sion. Because of the DOJ opinion, because of Black Friday, because of the [direction] the feds are going and now the states seem to be going in, no one really understands what’s going on. And so what I think we need to have is a single clear framework in which the players will know on how they’re playing. So that’s why we’ve always sup- ported a federal bill. It doesn’t make sense to us that 50 different states are going to come up with 50 different regulatory schemes in which to offer Internet poker. It’s not good for the players, it’s not good for the businesses that want to be the vendors and the operators, and I think it’s not also good for the financial institutions that need to process the payments. To try to figure out pay- ment methods in all 50 different states is going to be very confusing for big national banks. So we believe there needs to be federal legislative clar- ity in this space and that needs to happen sooner than later. Even if the states do act, I still believe there will need to be federal legislative clarity. VN: Let’s take the lessons we’ve learned from Alderney and Full Tilt. Based on the lessons we’ve learned from that situation, what needs to go into a federal bill to prevent something like that happening in a regulated market in the U.S.? Because regulation doesn’t automatically ensure that things like this don’t happen. PAPPAS: No, it doesn’t. I think regulation needs to be active, not passive. The regulators need to be actively looking at the books of the companies to make sure that they’re solvent, to make sure that they’re doing things right. I think it has to be clear that any site that ac- cepts player deposits must put that money into an escrow account that is secured somehow, whether by bonds or by cash or somehow se- cured so that when players want their money back they can get it back immediately without question. And I know that any bill that moves out of the U.S. Congress is going to look at that, and I think Black Friday certainly underscored the need for those kinds of player protections. And then your final question is what the play- ers can do. I don’t want to beat a dead horse, but come visit the PPA website at theppa.org. We have a Take Action page there, where you can write your lawmakers and call your law- makers. We also provide a variety of forums and in a weekly e-mail other Take Action items, and what we’ve found to be really the most effective way of reaching lawmakers is through Facebook and Twitter. Lawmakers are vain and they actually read their Facebook pages. You would not believe how many offices I go into and I say I’m with the Poker Players Alliance, and the first thing the lawmaker says to me is, “Your poker players are all over my Facebook page.” VN: I’ve got to admit that I’m surprised be- cause I worked for some Senators who didn’t care about stuff like that. PAPPAS: Certainly some of the older guard are not so attuned to it and it’s maybe staff monitored, but a lot of the younger members of Congress are very in-tune with what’s going on on their Facebook page. Believe it or not, I think that posting on a members’ Facebook page and then having a dozen of your friends like that message is even more effective than having 10 letters sent into an office, because the lawmaker may not see those 10 letters. He may just see that 10 letters were sent on that, but he won’t actually see your letter. But he will see your Facebook post, and he will see that there are real other people out there liking it, and it does have an effect. I’m telling you we’ve had members of Congress who’ve cosponsored bills simply because they say, “Stop pestering me on Facebook.” It is serious. We believe that, and I believe the PPA is really kind of cutting edge in terms of grassroots advocacy in Washington on using Facebook. We’ve actually developed appli- cations so that people can search for their mem- ber of Congress’s Facebook page just by putting in their address and their zip code. Some of the big companies and vendors inWashington, D.C., like Capwiz, which is the big e-mail campaign writing firm, they don’t even have those tech- nologies yet. We had to go and develop them because Capwiz was so far behind the curve on it. Fortunately we understand that they’re going to be launching their own product later this year, but we had to go off and do it ourselves because we thought that this is the wave of grassroots advocacy, using social networks, not the tradi- tional letter-writing campaigns, and the phone calls. Those will have a place, and we’re going to continue to use those, but we think the wave is social networks for sure. John Pappas has been engaged in high-level policy and political consulting in Washington, D.C., for the last 14 years. Prior to taking a full-time position as vice president of government affairs for the Poker Players Alliance (PPA) he was a public affairs consultant for the Washington PR firm Dittus Communications. During his four years at Dittus, Pappas served as a media and policy advisor for dozens of Fortune 500 companies, start-up firms, trade associations and grassroots organizations like the PPA. Where to now in the U.S. – and who’s driving ?
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