Minnesota’s Blacklist

Minnesota Department of Public Safety has released a blacklist of online casino and poker sites that it wants ISPs to block all Minnesota residents from viewing. The list contains around 200 casino and poker sites, with most being smaller companies. The list went out to about 11 Internet Service Providers and telephone companies with some companies being nationwide providers.

There were a few names on the list which don’t make much sense but then again here recently it’s hard to find actions by the government that do make sense when it comes to online gambling. A couple of names on the list are completely out of business and have been for awhile, while others don’t allow US customers at all. For example Party Gaming, which just settled with the US government for billions of dollars to curtail any legal action, is on the list. Not to mention in the agreement there would be no legal action for allowing players before 2006 against the Party group. So now Party Partners which hasnt allowed players since the UIEGA went into effect, and has an agreement with the US Federal Government is being black listed in the state of Minnesota.

It really seems there was not a lot of thought put into this list of 200 companies and IMEGA is ready to pounce. First and foremost is the 1st Amendment that could be violated in the process of implementing the blacklist. Not to mention the work it would take by the ISPs to actually perform the task.

Another task to manage would be all the websites tied to the IP addresses of some of the sites being blacklisted. Because if one is blacklisted the other might as well be on there too. A similar case involving blocking internet sets was thrown out in 2004 by a federal judge so we will have to wait and see how long the black list of Minnesota will live.