Inside Asian Gaming

46 n one of the stranger dramas to play out lately on the global economic stage, this month finds the eyes of several of the world’s most powerful nations turned toward, of all things, Internet gambling. It is expected, though not certain, that a panel of World Trade Organisation arbitra- tors will decide sometime around the 27th whether the Caribbean island nation of An- tigua and Barbuda is entitled to billions of dollars from its giant neighbor to the north as compensation for US laws that ban gam- bling operators not licensed in the United States from taking bets by telephone and on the Web. Providing a legal home for these opera- tors has grown over the last decade into a mainstay of the Antiguan economy, which has little else to offer the world except sand, palm trees and balmy ocean breezes. Gambling is not a mainstay of the econo- mies of Japan, Australia, Canada, India and the European Union. Yet, they’re petitioning the WTO for compensation, too, as are the 15 nations of the Caribbean Community and Common Market, everyone figuring that if little Antigua can cash in so can they. To understand how this absurdity bal- looned into a genuine trade dispute you have to go back a few months and several thousand miles to Potsdam, Germany, to the Emperor William II’s Schloss Cecilienhof, where Truman, Stalin, Churchill and Atlee met in the summer of 1945 to dicker over the post-war world order, and where in the summer of 2007 the latest failure of the so- called Doha Round of global trade talks has left WTO members large and small, rich and poor looking to cut separate deals,looking to make good on compensatory claims, looking for concessions—looking for leverage, basi- cally, any kind of leverage, even from some- thing as esoteric and suspect in mainstream thought as gambling on a home computer. But maybe this story begins not in Pots- dam but way on the other side of the world, in the southwestern United States, deep in the Southwest, in the sun-baked Texas bor- der town of El Paso, home of the law firm of Mendel Blumenfeld, whose clients include I The Great Internet Trade War The Antiguan mouse has roared, too loudly; now everyone wants a piece of the action World Sports Exchange—WSEX,as it’s known, based in Antigua and co-founded by Jay Co- hen, the only executive of a licensed Internet operator ever to be convicted in a US court and sent to prison for illegal gambling. ‘Arbitrary and unjustifiable’ Two hundred years before there was a United States, Spanish conquistadors explor- ing the upper Rio Grande River founded an outpost at a ford the Indians had traversed for millennia. They called it El Paso del Norte, the “Pass of the North,” and it grew into an important route linking central Mexico to the Santa Fe Trail and California, and its popula- tion grew and spread along both banks of the river.Today, this stretch of the Rio Grande, the boundary between Texas and Mexico, is a cement ditch. A bridge to the Mexican city of Juarez spans hundreds of yards of industrial no man’s land: boxcars, gutted warehouses, a tangle of railroad tracks, barbed wire. Every morning, the need to make a living drives thousands of people out of Juarez and over the bridge.In the evening they go back.There are parts of downtown El Paso where it’s im- possible to tell which country you’re in. So it’s always been. The political lines that presume to separate language, family, culture, money and trade are a chimera here. It’s kind of like the Internet, when you think about it. It’s a good place to observe first-hand the interconnectedness of global commerce. Maybe that’s what gave Mark Mendel and Bob Blumenfeld the idea to chal- lenge Washington’s Web gambling restric- tions not as a matter of criminal law, which failed utterly in the case of Jay Cohen,but as a dispute in international trade.One story goes that the idea was suggested in a letter a sup- porter sent to Cohen in jail. However it came about, Blumenfeld was at Cohen’s side when he left Nellis Federal Prison Camp outside Las Vegas in March 2004 after serving 17 months of a 21-month sentence for violating the US Wire Act. Cohen went back to his home in San Francisco to serve out his probation and pick up the pieces of his former life as a fi- nancial markets trader. But that same month, that novel trade approach crafted by Mendel Blumenfeld bore fruit. Now representing the government of Antigua,the firmwon a ruling from the WTO in favor of its contention that US law discriminates against the island na- tion by banning its Web operators from the US market while allowing US operators to