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The online gambling industry has long faced legal challenges from various government bodies for the purpose of curbing the industry's activities. The very main issue why a lot of groups have opposed to online gambling is that these sites have not followed fair and ethical trade practices in accepting wagers. There are a lot of debates on the laws passed to regulate online gambling and yet there is another issue brewing.
The imbuing dispute is regarding websites that earns profit out of online betting on sports events. There are quite a large number of online gambling sites that operates purely on monetary betting on various sports such as soccer, baseball, basketball, boxing, and the like. The annual revenues on these sports betting house runs up to trillions of dollars and Euros.
Even before the much talked about online sports betting, wagering money on various sports event is not new and is in fact been going on decades earlier. Gambling rooms have accepted stakes from various punters of their neighborhood on major sports events across the world. However, when the Internet made everything closer with a push of a button, this past time has grown into proportions of larger magnitude that was not possible decades before. The comforts of being able to bet on one's favorite boxer at the comforts of his own home, plus with all the wagered money combined, have certainly enticed punters to bet some more. The strong popularity of online sports betting has paved a way for new complaints that pre-fixing the event's results has manipulated the vested interests of the majority thereby inferring that unfair and unethical practices of gambling had started in the business.
The latest complaint came from the French Open wherein its organizers have filed a landmark case in the Liege court of Eastern Belgium and in Paris, in an attempt to ban online gambling companies from offering bets and claiming that online betting sites have smeared the reputation of the clay-court championship at Roland Garros. They have cited many instances where iniquity of trade was evidently present such as the major tennis match in August 2007, when Betfair, an online betting site, nullified the wagers on a match between Nikolay Davydenko and Martin Vassallo Arguello. Betfair had claimed that Davydenko's withdrawal from the match in the third set citing a foot injury was an act of an irregular betting pattern.
The French organizers' complaint seeks injunctions against the companies Betfair, Bwin and Ladbrokes. It is also backed by declarations of players that they were approached for fixing matches with sizeable amounts of money being offered. The outcome of this case is much awaited, particularly by those adamant lovers of online sports betting. Whatever the verdict is, this will have a very wide impact on the online gambling industry in general.
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