Lobbying For Online Gambling Continues to Expand in USA

America is the land of opportunity and that means if there is something that needs change a company or individual or organization can lobby in the US Congress for those changes. This process takes tons of time and money and lobbying efforts may not even pay off.

The American federal government posts the lobbying budgets in an effort to keep the process transparent but as in all things government the process isn’t terribly accurate. Some firms lobby on a number of issues and the funds aren’t broke down with any detail. Online gambling lobbying has a number of proponents that make the cash flow in Washington D.C. influencing politicians to vote in a certain direction.

While some companies such as lottery supplier Intralot put $90,000 us dollars into the economy and other suppliers such as GTech which spent $85,000 and giant online gambling company Bwin.party raised their stake by $20,000 to $80,000. Just listing the smaller contributors such as Bicycle Casino, Station Casinos, and International Game Technology and Boyd Gaming did their best with a total pay out of $160,000 among them. Penn National Gaming, a racetrack and casino operator paid $70,000 to keep in the game. Even Payment processing firm UC Group Ltd. placed just under $65k to lobby the politicians.

Most of all the lobby groups and firms didn’t come close to Caesars Entertainment which spent $886,000 to get their point across to the politicians. Remember this is just in the first three months of 2012 which is an increase over the last three months of 2011 when Caesars put $764,000 on the online gambling lobby effort. Pale by comparison the next largest contributor to online gambling legislation was TVG, Betfair’s US horseracing subsidiary which spent $160,000 this quarter. MGM and PokerStars each placed $150,000 into the efforts. One group you would expect to be putting big money into lobbying is the Poker Players Alliance which spent $315,000 already this year.