Online gambling in the US has been an extremely controversial topic. Many suits have been filed against online casinos and many suits have been filed defending them as well. The United States has a law that forbids the electronic transmission of information regarding sports betting but does not plainly prohibit online gambling. Some states do have specific laws against any sort of online gambling and owning an online casino without all the proper licensing would be illegal. And no states and granting online gambling licenses as of now. The issues involved in legislating online casinos in the US are a lot more complicated now than six years ago when Sen.

Jon Kyl (R-Ariz) introduced the bill known as the Internet Gambling Prohibition Act of 1997. During that time, online gambling had grown to be a 300 million dollar industry and there were around 32 online casino web-sites.In March 2002, it was estimated that gambling sites raked in about $2.2 billion as revenue in 2000, and would collect $6.4 billion by 2003. There were about 1400 online casinos then. Now there are between 1800 and 2000. Now, it is more or less legal to gamble online and there are plenty of legal online casinos in the US.

There is a law in place in the US that makes it very difficult for some of the smaller banks to afford to process gambling transactions whole following protocol. This means some US banks will not be able to do direct transfers to legal online casinos, but most can. In Australia, it is an offence to provide an interactive gambling service to a customer who is physically present in Australia but it is perfectly legal for residents to play poker or casino games online. On 28 June 2001, The Interactive Gambling Act was passed by the Australian Government .

This was done to protect Australians from the negative and harmful effects of gambling. In fact, unlike the US, sports betting is also legal in Australia. This offence is applicable to all the interactive gambling service providers, whether or not based in Australia and whether Australian or foreign owned. On March 5, 2009, France framed new laws regulating and taxing internet gambling. Budget minister Eric Woerth said that the French gambling market would expand and adapte to "Internet reality."

He further added that the government would rather give licenses to those who were willing to respect social and public order rather than banning 25,000 Web sites. These new rules are expected to take effect from January 1, 2010. Russian legislation, enacted in December 2006, completely prohibits online gambling in every form (as well as gambling depending on telecommunications technology). Many countries have legalized and regulate various online gambling forms. Some of these are the European Union and many countries in and around the Caribbean sea.