Nevada tourism officials are looking beyond China and toward India. It’s country of 50 million passports and Lt. Gov. Brian Krolicki would like to capture more of them and more of the 600,000 Indians who visited the U.S. last year. “Our research shows that Indian travelers want a destination with shopping, fine cuisine, entertainment, culture, adventure and beauty, and Nevada has all of that and more,” Krolicki told the Las Vegas Sun. Nevada’s tourism office in China is celebrating its 10th anniversary and it was a boon to the Strip. A Vegas-tourism presence in New Dehli or some other Indian metropolis merely makes sense.
In a somewhat convoluted ruling, Gov. Steve Beshear‘s slow-moving crusade against 
Internet gambling was dealt a setback. The Kentucky Court of Appeals will allow the Interactive Gaming Council to represent the 132 defendants, thereby keeping the identities of their principals concealed for the time being. The appellate body determined that the Commonwealth of Kentucky was trying to have its cake and eat it, too, having previously treated the defendants as one lump group. “The Commonwealth cannot now turn the tables and ask the court to require each domain name owner to come forward individually and assert virtually identical legal arguments through separate counsel to resolve threshold, purely legal issues that affect the validity of the entire forfeiture procedure,” wrote the court. “The alternative – forcing 141 domain name owners to pursue their claims individually – would be burdensome and inefficient.”
Following a 2008 online sting, Beshear endeavored to seize 141 domain names (downsized to 141 after Pokergeddon). His beef was that horse racing was being directly undermined by Net bettors. I don’t know how many people would buy that argument. However, his big, Internet-gaming grab is a tangle that appears destined to outlast his governorship.
Terrestrial poker players won’t be happy with a new Supreme Court decision … and neither are bridge and Scrabble enthusiasts.
In the meantime, David G. Schwartz talks some sense about Internet gambling — to say nothing of supplying some much-needed historical perspective.
