Congress passed a Bill today that prohibits credit card companys and banks from making payments to online gambling companies. While this doesn’t criminalize online gambling, it is certainly a huge shift in this industry. The U.S. is the largest majority market spender, and Britain is the largest money-maker in this industry.

The U.S. already has legislation prohibiting online gambling on U.S. soil and recently arrested David Carruthers, CEO of Betonsports.com, while he was on a layover to Costa Rica. David Carruthers was arrested on charges of racketeering, conspiracy and an illegal online gambling enterprise.

Why the pressure on online gambling? One could assume that it’s the exportation of U.S. spenditure to foreign soil, but that seems a simplistic point of view. One thing that is certain is that this new move will create new methods of transferring money for online gambling. It’s simply too far entrenched to be stopped.

And why try to stop it? We have two wars going on (Afghanistan and Iraq), a huge deficit (not counting the accounting irregularities of Social Security). For the record, I’m not a gambler myself. I just don’t understand where the pressure on this issue is coming from.

It will be interesting to see what effect this legislation will have on an industry that has been forcasted to become a US$20 billion worldwide industry by 2009.