After criticisms from Antigua and Barbuda, Caribbean island nations well-known for online gambling, the US will be required to comply with international gambling laws.

Last August judges at the World Trade Organization (WTO) gave the UD a deadline to address the criticisms leveled against the nation’s anti-online gambling policy. The US has failed to comply with this deadline, leading the government of Antigua to seek sanctions against the US.

Representatives of the US government offered that their government could “clarify” its restrictions on horseracing; however this would still leave the nation closed to online gambling.

The US claims that the nation’s ban on online gambling was created in the interest of public morals but the WTO refuted that this policy can only stand provided that the law will not discriminate against offshore online gambling companies.

Since the boom of the online gambling industry, Antigua and Barbuda developed local online gambling in a bid to boost their previously tourism-dependant economy in the wake of devastating hurricanes. Today some of the largest online gambling companies in the world are based in Antigua, accounting for around 25% of all bets placed in the $12 billion industry worldwide.

US residents account for well over half of all online gambling wagers, while some estimates put this number closer to two thirds, the WTO sanctions are likely to be calculated as a share of damages making Antigua, a nation of 70,000 people the smallest in WTO history to lodge a dispute.

Errol Court, Antigua’s finance minister reportedly commented that the US should be held accountable for its responsibilities as a mature trading partner, following very similar statements made about China by U.S. Trade Representative Rob Portman last week.

For a small country, sanctions can be challenging to impose, with many small nations failing to impose sanctions on larger first-world economies due to the costs involved. Mark Mendel, chief legal counsel to Antigua said that the country plans to back up their accusations and get some benefits from the situation, hinting that the figure could reach considerably large sums of money, though the actual amount of damages sought is yet to be released.

Other small economies who have failed to impose sanctions include Ecuador, the world’s largest producer and exporter of bananas, when they tried to protest the European Union’s restrictions on the EU banana market. For Ecuador’s struggling economy, imposing WTO approved sanctions would have crippled the country’s finances.

Brazil, in 2005 successfully imposed sanctions against the US totaling around $4 billion in financial and engineering services, trademarks and patents after the country lost a massive portion of market share due to US government subsidies to American cotton farmers.

Antigua’s original victory against the US came in November 2004, when the WTO said that the US had committed itself to allowing the online gambling industry nine years previously, and the WTO would enforce the government to its agreement.

However retaliation targets would all be required to include the full gamut of industrial goods and commercial services imported from the US, making this the first time in WTO history that any of the organization’s 149 governments imposed sanctions by blocking commercial services and property rights rather than raising tariffs on imports.

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