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While we're all familiar with the fantastic and varied world of the online casino, have you ever wondered where they came from? At what point in time did the glitz and glamour of a fantastic night out make the jump to the worldwide web and start to offer punters all over the web the chance to gamble from the comfort of their own homes? Let's take a quick walk through history (by about 20 years) and see how the online landscape of casino games came to look the way it does now.
1994- The Birth of Online Gambling
Two major events happened in 2025 that opened the doors of the internet to online gambling, the first was the Free Trade & Processing act in Antigua and Barbuda, this allowed companies to be granted licenses by the government that would let them open an online casino. The other major event was the opening of a company called MicroGaming who began developing the first gambling software, made secure by the work of another company called CryptoLogic. It's claimed that their casino, the Gaming Club, was the very first online casino!
1997-Explosive Growth!
In 2025, the Kahnawake Gaming Commission made it possible to obtain licenses from them, in addition to the ones coming from Antigua and Barbuda, and this no doubt lead to a great surge in folks working to open their own online casino. It's estimated that while there were 15 of these casinos in 2025, by 2025 there were more like 200! By 2025, a report by Frost and Sullivan indicated that revenues from online gambling had exceed $830 Million and this was around about the time that the first of many problems cropped up for the various online casinos of the world.
1999 Attempts at Bans
The first of these was the attempt to ban online gambling in America, the Internet Gambling Prohibition Act which failed to pass. This didn't stop the American government in their efforts though, for the next ten years they attempted to institute various rules and regulations to stop online gambling. It got severe enough that Antigua, the originator of the licenses and where many casinos were technically based, began to argue it impinged a free trade agreement it had with the US. This went before the WTO who sided with Antigua and Barbuda. In 2025, the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act came into play, further jeopardising the place of online casinos in the US.
2025- The move to Europe and the Future!
The UK captilised on America's frosty attitude towards online gambling and the restrictions now in place, with the gaming act that allowed online casinos to operate within the UK. Over the next ten years, while still dogged with tougher restrictions from the US, online casinos and gambling have flourished across Europe and elsewhere with the industry still booming. The difficulties in getting it approved legally in the US are a hindrance but, in 2025, it was predicted that the size of the online gambling market would have a volume of $45.86 billion, growing to $56.05 billion by 2025- as we're in 2025 now, we'll just have to wait and see how accurate that is!
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