The proponents of Internet sweepstakes businesses, banned by a law set to go into effect Dec. 1, are counting on a Guilford Superior Court judge to rule this week that the games are protected by the First Amendment. All we can say to this latest effort to circumvent a broad bipartisan majority of legislators and Gov. Bev Perdue is good luck with that.
Judge John Craig III in 2008 sided with two of the companies that make the popular games, Hest Technologies and Internet International Technologies, when they argued that the games are not the same as video poker, which was banned by the state in 2006. This year, the legislature passed a law expanding the video-poker ban to include electronic-sweepstakes games.
The computer-based games are offered to players who buy phone or Internet time in businesses that also offer other business-related services. It’s clear that with the proliferation of these Internet businesses — some 50 in Winston-Salem and more than 600 statewide — that the sweepstakes games are the main draw. While they use the facade of Internet or businesses services, these places exist largely to offer the highly profitable sweepstakes games.
It’s true that players cannot influence the outcome of the games, any more than a person who buys a lottery ticket can affect his or her chances of winning. With one exception. The player can buy successive tries, just as he or she can buy multiple lottery tickets. Therein lies the problem, with the lottery, which we opposed from the beginning, and with these iterations of gambling that offer the lure and hope of wining — if only you will spend enough money. One player told the Journal’s Laura Graff last summer that he had spent $200 that day playing the sweepstakes games and was going home to get more money.
That the businesses that profit from this human weakness would suggest that the issue is one of the game makers’ freedom of speech is, well, silly. “We’re talking about whether or not the player has won a prize. How in the world is that constitutionally protected speech?” Mark Davis, a special deputy attorney general, told the court last week. “How in the world is that conveying an idea or expression separate and apart from the finite four corners of this one particular game?”
Owners of the sweepstakes businesses argue that the closing of their businesses will put 10,000 people out of jobs in North Carolina. Job losses are regrettable, especially in this economy, but we question the numbers. Who will be left to run the so-called legitimate businesses that the owners claim exist — Internet services, copying and fax services and the like? We think that when the ban goes into effect, these Internet businesses will disappear rapidly because their primary revenue source will be gone.
Judge Craig’s choices are to rule in favor of the sweepstakes-business owners and grant an injunction that would stop law enforcement from enforcing the ban. Or he can agree with the state and dismiss the case. We believe the latter is the responsible choice.
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