The hacks at The Register are unimpressed as hell with Australian Senator Richard Alston, Minister for Communications. I think he's been responsible for the most awful technology-related laws and regulations that exist (in Australia, at least), but I have to admire the technique he's used in the latest attempt to regulate behaviour on the Internet.

Forget about The Register this time: they're just having a content-free rant about Alston. There's a much better article at IT News which has the details about the proposal. The basic idea is that the government wants to prevent Australians from using overseas gambling sites on the Internet. They wrap this up in all sorts of motherhood statements about protection and stuff, whereas the average cynic will say it's all about taxation revenue. I'm not even going to pass comment on whether banning gambling in this way is a good idea or not, but if you're going to do it, the question is how? How the hell do you police a law like that?

As it happens, the government on this occasion has come up with a very clever (and uncharacteristically audacious) technique for making it work. Rather than ban gambling online, they've proposed to bar banks from honouring credit card debts incurred on offshore gaming sites. This is really cute! It's not a totally onerous requirement on the rest of the world, because Australian credit cards can be identified by the leading digits on the card: the gambling sites can just mark the entire range of Australian cards as "bad". Detection of bad cards is a standard part of credit card processing anyhow.

This is a great example of how to make a law enforce itself. The Australian punters are likely to be happy, because they aren't banned from doing anything in particular. (Actually, they might be, but the news article doesn't mention it.) If they find some mug who accepts their credit card, they will have a brief but pleasant opportunity to gamble without any chance of losing money (until the operator wises up and blacklists all Australian credit cards). Normally it's not possible to regulate the behaviour of an offshore entity, but by denying them the means of payment (which is under the control of the government), their incentive to provide service is gone. The banks, being the entities which are actually regulated by the law, have no particular incentive to violate it, and they will be policed by credit card owners who will howl if they are ever charged a cent by an offshore gambling site.

There are lots of other issues surrounding this, but I will gleefully ignore them and enjoy this one example of self-enforcement. Nuts to whether the government should or should not tell people how they can waste their money. Nuts to whether by creating this law the government is tampering with the very core of the free market economy. Nuts to the fact that sooner or later someone will come up with a payment scheme that declaws this regulation. Nuts to the fact that every other aspect of the law probably sucks. I'm going to enjoy the moment.