Four online casino sites which include two British are facing court action by french casinos seeking to bar them from receiving a license to operate in France when the Gallic market is liberalized this summer. Britain's Sportingbet and 888 Holdings are being sued along with Malta's Unibet and Bwin of Austria by three of France's biggest casino operators Barrière, Joagroupe, and Tranchant, are asking the Criminal Court in Paris prepares to end a state monopoly on online gambling and to block any licensing to the accused online casino operators for at least two years.

The three online casinos – Tranchant, Barrière and Joagroupe, which run a total of 104 casinos, say their online rivals have flouted the law by setting up French language sites to tout for custom in France without waiting for parliamentary approval. They told Paris Criminal Court that the online groups had ''violated French legislation in a deliberate and patent manner''.

The French casino owners want the foreign online casino sites to be imposed a penalty on any future licensing attempt once France opens its gaming market for actions committed while the market is still closed. However, if the lawsuit is upheld by judges, the four Internet firms would find themselves at a notable disadvantage in a market thought to be worth hundreds of millions of euros a year.

The case, which is likely to end Wednesday, comes two weeks before the French Senate is expected to back a bill authorizing private online gamblers to apply for licences. The legislation has already been approved by the National Assembly, the lower house of parliament, and is likely to come into force in time for the French to bet on the World Cup.

However, there are about 100 operators will apply for a licence, according to French government estimates, but only about half will receive one. They will have the right to take bets on sports betting and casino games such as auto racing, basketball and poker, but not on activities such as one-arm bandits considered by French officials to be dangerously addictive.

From this time on, the new operators will face high tax rates which critics say are intended to favour the two state-run firms which control the French market at present — Pari Mutuel Urbain (PMU), the bookmakers, and Française des Jeux (FdJ), the national lottery. An estimated 3,000,000 French people already betting online with online casino sites operating outside France.

Source: http://www.onlinecasinoadvisory.com/casino-news/online/french-casinos-sue-foreign-online-gambling-operators-43594.htm

The spectre of broadscale Internet censorship in Australia has been covered previously here on The Next Web before, but many outside Australia may wonder: why should you care if you don’t live in Australia. If you’re not aware of what’s proposed, the short version is that Australia is proposing to introduce a compulsory firewall that filters content based on a blacklist of banned sites

What’s going to be on that list is even now still somewhat confused. The Censorship Minister Stephen Conroy has stated that all Refused Classification content will be banned, which in Australia would extend to computer games and online casino games unsuitable for children especialloy in Australia that has no adult (R18+) rating for computer games, small breasts, information about euthanasia, discussion forums on anorexia, as well as the usual nasties of child porn. To complicate matters, a site may be refused classification in Australia if it links to a site that is refused classification, which could literally result in half the internet being blocked.

The Austarlian Government plans to impose mandatory Internet filtering at the Internet Service Provider (ISP) level. There are two lists, a “child safe” list which filters both illegal content and explicit pornography; a second which users can opt-out to which only filters unwanted content. Austarlia's federal has engaged to pursuing its plan to censor the Internet, blocking sites encompassing online casinos and even sports betting sites thought via arbitrary officials to be harmful. The censor board, a small team of bureaucratic staff whose decisions are imposed without audit or announcement, has decided to include nudity involving women with small breasts in the ban.

On the authority of a report on boingboing.net, the Adult Classification Board has very resolute that nudity of women with A-cups is a sneaky pattern of pedophilia and should be omitted as progeny pornography. The Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, has consistently ignored advice from a host of technical experts saying the filters would slow the internet, block legitimate sites, be easily bypassed and fall short of capturing all of the nasty content available online. Despite this, he is pushing ahead with trials of the scheme using six ISPs - Primus, Tech 2U, Webshield, OMNIconnect, Netforce and Highway 1. But even the trials have been heavily discredited, with experts saying the lack of involvement from the three largest ISPs, Telstra, Optus and iiNet, means the trials will not provide much useful data on the effects of internet filtering in the real-world.

Online casino sites are hoping complaints by the Australian public and Internet providers will quickly end the era of censorship in this land once known for bold thinking.

News Source: http://www.onlinecasinoadvisory.com/casino-news/online/small-breasts-blocked-with-online-gambling-by-australia-43591.htm