"It's long been said the Internet is like the Wild West ---- uncivilized and ungovernable.

But there was at least one thing you could do in the Old West that you can't on the Internet: gamble.

Not legally, anyway. Not in America.

A Riverside County American Indian tribe wants to change that. The Morongo Band of Cahuilla Indians, which owns a lucrative casino halfway between Riverside and Palm Springs, wants to operate an Internet poker site, taking advantage of an exception in the federal law that allows Internet gambling within a state's borders. (It's ludicrous to think such an earthbound rule can be enforced when dealing with the amorphous Internet, but such is the absurdity of the 3-year-old federal prohibition.)

The 2006 federal law was moderately effective because it prohibited banks and other financial institutions from transferring money to and from gambling sites. But as with Prohibition some 90 years earlier, those who would ignore the law can find a virtual speakeasy without great difficulty.

All it really serves to do is point up the hypocrisy of our political leaders, who decry gambling while promoting state-sponsored lotteries and permitting real-world casinos ---- taxpaying ones ---- in more than half the states.

The prohibitions against Internet gambling should be lifted because government has no business trying to regulate such personal behavior and can't do so effectively ---- not so a nearly bankrupt state can throw a few more coins in its till or an Indian tribe can expand its monopoly into cyberspace."

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EDITORIAL: Little reason to keep Web gambling ban (The Californian 8/20)