The USA’s deranged restrictions on Internet (and indeed, any other) gambling have been quite rightly ruled illegal.

Unfortunately, I can’t imagine John Ashcroft and his sober gang of puritans taking heed and removing the restrictions – not in an election year when the pious right are already upset by the President’s lack of religious mania.

So the concept of GATS will take another hit in the eyes of the rest of the world, Americans will increasingly view free trade as a fiendish and decadent plot to sell their children into white slavery (this seems to be broadly the moral objection to gambling), and the path towards the horrors of protectionism will be trodden a little more thoroughly.

Arse.