Costa Rica and the USA discussed about online gambling and achieved an agreement, as trade officials said. The consequence of the agreement was the dropping of the request for arbitration by Costa Rica at the World Trade Organization.The discussion came up in May last year, after Washington declared that it would retract gambling from services which had been opened up under a world trade deal in 1994. According to the rules of the WTO, the USA had to offer access in other services to any of the WTO’s 151 members. The agreement between the USA and the European Union concerned the access to postal and courier, research and development, and storage and warehouse services in compensation. The deal with Costa Rica was similar as the one with Japan and Canada.
Though the EU was investigating whether the U.S. prosecutions were discriminatory with the foreign online gambling companies, it could end in a trade conflict at the WTO. Last year, European companies as PartyGaming and bwin Interactive Entertainment were complaining about the U.S. preferences on some online gambling companies, because of some measures they had introduced to isolate their access to its gaming market.
The Justice Department of the United States keeps investigating the activities of the European companies before introducing those measures. According to the EU companies, the USA would allow to U.S. firms to offer Internet horse race betting to continue operating.
