The Nevada Gaming Commission has enhanced its definitions for regulated service providers for the state’s upcoming online-poker industry.
The strengthened regulations, published last week, address and define concerns and specify expected practices in the areas of player identification and age verification for the state’s online poker players, adding firms filling these specific roles to the roster of regulated business entities.
One of the new classes of service providers specifies and defines companies offering “geolocation” services, which in general describe the process of determining the physical location of a remote user, who, in this instance, would be accessing a Nevada-regulated online poker site.
Player ID services have also been clarified under the tag of “patron identification service provider.” These are individuals or businesses who are assigned the responsibility of proving the accuracy of the information players use when registering with the new online sites.
The player-ID provider definitions include several exceptions to eliminate redundancy and excuse relatively minor functions from the strict service-provider applications process. Among the listed exceptions are persons or firm providing ID services for other than online-gaming purposes payment-processing services (which are defined separately), licensed operators who perform these activities in-house, and others.
The new definitions, if approved, will be added to the NGC’s lengthy Regulation 5, which defines the operational scope of “gaming establishments” licensed to do business in Nevada.
