Below you'll find a selection of what the world's journalists are writing or blogging about PartyGaming's $105 million settlement with the United States Department of Justice.
Hyperlinks go directly to columns or blogs.
At a stroke, PartyGaming is now top of the pack for the long-awaited sector consolidation. Whether the City, having burnt its fingers first time round, will fund PartyGaming's ambitions is no certainty. But let's face it, the City has only itself to blame for allowing PartyGaming's founders to pocket more than £1bn at 2005's float.
Alistair Osborne | The Guardian
Even though the United States Justice Department has agreed to vouch for you if a regulatory authority should question your probity, PartyGaming, you might want to think carefully before adding the feds as a reference on your resume.
Christopher A. Krafcik | IGamingNews
Is a bright new future dawning for PartyGaming? Well, some sort of a future anyway. But it seems deeply unlikely this one-time FTSE 100 stock will ever again achieve the heroic valuation it was floated at when it still had the vast US market largely to itself.
Jeremy Warner | The Independent
In practice, the way has been cleared for the group to apply for a gaming licence when the UIGEA is eventually overturned and a regulatory framework is put in place, as seems inevitable. The deal also paves the way for the consolidation of the industry. Until recently, this was expected to involve big Las Vegas operators snaffling PartyGaming and its ilk, but the financial woes of the likes of Harrah’s Entertainment and MGM Mirage make such a scenario less likely.
Nick Hasell | The London Times
A foreign company and its executives, operating out of a country where everything the company was doing was legal, was being prosecuted in the U.S. for violating an ambiguous law the Justice Department was using to paternalistically prohibit Americans from consensually wagering online. Now in exchange for agreeing to stop doing business with Americans and paying a $105 million fine, the U.S. government has graciously agreed not to throw the company's executives in prison. Whether you're scoring in terms of individual freedom, free trade, common sense, or the rule of law, it seems like a net loss all around to me.
Radley Balko | Reason Magazine