The Last Word by Damien Connelly
Online Grows. Land-Based Goes Niche Welcome to The Last Word. 50 years ago, humans landed on the Moon during Project Apollo. That remains one of the greatest achievements of humankind. However, most people’s daily lives were not really impacted by that achievement because post-Apollo we stepped back from the Space Race due to its costs and the fact these were not shared internationally — the USA and the USSR could not finance large-scale, ongoing space projects on their own. From the Space Race the precursor of the Internet was formed to help share research — it was called ARPANET. It connected U.S. universities and specific sites. ARPANET went international in 1973 when Norway was connected to it, followed soon after by the UK. Which is where an Englishman enters my story…
During his time at CERN, Sir Tim Berners-Lee created HTTP and the first web browser. Importantly, he released the source code and allowed anyone to access and use it for free. This decentralised and democratised the Internet by creating the World Wide Web — when I started working in the Internet as a Technical Support Representative for Microsoft during my second Master’s studies, the difference between the Internet and World Wide Web was both obvious and significant; today, that difference is marginal and, to most people, invisible. Nowadays we use the word ‘online’ to refer to the Internet’s / Web’s digital ecosystem where most of the
assets are intangible. For the opposite of online we have many words including offline, land-based, bricksand-mortar and onground. In 2018 Sir Tim Berners-Lee publicly noted his disappointment in how ‘the Web’ has developed. From his decentralised and democratised ambitions, what we see today is closer to certain economic models of market efficiency and either monopolistic or oligopolistic commercial behaviour that is more akin to the path taken during the Soviet Communist period — perfect Communism is theoretically amazing. However, the primary weakness of Communism is it relies on humans. Humans are imperfect and irrational. Some humans seek power and some have a desire to follow the behaviour of the masses. As Morgan Stanley highlights in its research article about online gambling, the big companies in this sector are getting bigger; such as GVC, William Hill and Bet365. And as Robert Brassai notes in his article, he feels it is purely a matter of time before online gambling giants emerge to challenge land-based operators. Which brings me to the principle of economies of scale. Our industry has seen economies of scale in practice. Witness the transition towards integrated resort casinos — where market and geo-political conditions allow — and the superior financial returns these IRs produce compared to the smaller / older commercial casino model which has at best four revenue pillars: gambling; F&B; live entertainment; and hotel.
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