Unless some miracle happens, this issue is probably dead for this year in California.
Blame the short sighted greedy Indian Gaming groups. They could adopt a procedure that gets many many many more people into their
casinos, but instead want to write new buggy code, employ bunches of customer service and programmer types, for an end result that will leave them disappointed.
All they have to do is agree to live deposits and withdrawals, and let known quality
online poker sites run the games, and it becomes the classical win/win/win situation.
That live deposit/withdrawal procedure would address almost every single concern that you will hear. Age verification, and problem gambling would be utterly simple to deal with.
The win for the Casinos is that only in cardrooms or casinos would provide live deposit/withdrawals, and how could they not love live bodies coming in the door with pockets full of money?. For the first month or so, they might need some temps to process what I would imagine would be long lines of willing folks, who just might bring enough to gamble a bit while waiting. After a not so long period, the normal cashiers could handle the process without much effort.
The State should charge sales tax up front, we would be buying a service after all. No taxes on withdrawals. The state could easily kill
online poker if they get too greedy. As it stands, the sales taxes in Ca. are too close to what I think is the drop dead limit at 9% give or take a little. Much higher and it will do more harm than good.
I talked to the TD at Hawaiian Gardens, and he said they, the Bicycle Club, Commerce, and Morongo all realize that live deposit is the way to go, and they really don't want to deal with running a web site. They also proposed a bill which would have allowed PokerStars to be the site they preferred. That may be too inclusive tho, so the better solution would (IMHO) be letting any State qualified OLP site provide
real money poker with ONLY live deposit at cardrooms. In Ca. we have cardrooms, and casinos with cardrooms, so I use the more generic 'cardrooms'. So I might walk into a cardroom and put $100 on stars, and another $100 on Party and some more somewhere else. One process which might involve a centralized clearing house, but could most easily be done at the cashiers cage with P2P xfers. The cardrooms would be responsible for ID verification, and collecting and distributing funds. It would all be traceable electronically.
For us players the win is ease of money movement.