192
Opinion of the Court
of casino operators is likely to advertise in a meaningfully distinct manner from the others. The Government's suggestion that Indian casinos are too isolated to warrant attention is belied by a quick review of tribal geography and the Government's own evidence regarding the financial success of tribal gaming. See n. 5, supra. If distance were determinative, Las Vegas might have remained a relatively small community, or simply disappeared like a desert mirage.
Ironically, the most significant difference identified by the Government between tribal and other classes of casino gambling is that the former is "heavily regulated." Brief for Respondents 38. If such direct regulation provides a basis for believing that the social costs of gambling in tribal casinos are sufficiently mitigated to make their advertising tolerable, one would have thought that Congress might have at least experimented with comparable regulation before abridging the speech rights of federally unregulated casinos. While Congress' failure to institute such direct regulation of private casino gambling does not necessarily compromise the constitutionality of § 1304, it does undermine the asserted justifications for the restriction before us. See Rubin, 514 U. S., at 490-491. There surely are practical and nonspeech-related forms of regulation—including a prohibition or supervision of gambling on credit; limitations on the use of cash machines on casino premises; controls on admissions; pot or betting limits; location restrictions; and licensing requirements—that could more directly and effectively alleviate some of the social costs of casino gambling.
We reached a similar conclusion in Rubin. There, we considered the effect of conflicting federal policies on the Government's claim that a speech restriction materially advanced its interest in preventing so-called "strength wars" among competing sellers of certain alcoholic beverages. We concluded that the effect of the challenged restriction on commercial speech had to be evaluated in the context of the entire regulatory scheme, rather than in isolation,
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