If you go to Europe, you’re probably familiar with betting parlors. They shittify any town they take over, filling up with lonely men losing their money.
Online just hides it a little better.
Legislation is weird because the bad guys only have to win once, and to prevent them you have to win every single time.
This didn't just magically happen. We knew all of these problems, and it was completely illegal in the US for decades because of that. But there was a concerted, highly funded, well organized push among state legislatures over the past few years to get this stuff through, to the complete detriment of society. Pure blatant regulatory capture funded by multi-billion dollar corporations.
Sports betting is not zero harm, but the rate of harm is significantly lower than the kinds of betting that are legal in parts of the US.
The US is one of the weirdest markets globally in that it legalized all the high-harm activities (because of massive political corruption) and banned all the low-harm stuff. Now they are normalizing, you have the hysterical people who don't really understand why it was banned initially saying that Eden has fallen.
Sports betting also has the unique issue of introducing corruption into sports. A league like the NFL has a huge number of players, coaches, referees, and league staff, all of whom can influence the outcome of a game, and all of whom are potentially susceptible to bribes. A notable case of this happening is the "Black Sox" scandal, where the 1919 Chicago White Sox blatantly threw the World Series in exchange for bribes from a gambling syndicate. The more prolific sports betting is, the more likely events like this are.
This cannot be overstated.
I like to watch my local hockey team. To (legally) access their games, you must pay $30/mo (or have a cable TV package that includes it). Once you pay the entry fee, you're then to subject to _near constant_ ads for gambling: at least one gambling ad every commercial break (and which translates to ~10 ads just during periods), betting lines and bookmaker logos in scorebugs, full-screen takeover ads with reads during breaks in play, ads for on-network shows covering gambling more in depth, etc.
Oh, and at one point the team had a sportsbook _inside the arena_ (it's since been replaced with a different sponsor).
It's completely taken over sports broadcasts.
Is that really better than a regulated industry? Because that’s the alternative when you have prohibition.
It all comes down to access. The mobile aspect of things can fuel addictions to an extreme that otherwise would have been controllable. There's no reason you can't have casinos or gambling halls or whatever to fill that need. Prohibition obviously isn't the answer. But being able to pop open an app and lose your paycheck in a moment is ruinous to people, and there's an entire predatory industry out there designing these things to trick people like that.
Scale is important. If the "regulated" (I use that term loosely in this context) industry is hundreds or thousands of times larger than the previous unregulated industry, then I could see it being a much worse problem.
And the fact that ads for sports betting have taken over broadcasting and online media for anything even tangentially related, my reaction is that the problem has gotten much worse.
Prohibition never completely stamps something out, but it's better than opening up access to every 18 year old with a smartphone.
You mean the UK? What you describe is uncommon in most european countries. UK is a very exception because private over-the-counter gambling outlets (aka bookies) are legal. That's not the case in most european countries where usually the state has monopoly.
Most old men used to meet up with their friends and put a line on for the races...you don't enjoy that, maybe you don't have friends to go places with but other people did...what is the issue? The government has wisely cracked down on FBOTs, the worst part of that model that appeared after sports betting moved online. The culture that exists today (as this industry disappears) is nothing to do with what it was (and, btw, the move online has seen the vig go down by something like 90%...so that isn't bad either).
The really weird one is casinos in the US: until Adelson died, both parties largest donors were the casino industry...now it just the Dems. You have zero harm protection, zero regulations, and massive levels of political corruption.
In the UK, these companies pay lots of tax, they invest heavily in technology, and until last year were the only people funding gambling addiction...the government, which runs the healthcare system, refused to do so.
The rate of harm from online gambling is usually under 1% and highest in markets that are either overregulated (i.e. Hong Kong) or unregulated (i.e. US). You "lose" every time you go to the cinema, buy food, do anything by your terms is a loss. You want to gamble on sports, someone will take your bet, what is the issue? Casino/table games are pointless, but this isn't what "betting parlors" are and this isn't the culture in Europe which skews heavily towards sports betting, which is relatively low-harm.
Again, look at the US: crypto, zero-day options, etc. There is value in having an outlet, because people are going to do this stuff whether it is legal or not.
It didn't use to be manageable before, you probably just didn't hear of it happening. Remember online poker used to be widespread. Illegal sports betting was very widespread. Someone "irresponsibly" losing money isn't the same thing as an addiction either (if you do research into why people get addicted to gambling, you will find out that it isn't about money, it is often about sensory experiences which sports betting does not provide).
UK, Ireland, Greece are mentioned. Italy apparently has them too. I don't know about anywhere else.
Some British towns had four or more of these within 100m. It was generally a sign of a deprived area.
We lost that battle when states introduced lotteries. Government gambling.
I don't really buy the argument that if advertising is bright and colorful, it's distinctly targeted to children. Most advertising is bright and colorful. The only decent argument from the smoking / vape wars was Joe Camel because he was a cartoon character, but I didn't know who Joe Camel was until I was ad adult. I think the advertising to children because it contains non-unusual ________ argument is pretty weak.
If you mean advertise where children would be able to see it, absolutely, all over the place.
Nobody cares wether the next lottery has a 24 and millions care very deeply about who wins the next sportball cup.
Both allow you to use them as an addiction but one has a far weaker and narrower pull.
Not just the money, but also the amount of their mental energy it comes to capture.
I've heard lotteries called a "hope tax," which is pretty morbid.
I personally dislike tobacco and wish people would stop using it, but it would be dishonest to claim that it is as bad as heroine just because they are both addictive.
If you start letting moralizers regulate everyone's behavior "for their own good" where do you stop?