> It could be banned. Would that stop it? Probably not.
Was not that big of a thing 15 years ago. The goal of a ban is not to reduce the consumption to 0, but try to lower it a significant amount. Although, since people are generally aware of it and participated in it, it might not be that easy to go back to beforetimes.
It doesn't have to be a prohibition either. Advertising could be banned. Branding could be controlled so it isn't appealing (Provider 1, Provider 2, etc). Parlay bets and "innovations" (which burn customer money 10 times faster) could be restricted. The "concierge" service that preys on the big spending addicts could be regulated/erased.
That's the sort of ban that actually works for society, because it is strongly focused on disincentivizing harmful behavior, while shutting out the black market.
> Advertising could be banned.
I always liked how the offshore casinos would setup a play money casino on their name.net and advertise that on the poker shows. Of course, I imagine a lot of people would put in .com instead and accidentally end up on the real money casino. Whoops.
The other regulation would be acredited gambler thresholds, that limits how much an individual can bet, based on some formula that accounts for a person's income and net worth. You're just not allowed to gamble more than a third of what you legally earned last paycheck or whatever.
Genies are tricky to get back in the bottle - especially when you can just as easily go to a company based in the Caymen Islands or wherever and spend that way.
Phones allow you to gamble from anywhere on anything. You could ban advertising it during sports broadcasts, which would probably reduce things a fair bit, but that's likely to impact the "casual" gambler who
I don't do sports, but occasionally I'm in a pub and they are on. I've seen in the UK over the years how pervasive it is now compared to a generation ago. The advertising companies paint this picture of it not only being normal, but also being the only way to enjoy a game. I'm fairly sure that my parents and grandparents who were big into football enjoyed games quite happily in the past.
In the 90s the typical sports gambling in the UK was old men putting the price of a pint on the pools or in a fruit machine, where you guessed which team would win. The winning limit on the fruit machines was about 5 pints worth, and the pools was a confusing weekly maths challenge while listening to results such as "Forfar Four, East Fife Five"
The explosion of "fixed odds betting" machines which dispensed with the social aspect of going to a pub and spending £5 over lunch in favour of extracting £50 in 5 minutes and moving on, combined with general high street abandonment led to a terrible blight on uk town centres. Online gambling meant you no longer had to go into a seedy shop to hand in a betting slip for the 3:40 at doncaster, then wait for an hour or so in the pub next door to watch it with acquaintances, but instead you could do it all from your own home.
Gambling has become industrialised in the last generation, emphasising the cash extraction and reducing the pleasure it brought. It's no longer £3 for an hour of interest, it's become about extracting as much money as possible (and thus the adverts are all about winning big bucks because you as a sports nerd know far more about which player will score first than the betting companies do)
Gambling has always been a part of football. You mentioned the football pools, is this not gambling? Horse racing, not going to mention that?
Conflating fixed odds machines with sports gambling is deliberately disingenuous, it is like comparing a nice glass of water with super skunk weed. Sports gambling is known to have less harm because it is not possible to control many aspects of the experience, unlike with fixed odds machine where the experience is controlled to appeal to addicts. Also, these machines are very heavily regulated, there are categories that separate what places can have them, how the mechanics operate, etc. We have regulation (you seem to be unaware that regulations have changed to limit how much you can wager, you cannot wager £50 in 5 minutes), the problem is purely one of choice.
Online gambling has grown because it is more accessible, and that has meant that a higher proportion of the users are people who didn't want go into a seedy shop and can now put their acca on at the weekend and that is it.
Football pools was also about extracting money from people. The people who ran the pools did not do so because they had an innate love for the human spirit, they did it because people wanted to gamble.
Also, banning advertising would not be a big issue for gambling companies. In the UK, it would be a massive leveller because Paddy Power is able to generate as much revenue as everyone else whilst spending significantly less on advertising. However, the issue is that offshore places would still advertise in the UK and it would significantly incentivize revenue generation from FBOT. If you no longer have big retail participation then you have to rely on addicts to fund the company. This is the first-order effects, past this point it will be different and who knows. But there is an ecosystem that advertising is part of that generates massive revenue, provides significant employment, funds addiction treatment (until 2022, there were no gambling addiction centres funded by the government, it was all funded by providers), and is a generally low-harm product that people enjoy (gambling has been a core part of British culture for decades, what has changed recently is the makeup of British society not gambling).
You wrote:
Did you read this part? In short, I would say "scale matters".Losing or winning a pint or two once or twice a week isn't the end of the world. The pools involved putting numbers into coupons and sending them off each week, it cost you £2 or whatever, and that was it for the week.
Modern sports betting seems (to my untrained uninterested eye) to be about extracting multiple bets of £20+ an hour, seemingly competing with the coke dealers which is apparently a very common part of football nowadays for the income, and using similar tactics.
Yes, gambling was huge in the US before, you just didn't know about it. Illegal gambling market in the US was massive because you could go offshore. One of the issues with offshore providers is no taxes, no harm prevention, etc.
Legalization allows you to generate tax revenue and implement harm prevention effectively for the very small amount of users that are gambling addicts (if you compare to some of the things that are legal in the US, talking about addiction makes no sense at all...weed, for example, is inherently addictive, gambling is not).
Regardless though, when sports betting was largely illegal in the US, the illegal market was by far the biggest sports betting market in the world. Continuing to make it illegal was extremely illogical.
> Legalization allows you to generate tax revenue and implement harm prevention effectively for the very small amount of users that are gambling addicts
You do not need legalization for harm reduction. But, the state earning on gambling means effective regulations will be against state interests.
Gambling earns mostly on addicts. Not on people who bet a little here and there. By extension, state will need those addicts existing and loosing money to get taxes too.
> weed, for example, is inherently addictive, gambling is not
Any science on this? That’s a wild statement vs my priors.
Yes it existed before. But Do you dispute that far more people in the US are participating now?
Ease of access and advertising matter.