Congress Eyes Stricter Controls on Sports Betting Industry

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00:00A U.S. congressman is getting involved here, and if Congress starts getting involved and watchdogging

00:07a little bit more of the sports betting, that means these professional leagues are going to

00:10have to be on notice more than they want to be, aren't they? Yeah, I think that's always been a

00:17theme, not just in sports betting, but sports in general. I've always kind of, the sentiment has

00:21always been Congress telling sports leagues, listen, you don't want us to police you because

00:25we're going to come in and put serious guardrails that you don't want to do. You should be taking

00:30care of the stuff yourself. It was the same with NIL, I think, which the NCAA had to deal with in

00:35its own way. It's been kind of the same with sports betting now, where when there are national scandals

00:41and when the international news is picking up this kind of stuff, Congress kind of turns their head

00:47and is like, all right, well, it doesn't seem like you have it figured out, even though maybe you're

00:50telling us the system is working like it's supposed to. You had Congressman Paul Tonko this week write

00:56seven letters to different major league sports commissioners, essentially telling them you need

01:03to get behind this bill that I have called the SAFE Act, which has wide sweeping protections and rules

01:11and restrictions for sports books and sports betting. A lot of things that the leagues and the sports

01:16books themselves probably wouldn't love to adopt, but he's telling them, you guys have to support

01:21this bill and get behind these guardrails or next time that the scandal drops, it's really on you and

01:26it's your fault because you didn't embrace this stuff. Now, this is the SAFE Act bill, which he

01:31reintroduced earlier this year in March. He's actually been pushing this bill for several years and it would

01:37do sweeping things like preventing sports betting ads during live games. That's, you know, at arenas,

01:43that's on TV, it would prevent programming themselves from pushing bonus bets. So, you know,

01:48if you watch any of the, you know, pre pregame pre show or even mid game sports programs are always

01:54talking about some sort of bonus offer or odds boost, something like that. And even more importantly

01:59for the industry, which is a real concern is banning the use of artificial intelligence to tailor bets

02:04that customers get based off their betting habits and to create and introduce new types of bets.

02:11So AI has been a huge driver of sports books, kind of updating their tech and really becoming

02:16more efficient and squeezing more profitability out of their customers. The American Gaming

02:20Association has already come out several times and said that this is really something they don't want.

02:25So I think this is a case of where if you have this stuff come to light with these betting scandals

02:29and more, you know, bad news, so to speak, the pressure kind of to not have these things

02:35becomes even harder to face from a public perspective. And in Tonko's case, I think he's kind of taking

02:40advantage of all these huge scandals, I've wanted this bill passed for a long time, maybe now I can

02:46curry public support. And that's why he wrote these letters to the commissioners, basically telling them

02:50next time something like this happens, you take all the blame, unless you get on board with what I want.