U.S. Rep. Paul Tonko, D-New York, said his SAFE Bet Act would provide regulation to protect people in the U.S. from gambling-related harm in the new era of high-tech sports betting.
Backed by three Northeastern University advisers, new federal legislation to regulate sports betting as a matter of public health was announced Tuesday in Washington – less than four hours before the opening game of the NCAA basketball tournament.
US Representative Paul TonkoA New York Democrat, he said his SAFE Bet Act would provide regulation to protect people in the US from gambling-related harm in the new era of high-tech sports betting legalized by a 2018 Supreme Court ruling.
Tonko was joined at a press conference by representatives of Northeastern's Institute for Public Health Advocacyled by law professor Richard Daynard.
Daynard helped lead the legal fight against Big Tobacco, a grueling fight that languished for decades — until groundbreaking court decisions in the 1990s led to heavy fines against the industry and bans on secondhand smoke in nearly all public places.
“We are not talking about activity. We're not talking about gambling. This is not an attack on gambling,” Daynard said, referring to the artificial intelligence that drives many companies' betting programs. “Whatever one thinks of gambling as it was known five years ago before the floodgates of online sports betting opened, this is a different product.”
Daynard applauded Tonko's suggestion in light of the recent Super Bowl, for which online bets were placed at a rate approaching 15,000 per second.
“It's time for us all to roll up our sleeves and make it happen,” Daynard said.
They also appeared at the press conference Mark Gottliebexecutive director of the Public Health Advocacy Institute, and Harry Levant, who serves as the institute's gambling policy advisor as well as a gambling therapist for the Ethos Treatment centers in Pennsylvania.
Daynard, Gottlieb and Levant are working with Tonko to develop federal legislation that would designate gambling as a public health issue — on par with tobacco, alcohol, opioids and other addictive products.
“Sports has always belonged to the American people, the American family,” Levant said. “Sports now belongs to the gambling industry. I really hope that the leaders in the sports world — athletes, owners, league commissioners — will come forward and join us in making sports gambling as safe as possible.
“I'd like to think that there are people in these leadership positions, and possibly even companies in the gaming industry, who are going to say, 'You know what? This thing is out of control. It must be regulated to protect the American public.”
Daynard noted that an estimated 7 million people in the U.S. suffer from a gambling addiction — a number that's probably conservative now that so much betting is done on cellphones.
“There has never been a study in the United States that looked at the full scope of the public harm associated with the expansion of commercialized gambling,” Levant said. “It has been looked at in other countries including Australia, the UK and Finland. These other countries have found that around 15% of the general public suffer gambling-related harm on an annual basis.'
Levant noted that these studies included friends, family and colleagues who were affected by someone they know struggling with gambling.
“If the 15% number is true in America,” Levant said, “we're talking about over 70 million people a year suffering from gambling-related harm.”
Tonko has been a leader in congressional efforts to regulate sports betting, which is allowed in 38 states and the District of Columbia. Thirty states have also legalized mobile betting over the phone.
Tonko last year introduced the Betting on our Future Act, which sought to ban all online and electronic sports gambling advertising. The SAFE Bet Act is a next-generation version of that bill, he said.
The new legislation focuses on “advertising along with affordability and the impact of artificial intelligence on gambling,” Tonko said. “And with that I think we have a safer product.”
The bill seeks to ban advertising during live sporting events, while banning promotions that offer bonus bets, odds increases and other incentives.
It forces companies to carry out affordability checks on customers, bans credit card deposits and limits customers to five deposits in a 24-hour period.
And it bans companies from using artificial intelligence to track a customer's gambling habits, which are used to offer personalized offers, as well as “micro-bets” and other AI-based products.
“One of my biggest concerns about an unregulated sports betting industry is the use of massive supercomputing power and artificial intelligence to deliver thousands of instant micro-bets that are carefully tailored to each consumer's gambling profile,” Gottlieb said. “These types of bets are offered every few seconds on almost every sporting event and provide opportunities for hundreds if not thousands of bets during a single competition.”
The SAFE Bet Act also requires nationwide sports betting data collection, a surgeon general's report on public health issues and a national clearinghouse for people who want to be banned from dealing with betting companies.
Tonko is planning a bipartisan approach in both the House and Senate to fine-tune the bill's language in hopes of building support over the next two months.
