Most of the top level comments support scrapping the deal, most of them on the basis that "sports gambling is a cancer." A cancer for whom? I want to take the opposite position: let people do whatever they want, as long as they bear the consequences of their decisions instead of socializing the risk. You don't like betting or gambling? Great, then don't do it. But forcing your preferences on others is not the way.
Sports betting has externalities that are hard to push back into the original bettor and the bookie. Solving those externalities involves regulation in some form, whether by regulation or heavy taxes.
How do you protect the risk from falling on society? I think that is the crux of it, it is not something you can cleanly separate which is where regulation steps in. The question is, how much money and influence can these companies shore up before that regulation hits?
As a practical matter when someone gambles away their life savings we aren't going to let them starve in the streets, we're going to give them public assistance.
Despite my libertarian leanings I have to acknowledge that sports betting is a disaster for people with low impulse control, and while in theory prediction markets are useful for aggregating knowledge, in reality they've been taken over by degenerate gamblers and fraudsters.
