UIGEA Author Not Happy About Daily Fantasy SportsMan Who Wrote Bill Crushing The Poker Boom Comments On DFS |
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With Disney recently investing $250 million into DraftKings and PokerStars’ parent company moving towards entering the same space, the daily fantasy sports industry is big business these days, at times entering into the same types of conversations as online poker.
According to a piece on the industry by ThinkProgress, the author of the 2006 Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act said that “[n]o one ever conceived of [fantasy sports] becoming a large scale activity or that it could transition into one-day contests.” UIGEA, which caused some of the world’s top online poker sites to stop catering to Americans and helped set the stage for online poker’s Black Friday in April 2011, gave a carve-out to fantasy sports.
From the article:
The author of UIGEA, former Rep. Jim Leach (R-IA), told ThinkProgress that the fantasy exception was not his idea — and was never intended to cover daily fantasy games like we see today. “My intent in initiating the law was to constrain a growing gambling ethos in America that could bring the casino to the home, the work station, college dorm, even the treadmill. My concern was that a savings and investing country could too easily become a country where too many would bet wantonly on unrealistic hopes of obtaining a big payoff,” he recalled. After “a number of Members indicated they couldn’t support it if it didn’t make a minor exception for fantasy sports,” Leach said he reluctantly agreed to add the exemption “on the assumption that nothing in the endeavor could be used to incentivize corruption of any actual sports contests being played.”
As Congress mulls over a Sheldon Adelson-backed plan to “restore” America’s 1961 Wire Act, which was another law that was used against offshore poker operators in the Black Friday indictments, fantasy sports could potentially get yet another carve-out.
As LegalSportsReport pointed out, Leach’s comments don’t really change anything about daily fantasy sports, though the more often big names in the gaming industry say daily fantasy sports is gambling, like MGM CEO Jim Murren did recently, there could eventually be more oversight on those types of games. According to ThinkProgress, daily fantasy sports are unregulated.
Despite UIGEA and the Wire Act still being on the books, individual states have been given the green light to pursue their own real-money online gaming industries, if they chose to legalize and regulate it. Compacts between states, like the one between Nevada and Delaware for online poker liquidity sharing, are also OK under federal law. Adelson is trying to change that, though.
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