Online fantasy sports enthusiasts and employees of sports betting companies protested in front of the Manhattan office of Eric Schneiderman, the attorney general, on Nov 13, Friday against his latest attempts to shut down FanDuel and DraftKings in New York.
New York is a city that permits residents to place a $100k bet on horses, but disapproves of spending $5 on a fantasy football contests. The state’s laws do not permit any
lottery or the sale of lottery tickets, pool-selling, bookmaking, or any other kind of gambling.
At the same time, New York has been carving out exceptions for the past several years.
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In 1939, the laws were amended to permit horse betting. In 1957, religious organizations and nonprofit organizations were permitted to hold bingo games to raise funds. In 1966, the state lottery was legalized and a few other forms of charity gaming were legalized in 1975. In 1988, the federal law was changed to permit Indian casinos to run casino businesses on reservation land in states that permitted any form of casino game. In 2013, the state granted licenses for seven full-fledged casinos.
Although the state has legalized a lot of gambling activity, it is now the biggest enemy of the online daily fantasy sports industry. Eric T. Schneiderman, the attorney general of the state of New York, has launched a legal battle against top fantasy sports websites DraftKings and FanDuel. He wants them to quit operating in the state. Both FanDuel and DraftKings argue that fantasy sports are skill-based games that do not fit into the definition of gambling. Last year, a New York Supreme Court judge heard the case, and he may rule that DraftKings and FanDuel should not accept bets from New York residents.
New York’s attitude to gambling is strange. It bans sports betting, but can do nothing about the fact that residents place sports bets at hundreds of offshore sports betting sites. Critics of the law say that the state passes laws to permit gambling only when it can receive a share of the revenue and bans gambling when it cannot make a profit out of it.
Since the state does not make its position on gambling clear, huge real estate projects such as Belmont Park and Aqueduct cannot be moved forward. The current system does not benefit local municipalities either. Residents of Suffolk and Nassau counties can hardly take the help of the law to prevent OTBs from running VLT parlors because of certain recent changes in the state’s legal machinery.
New York has amended its laws so much that they have ceased to be useful. Experts say that it is high time the city starts creating better gambling laws from scratch. New York has to create laws that will fetch maximum revenue from well-regulated gambling establishments while simultaneously protecting its customers.
