Gazing out the 11th-floor windows of a downtown Manhattan building at a clear, blue sky, four panelists at the opening day of the SBC Summit North America were asked to look into their crystal balls and present their best- and worst-case scenarios for what the U.S. sports betting landscape might look like in the year 2030.

“Best-case is, come 2030, the industry is regulated very similarly to how we’re looking at things now,” said Louis Rogacki, assistant attorney general for the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement. “For that to happen, the industry needs to take a more active role in doing things rather than waiting for regulators to say, ‘You need to do this, you need to do that.’ Don’t wait for the next cybersecurity or integrity issue.

“Worst-case scenario is you (sports betting operators) don’t heed the warnings and you end up with federal intervention and some kind of hodgepodge of federal agencies all dealing with gaming. Now you’re gonna have to deal with the SEC.”

“I don’t think federal intervention is necessarily a bad thing, but they don’t know the space like [states] do and might show up and do something crazy,” added Cole Wogoman, the National Council on Problem Gambling’s senior manager of government relations and league partnerships.

Crazy or not, Wogoman went on to predict that “there will be some level of federal intervention” in the sports betting space by 2030, adding that he wasn’t certain what that involvement would consist of.

But from his experience on Capitol Hill, he said that there have been calls from leagues and operators alike for Congress to take on some sort of role when it comes to competitive integrity and a national self-exclusion list for people who recognize they have a gambling problem to opt into. 

Rogacki said he’d like to see the federal government be more vigilant in its prosecution of offshore operators.

“I can’t go after somebody in Costa Rica. I can just get the information and pass it on to the federal government,” he said.

To this end, gaming attorney Behnam Dayanim of the firm Orrick, Herring & Sutcliffe called on state agencies to prioritize what they consider particularly important sports betting regulations and loosen up some of the more trivial burdens placed on legal operators.

“Sports betting is not tremendously profitable, and they’re competing against offshore books who don’t have this regulation,” he said.

This point, in part, seemed to counter something Cathy Judd-Stein, former chair of the Massachusetts Gaming Commission, expressed earlier when she said, “It’s a very complicated business for all of the operators to really comply with each individual jurisdiction’s demands, but regulators are going to expect it to ensure the public’s trust.”

More pointedly, Rogacki added, “The biggest dirty word for a regulator is to hear an operator say, ‘That creates friction.’ You say friction to me, the meeting’s going to end very quickly after that.”

‘Data subjects have rights’

When asked to articulate her best-case scenario for 2030, Judd-Stein replied, “Best-case scenario would be that operators and regulators get together to create a universal framework for responsible gaming and how to tackle problem gambling. It’s an easy ask and very simple concept that would create great efficiencies for operators. We’ve already been seeing some great collaboration from the industry.”

In some areas, certainly, but not all. During an earlier panel discussion about the role of artificial intelligence and machine learning in the industry, IC360 (formerly U.S. Integrity) COO Scott Sadin said, “You’re only good at the data you’re pulling in. It really needs to deploy across a large number of sportsbook operators in multiple jurisdictions. That’s when you’re really going to start to identify the profiles of certain types of problem gamblers. Someone might have a gambling problem but not on live betting.”

But as for pulling together all that data, Michelle Dunham, manager and counsel for the fraud detection provider Accertify, said it’s easier said than done.

“As Scott talks about, we want every piece of data out there,” she said. “But data subjects have rights, and jurisdictions and states have rules and regulations about how data subjects’ information can be used.”