Jeb Bush argued for regulation of paid fantasy football leagues, but he doesn’t seem aware that regulations already exist.
“Effectively, it’s day trading without any regulation at all,” Bush said during Wednesday’s Republican debate, though he doesn’t consider it gambling.
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“If they can’t regulate themselves, then the NFL needs to look at, you know, moving away from them a little bit, and there should be some regulation,” he continued.
A popular refrain is that to say that, wherever a problem occurred, not enough regulation existed to stop it. Were the government to have proper regulation and control, no problem would exist.
The conversation about fantasy football centers on two companies, DraftKings and FanDuel. An employee for DraftKings competed on FanDuel and won $350,000. Some say that the employee used information from DraftKings to create a better team and gain an unfair advantage.
Reason, however, notes that it “isn’t exactly insider trading, and it’s not clear that anything illegal happened … The two companies themselves came forward and disclosed what had happened and announced they would stop their employees from participating in other sites’ fantasy sports programs while they developed a more formal policy.”
Paid fantasy football companies already fall under the jurisdiction of the Federal Trade Commission and other state and federal law, like any other company. Fraud, deception, and collusion would bring federal investigation and heavy penalties.
It’s not clear that fantasy sports leagues are so innovative and inscrutable that politicians need to create new laws specifically targeting them. The leagues claim that they aren’t gambling, though that’s been disputed, especially in New Jersey.
The companies are young and still establishing norms, but they are very much regulated. Like other new companies, they face government oversight and scrutiny. Claiming that they operate in an anarchic, regulation-less realm is a strange and ill-informed statement.
