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Comment by riffraff | Hacker News Reader

I agree with you 100% but just one thing of note

> You can ban gambling advertising, as Italy did in 2019

this has been widely sidestepped, betting companies now advertise something like "sport-results.com" and then that one has a prominent link to the betting site.

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FWIW the Netherlands used to ban gambling advertising, and then legalized it (purely due to corruption if you ask me, but that's besides the point). The change was night and day. Overnight, half the banner ads around town were promoting poker sites and sports betting etc. There really weren't lots of similar ads for "sports results" sites before then.

That is because the ban was universal. In Italy they only banned advertisements.

I hate it though the legalisation, especially since it turns out:it is as bad as they thought it was, no the companies do not do the required addiction checks and yes it ruins people's lives.

It's the most blatantly corrupt thing I've seen our government do in a long time. It made things worse for everybody, to the benefit of a few gambling bosses and absolutely nobody else.

That's an enforcement problem, not a problem with banning advertising.

Here in the Netherlands we had TV advertising for gambling, using semi-celebrities, those were outlawed again within a few months and have not come back. 20-30 years ago, there were a lot of 'call in to win' shows on TV that were of course basically a scam. They too were made illegal and have not returned.

Isn't sport-results.com then advertising for gambling, which should be illegal?!

This is the whole problem with half-measures

If someone posts a link to a gambling site on Facebook, should Facebook be banned?

Facebook has to abide to the local laws.

You probably don’t ban Facebook as a whole but if they fail to crack down on gambling links that violate advertising laws or allow gambling companies to advertise in spite of those laws they probably face heavy fines from regulators.

I think the issue he's raising is how you define advertising though. Is texting your friend a link advertising? What about posting a link on a forum? On Wikipedia? On your portfolio? On your footer? On your nav bar?

I think everyone agrees the name should not be damnatio memoriae nor should you be able to link to a click-wrapper, but people will always push the gray area in between as far as they can for that kind of money.

I think it's pretty easy to define, actually. Were they paid in some way to do those things? If yes, then it was advertising.

It sounds like the most common way to do these things is to have one company operate one gambling and one non-gambling site and just tell people they operate the other site on each. No money's changing hands, so that's not advertising. Then you can advertise to go to your non-gambling site, and they can organically navigate to the gambling site which was disclosed, not advertised. You would almost have to ban companies which have any interest in a gambling product from advertising anything at all.

That sounds like a conspiracy and the penalties for conspiracy are much more severe than just illegal advertising.

Conspiracy to do what? Advertise? We already established it's not advertising.

If we're gonna play Reductio ad absurdum my question is, if someone whispers "online gambling" to a friend, should they be put to death?

This is the same issue where poker companies used to advertise their play money sites and use the play money sites to link to separate real money sites. The loophole exists although it is certainly closeable.

I'd say it still reduces exposure and makes a statement. It also denormalises gambling a bit

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