I have been in a fog lately of publication deadlines and moving minutiae, but I did notice that a new anti-gambling bill was introduced in the House a few weeks ago.  On February 16, H.R. 4777 was introduced by Rep. Goodlatte of Virginia with 118 co-sponsors.  That last part makes me a little nervous.  Most Congresses in the past ten years have seen an anti-gambling bill be introduced, but none so far have passed.  We'll see about this one.

H.R. 4777 is aptly named the Internet Gambling Prohibition Act, and does not differ wildly from other similar bills introduced in the 108th or 107th Congresses.  This bill does, however, contain a more detailed exception than earlier bills for Fantasy Sports and other quasi-gambling online activities. I blogged this post last year about a less-detailed exception in a proposed bill from the 108th Congress.

`(vi) participation in any game or contest in which participants do not stake or risk anything of value other than-- `

(I) personal efforts of the participants in playing the game or contest or obtaining access to the Internet; or

(II) point or credits that the sponsor of the game or contest provides to participants free of charge and that can be used or redeemed only for participation in games or contests offered by the sponsor; or

(vii) participation in any simulation sports game or educational game or contest in which (if the game or contest involves a team or teams) all teams are fictional and no team is a member of an amateur or professional sports organization (as those terms are defined in section 3701 of title 28) and that meets the following conditions:

(I) All prizes and awards offered to winning participants are established and made known to the participants in advance of the game or contest and their value is not determined by the number of participants or the amount of any fees paid by those participants.

(II) All winning outcomes reflect the relative knowledge and skill of the participants and are determined predominantly by accumulated statistical results of the performance of individuals (athletes in the case of sports events) in multiple real-world sporting or other events.

(III) No winning outcome is based--

(aa) on the score, point-spread or any performance or performances of any single real-world team or any combination of such teams; or

(bb) solely on any single performance of an individual athlete in any single real-world sporting or other event.

This exception would also take out of the equation promotional contests and contests such as the Winbutton, where you are merely wagering your attention. I would like to see the bill's cosponsors (really just one of them) articulate the difference between an NCAA March Madness pool and a Fantasy Football league that would require the criminalization of the former but not the latter. I see how fantasy sports have less ability to corrupt a sport because "fixing" a certain number of performances in different games per week over a season would be fairly impossible. However, I'm not sure if the potential for the corruption of sports was the only reason why sports gambling is illegal in almost every state and under the Wire Act. I thought there was this whole morality problem. I also thought that the reason why the federal government has told us that Internet gambling should be illegal is because Internet hosts might use our credit cards for bad things and might commit fraud on us. I guess this potential is less if the host is Sports Illustrated or ESPN. Surely the reason for this exception isn't that SI and ESPN lobbied for it. Surely the reason for the exception isn't that cable companies like to sell the NFL Ticket and other zillion-game packages that only fantasy sportspeople buy. Surely not.

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