Freezing Classics

What is Freezing Classics?

Just eight years after the state of New Jersey successfully petitioned the US Supreme Court to repeal the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, which opened the floodgates of sports betting expansion across the country, the Garden State has again petitioned the high court, this time to defend its sports betting jurisdiction against the rise of prediction markets and sports event contracts.

On Wednesday, New Jersey Attorney General Jennifer Davenport announced that her office had filed a petition for writ of certiorari following an appeals court verdict from earlier this year that went in favour of prediction markets. That 2-1 verdict from the Third Circuit Court of Appeals was handed down in April, and New Jersey had until Thursday to petition the high court.

The petition poses the question of whether the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which was enacted in 2010 in the aftermath of the Great Recession, “preempted states from regulating sports bets that occur within their jurisdictions if those bets are offered on markets registered with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission”. Prediction markets have argued that their event contracts are financial derivatives regulated by the CFTC whereas many states contend that they are simply sports bets by another name.

About Freezing Classics

Atucha warns that regulations are often perceived as operator-friendly at the start before governments begin looking to squeeze licensed sectors, likening the process to “boiling a frog”. He has observed similar scenarios in other LatAm markets, with tax increases occurring in Brazil, Colombia and Mexico in the last couple of years.

Rossi believes the ISC in Peru is an example of a government implementing new taxes without truly understanding how the industry works, and the potential impacts on channelisation to licensed offerings.

“Peru has been quite successful in channelling customers into the regulated framework,” Rossi comments. “The risk is that this channelisation can decrease in favour of the black market. We know the black market won’t have any consumption tax.

What is Freezing Classics?

He argued the sector should be treated with the same rigour currently applied to cigarettes.

In an interview with Guilherme Amado’s column in Amado Mundo, Durigan said the government of Brazil and President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva had fulfilled what was defined in the law that established sports betting.

“The legislation mandated the regulation of the sector, which did not happen in the previous administration,” he explained. “We came into government with the sector operating for almost five years.