In Denmark the government has a service (ROFUS), which anyone can voluntarily sign up for to exclude themselves from all gambling providers operating in Denmark. You can exclude yourself for a limited duration or permanently. The decision cannot be revoked.
Before discussing whether gambling should be legal or illegal, I would encourage Americans to see how far they can get with similar initiatives first.
I don’t know if “don’t even discuss other methods until you’ve tried this first” seems right to me, but I do think such services seem pretty great, and would guess that expanding/building on them (including e.g. requiring that any gambling advertising included an ad for them) would be a lot more tractable than pursuing harder bans.
What actually works is clearly the most important thing here, but aesthetically I do like the mechanism of “give people the ability to irreversibly self exclude” as a response to predatory/addictive systems.
Without looking it up, I’d bet there are plenty of people who get added to this list by mistake, and can’t get themselves removed, like the people who got put on the US’s no-fly list, or get declared dead.
I’ll crosspost the comment I left on substack:
In Denmark the government has a service (ROFUS), which anyone can voluntarily sign up for to exclude themselves from all gambling providers operating in Denmark. You can exclude yourself for a limited duration or permanently. The decision cannot be revoked.
Before discussing whether gambling should be legal or illegal, I would encourage Americans to see how far they can get with similar initiatives first.
A similar service exists in the UK—https://www.gamstop.co.uk/
I don’t know if “don’t even discuss other methods until you’ve tried this first” seems right to me, but I do think such services seem pretty great, and would guess that expanding/building on them (including e.g. requiring that any gambling advertising included an ad for them) would be a lot more tractable than pursuing harder bans.
What actually works is clearly the most important thing here, but aesthetically I do like the mechanism of “give people the ability to irreversibly self exclude” as a response to predatory/addictive systems.
Without looking it up, I’d bet there are plenty of people who get added to this list by mistake, and can’t get themselves removed, like the people who got put on the US’s no-fly list, or get declared dead.
It seems you need MitID (Denmarks national login system) to sign up online, so this seems very unlikely. If it happens, you have a far bigger problem.
Also, a system with a few false positives still sounds far better than the current situation.