Advertising sports betting services and other forms of gambling on public billboards could soon become illegal in New York if a state senator gets her way.
Last week, Democratic Senator and former New York State Assembly member Nathalia Fernandez submitted a bill that proposes a ban on billboard advertisements that promote “gambling or sports wagering services.”
The bill will need to clear the Senate’s Committee on Consumer Protection before it reaches the floor of New York’s upper chamber.
Fernandez’s bill also proposes a parallel ban on all digital and conventional billboard ads promoting tobacco, alcohol, and vaping products.
The text of the draft bill stipulates that the ban would include “fantasy sports, lotteries, sweepstakes involving consideration and prize, […] and interactive gaming.”
The bill also seeks to classify “any other activity involving the placement or facilitation of wagers or bets for money or anything of value” as gambling.
New York Billboard Gambling Ads Ban: An Alternative Option?
The same senator has launched a second bill that pro-gaming advocates and New York-based gambling operators may find more palatable.
Fernandez’s other bill, submitted on the same day as the first, calls for the state government to remove billboard ads that promote gambling services “exactly upon the last day of the advertising contract” and replaced with a public service announcement about the health harms of gambling.
Currently, under the terms of New York state law, all gambling-related billboard ads must include messages about problem gambling, including addiction hotline contact information.
The font height of these cautionary messages must take up at least 5% of the billboard’s total face area, the law stipulates.
Gambling Billboards: Stoking Controversy
The legal status of gambling billboard ads varies from state to state in the US.
States such as Alaska, Maine, and Vermont permit some forms of gambling, but have imposed blanket bans on billboard ads.
Others, such as Utah and Hawaii, have banned gambling altogether. Lawmakers in Utah have reportedly launched a bid to outlaw the use of prediction markets in the Beehive State.
This could set them at odds with federal financial regulators. The Commodities and Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and its Chairman, Michael Selig, have claimed they alone have the power to regulate prediction markets.
Earlier this month, Selig said prediction market platforms and traditional forms of gambling like sportsbooks and casinos are “two separate things.”
The CFTC chief insisted that prediction market platforms like Polymarket are “financial markets.”
Conventional casinos, meanwhile, are a form of “entertainment,” Selig said.
Elsewhere in the world, gambling billboard ads have recently stoked controversy in nations like Belarus.
Last year, a slew of social media users complained that some of Minsk’s most famous buildings and transport hubs were being covered with digital screens advertising a range of gambling services.
Notable examples include the National Library of Belarus, a landmark building located in the center of the Belarusian capital.
