The Tribal sector won’t back down against predictions – but at what cost?

If the prediction market story has taught us nothing else, it has at the very least served to highlight the significance of language. For it is language, alongside clear and obvious administrative support, that separates the sector from the regulatory constraints of the US gambling industry. Indeed, if there were to be one thing prediction market operators would like to steer the general public away from, it would be linguistic definitions.  

Derivatives or bets? Odds or futures? Markets or verticals? Exchanges or wagers? What appears on the surface to be little more than a perverse, synonymatic game of spot-the-difference has gestated into one of the defining legal discrepancies of gaming history. And this week saw the story take another Tribal turn.