The recent House hearing for HR 707, the Restoration of America’s Wire Act (RAWA), featured testimony from:
Oddly absent from the witness list for a hearing ostensibly focused on gathering the facts about regulated online gambling: any individual with direct experience in the regulation of said activity.
As the largest state with regulated online gambling, New Jersey is at the vanguard of application of all the contested technologies – geolocation, age verification, identity verification, AML controls – referenced at the RAWA hearing.
Accordingly, David Rebuck, Director of the NJ Division of Gaming Enforcement, is the most obvious and indispensable expert on the subject at the heart of the hearing.
As qualified as the invited witnesses may be in their respective fields, none of them are properly credentialed to speak directly to those technologies in the abstract, let alone in terms of practical deployment.
But Director Rebuck’s review of the first year of regulated online gambling in New Jersey provides direct, credible, fact-based answers to many of the questions raised at the House hearing regarding the technology undergirding regulated online gambling that went unanswered – or were answered incorrectly.
So what does it say about the true purpose – and credibility – of the hearing that Rebuck wasn’t invited?
The list of witnesses who would have grounded the hearing in realism instead of rhetoric extends well beyond Director Rebuck and his staff at the DGE:
That’s to say nothing of:
Instead of any of these voices, voters were offered a panel with exactly zero hours of applied, professional experience dealing specifically with the regulation of U.S. online gambling.
Watch the hearing for yourself – especially the second segment, which is heavy on the Q&A – and decide for yourself if the proceedings would have benefited from the presence of someone with practical experience.
Segment 1: Hearing begins at 01:28:30
Segment 2: Hearing begins at 00:28:40.