FOLLOW US

The numbers tell part of the story. [1] By the start of the 2026 World Cup, online sports betting was legal and operational in thirty-four states, and U.S. online sports betting revenue had grown 24.8 percent year-over-year in 2024 alone, reaching $13.78 billion. Online gambling now accounts for approximately thirty percent of all commercial gaming revenue in the country. The year 2024 marked the fourth consecutive year of record-breaking revenue for the industry — a streak that maps almost perfectly onto the period of rapid post-Murphy legalization.

• 34 states with legal online sports betting as of 2026
• $13.8B U.S. online sports betting revenue in 2024
• 85% of U.S. adults who have gambled at least once in their lifetime
• 2.5M U.S. adults estimated to suffer from gambling disorder

But the raw revenue figures obscure the more interesting transformation — the cultural one. Before 2018, gambling in America was largely a destination activity. You drove to Las Vegas, or to a riverboat in Mississippi, or to a tribal casino in Connecticut. The act required a degree of intention; it had a geography. What the smartphone app changed was not just the convenience but the psychology. The casino was now in your pocket. It was in the bathroom at the restaurant. It was available at 3 a.m. in the darkness of a bedroom, after the kids were asleep and the losses had already accumulated into something that felt, with a few drinks in, like an emergency to be solved by one more bet.

Consider the trajectory of online gambling participation in the United States. In 2018 — the year of the Murphy decision — fifteen percent of Americans gambled online. By 2024, that figure had risen to twenty-two percent. The National Council on Problem Gambling, which tracks these trends through its biennial NGAGE survey, noted with some concern that online gambling "is closely associated with risk" in ways that land-based gambling has never quite replicated. The format is different, and the danger is different.

II.

The Architecture of Entrapment

There is a particular passage in the history of American corporate wrongdoing where an industry, having secured its legal standing, begins to optimize its product not for the enjoyment of users but for their retention — and where "retention," in the cold language of product development, means something closer to dependency. The tobacco industry mapped this territory with devastating precision in the mid-twentieth century. The social media platforms charted it again in the 2010s. The sports betting industry arrived at the same crossroads in the 2020s, carrying all the technological advantages its predecessors lacked.