While dozens of states have taken legal action against the controversial industry, Minnesota is the first state to pass a law making it a felony for companies like Kalshi and Polymarket to operate.
The prohibition extends to services supporting prediction markets, like virtual private networks, that could allow consumers to disguise their location and get around the ban.
What does this mean? You can’t use a VPN? You can’t offer a VPN that doesn’t block prediction markets?
This part also seemed pretty interesting to me, they’re making exceptions for specific uses:
An updated version of the prediction market bill will allow trading on weather, an exception that followed pushback from the agricultural industry, which has historically used futures trading on weather as a hedge against storms and other inclement weather that can affect a harvest.
And I just read the wording. The VPN ban here is included in the language of the new law. It reads that a person is guilty of a felony if they “provides supportive services to a prediction market or consumer knowing that the services will be used to identify a consumer’s location, transfer funds, or make or process payments for the purpose of allowing consumers to make wagers or to settle wagers made by consumers in violation of this section.”
Basically, if your prediction market website provides vpn services to avoid the ban, that’s illegal. A regular VPN provides those services, but does so without knowledge of what the user is doing with the added privacy. So, no, it’s not a VPN ban, it’s a ban on VPN advertising for predictive markets.
Ok, so basically the same deal as what some states are doing with “VPN bans” for porn sites
Yes, prediction markets have historically been used to hedge risk for crop yields, for example. But betting on sports ball isn’t a prediction market, since the outcome can’t be a hedge in anyway, unless you play on one of the teams and then it’s obviously going to be a problem.
There are many more things than those that prediction markets could be created for though, and it doesn’t seem like this law is limited to sports betting. It doesn’t seem great that even if there could be potential undiscovered or lesser known legitimate uses for prediction markets, the only ones permitted to use them are industries with an influential lobbying group who manage to grandfather themselves in before the law is passed.
Ooo this is gonna get good. Can’t wait for the Scrotus to say they can’t do that.
God I love this state so much
