Sure, but that just proves the point that these markets are being treated like some dangerous exotic product when the real issue is enforcement. If someone can hack a weather probe to move odds, then punish the fraud, not the entire market. Banning access just pushes people to VPNs and offshore sites anyway.

Yeah, it does look a bit like regulators picking winners and losers. If the concern is consumer harm, sports betting is hardly some saintly exception either. Feels more like they’re okay with the old licensed casino model but nervous about prediction markets because they blur into finance and can expose how arbitrary a lot of gambling rules really are.

I get why it looks that way, but I think the regulator’s argument is less about protecting a monopoly and more about control. Sports betting is already a heavily licensed, taxable channel; prediction markets blur into financial speculation and can be way easier to manipulate. The Meteo-France hacking story is exactly the kind of thing that spooks regulators.

Yeah, the “innovation” part stops sounding cute once people start exploiting public data, insider info, or literally tampering with equipment. If it’s basically a betting site, regulators treating it like gambling makes sense to me.