00:00Let's move to Ontario. And a topic that we really haven't hit on a lot this year, and that's probably a good thing, are the offshores, the sports betting markets outside of the United States and Canada.
00:12And apparently, a really good idea, by the way, Ontario in particular, looking for people like us to make people aware of what is legal and what is not legal. Does that make sense?
00:24Yeah, I think you know best when I come on here. I talk a lot about U.S. regulators saying no to offshore and black market operators. And now we're looking at Ontario.
00:34I mean, Ontario, when they launched single event sports wagering or legalized it in August 2021, one of their main goals was to shut down the gray market.
00:43And that's particularly in Ontario, where they opened commercial operators and now have 40 plus regulated licensed sports betting operators.
00:53That gray market, which existed because it wasn't explicitly illegal, it just wasn't regulated, that is now illegal.
01:01So once they launched the commercial market, they said, OK, we'll give these, you know, unlicensed operators until October to withdraw.
01:08So that was October 2022. They were pretty happy with it. You know, quite a few operators, including Bet365, Betway, these major European operators were in that gray market that were not illegal.
01:20They just weren't regulated. They all switched over to the regulated market and are now paying taxes, you know, the like.
01:27But yeah, the Ontario regulators came out this month and said, hey, media partners in the province, can you stop promoting illegal operators?
01:37And that's something you see a lot. And they specifically called out Bodog.
01:42But yeah, you see, you know, even now, even in the U.S., you see relatively big name media publications sometimes still citing offshore sports books like Bovada and BetUS.
01:54And especially once you get into the social media influencer world, you kind of see some of these offshore sports books, you know, kind of slipping into the influencers.
02:03And the influencers are telling their, you know, thousands or millions of followers to go to these offshore sports books to bet.
02:11And, you know, that's one of the reasons you need you want to regulate is to bring it into the light, make sure it's consumer safety and everything is in place.
02:19And so it's interesting that Ontario comes out and says, hey, media partners, can you stop doing this?
02:25And to your point, I think we do a pretty good job of making sure we're only highlighting legal operators that are guaranteed to be safe for consumers.
