What regulation would you propose? I'm personally against most regulation as well but more transparency (e.g. showing house favored odds) and advertising restrictions don't seem that harmful.
I think regulating too hard here would result in black markets and gamblers becoming more vulnerable to bad actors.
It seems very self evident to me (given what we now see with legalized gambling) that the harms of broadly legalizing it and creating an industry around it far outweigh any harms associated with black markets by a wide margin. Also, black markets for gambling still exist, so this kind of just feels additively worse. Just from a measure of utility, even if we went back to only having gambling performed with organized criminals breaking legs when people can't pay, that would still result in significantly fewer ruined lives, significantly better quality of life for the communities that are having wealth sucked out of them and into gambling syndicates. It's entirely unproductive destruction of wealth, robbing from the poor and giving to the rich. If gambling made anything better in net for society, gambling syndicates would never attempt to legalize it.
Not OP, but how about not being allowed to lose more than 1% of your net worth (or salary?) gambling in a year? (The gambling platforms would be required to monitor your losses)
Limiting sports betting to in person at licensed casinos seemed to work well enough for decades. Only a little akward when teams play in Vegas.
Yes, there was a fair amount of unlicensed sports betting, and of course a pro sports scandal every so often.
Alternatively, if you cap the amount of bets the bookies can retain, that might solve my immediate problem of I'm so tired of seeing the sports players with betting ads on their jerseys, the commentators yapping about bets, and then half of the commercials are sports betting ads. If they can't keep much, they won't have money to advertise.
Personally, I enjoyed the ads a lot more when the poker industry was advertising their no money .net sites and hoping people would just happen to go to their .com sites instead. That was at least a little amusing.
I think regulating too hard here would result in black markets and gamblers becoming more vulnerable to bad actors.