There’s a new front opening up in the fight over sports gambling, and this one is about who the ads are reaching. Senators Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Katie Britt (R-Ala.) have introduced the Gaming Advertisement to Minors Enforcement Act of 2026 — the GAME Act — a bipartisan bill that would make it illegal for large online platforms to serve targeted gambling ads to minors.
The premise is simple. Sportsbooks and prediction markets have built sophisticated advertising machines, and those machines don’t stop at the door of someone who happens to be sixteen. Blumenthal put it bluntly, describing an industry treating young people like a “gold rush” and warning that high schoolers and even middle schoolers are now gambling on their phones in ways that were impossible a few years ago. Britt framed it as a generational responsibility — protecting kids from a habit that, caught early, too often hardens into addiction.
The numbers they cite are the kind that get a bill written. A 2024 study found that people who start gambling before eighteen are 50% more likely to develop a gambling problem, and one in six parents say they wouldn’t even know if their child was gambling. Separately, 45% of adolescent boys who gamble report seeing gambling content online — and 59% say that content started showing up in their feeds without them ever searching for it. That last figure is really the heart of the matter. This isn’t about kids seeking out a betting app. It’s about the algorithm bringing the betting app to them.
What the bill actually does
Here’s where the GAME Act gets more specific than the average “think of the children” press release, because the text does real definitional work.
The prohibition kicks in one year after enactment. After that date, it’s unlawful for a “covered digital advertising platform” to display a “targeted advertisement directed to a minor that promotes a sports gambling platform.” Each of those terms is defined carefully, and the definitions are where the bill’s reach is set.
A covered platform isn’t every website. It has to derive revenue from advertising, function as a social media community forum, a search engine, or an ad-buying exchange, and have more than 100 million unique monthly users. In practice that aims the law squarely at the largest players — the major social networks, search engines, and programmatic ad platforms — rather than small publishers.
A sports gambling platform is defined broadly enough to capture the moment we’re actually in: it covers any service that lets someone gamble on a sporting event, and it explicitly sweeps in services “marketed as allowing an individual to invest in prediction markets.” That prediction-markets language matters, because it’s the current workaround — platforms that frame sports wagering as “investing” in an event’s outcome would still fall under the ban.
The definition of a targeted ad directed to a minor is the technical core. It covers marketing tied to a minor through their personal information, through behavioral profiling of minors based on observed or predicted interests, or through a unique device identifier. Crucially, it carves out what isn’t targeting: ads shown in direct response to someone’s own request, purely contextual ads that don’t vary based on who’s viewing, and back-end ad measurement. So a gambling ad placed next to sports content because of the content is fine; an ad placed in front of a kid because the platform knows it’s a kid is not.
Teeth
The enforcement structure is what gives the bill its bite. The Federal Trade Commission would treat a violation as an unfair or deceptive practice and enforce it with its full existing toolkit — civil penalties and injunctive relief through the courts.
Then there’s an escalation path that’s worth noticing. A platform found in violation — or one that settles an enforcement action — three or more times gets referred to the Department of Justice for criminal prosecution. At that point the penalty is up to $100,000 per ad shown to a minor. The bill defines an “instance” as a single enforcement action, which can itself cover one or many ads. When you do the arithmetic on a platform that has served gambling ads to minors thousands of times, the exposure stops being a rounding error and starts being a number that changes corporate behavior.
The bigger picture
The GAME Act doesn’t stand alone. Blumenthal has been assembling a broader portfolio aimed at the mobile sports betting industry: the SAFE Bet Act, which would set national standards for mobile sportsbooks; the GRIT Act, which would route a share of federal sports betting revenue toward addiction treatment and research; and the Prediction Markets Security and Integrity Act, aimed at fraud and abuse in prediction markets.
Taken together, they reflect a recognition that the legalization of sports betting moved a lot faster than the rules around it. The GAME Act picks the narrowest and most defensible slice of that problem — not banning gambling, not banning advertising, but drawing a line at using a child’s own data to sell them a bet. It’s a hard position to argue against, which is probably the point, and probably why it found a Republican co-sponsor.
Whether it moves depends on the usual variables in a divided Congress. But as a piece of legislative design, it’s narrowly drawn, technically literate about how modern ad targeting actually works, and backed by penalties large enough to matter. That combination is rarer than it should be.
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