Prediction Markets; Public Interest Determinations

1,072 comments (77.5% of the docket) share a near-identical ~3,400-character template opening “I oppose this rule to deregulate prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket,” personalized only in the closing signature block. The template cites a claim that 0.04% of traders captured 70% of platform profits, Kalshi/Polymarket marketing stunts, Donald Trump Jr.’s reported advisory role at both platforms, and more than a dozen pending state lawsuits, and asks the Commission to withdraw the rule or, failing that, impose sportsbook-style consumer protections.

• Marquita Fitzgerald: “For these reasons, we urge the Commission not to finalize the proposed rule. If the Commission proceeds, the final rule should at minimum require the same consumer protections as are imposed on state-regulated sportsbooks.”

A separate, shorter template (46 comments) draws on the same underlying talking points as the primary campaign — the 0.04%-of-traders statistic and Trump Jr.’s advisory ties — but is loosely paraphrased per submission rather than copy-pasted, which let it evade exact-text-match detection. Some copies stay close to the source template; others are heavily rewritten (evidently AI-assisted) while keeping the same statistic and arguments intact.

• Mercedes Lackey: “‘Prediction markets’ are gambling. Las Vegas knows that. The UK knows that. Why don’t you?”
• June Confer: “Gambling is gambling. It is corrosive, no matter what clothes it wears”

24 comments follow a distinct template from self-described individual sports/event-contract traders, each opening “Dear Chairman and Commissioners,” introducing themselves as a trader in a named state, and arguing for case-by-case review over a blanket ban, warning that prohibition would push activity to unregulated offshore platforms, and asking the Commission to keep mainstream sports contracts eligible. Each copy is independently worded — line-level text similarity between copies is low — but the shared salutation, RIN citation, self-introduction pattern, and four-point argument structure make clear they trace to the same source brief.

• Gaven Anguiano: “Trading sports event contracts on Kalshi has given me complete location freedom.”
• Tyler Hagglund: “Kalshi makes sports more fun for me to watch”

65 comments come from federally recognized tribes, tribal gaming commissions, and tribal trade associations. Each is a distinct sovereign government’s own formal filing, not a mass campaign — but nearly all share the same legal architecture: that sports-event contracts on Indian lands violate the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act absent tribal authorization and a state-approved compact, that event contracts fail the CEA’s statutory “swap” definition, that the major-questions doctrine bars the CFTC from becoming a national gambling regulator, and that the Commission never conducted the government-to-government consultation Executive Order 13175 requires.

• Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians: “The Proposal would cause immediate and substantial harm to the Tribe by authorizing online wagering on the Tribe’s sovereign Indian lands—in violation of IGRA—and diverting revenue away from the Tribe that supports critical government services.”
• Bay Mills Indian Community: “These wagers are indistinguishable to the public because there is no distinction. They are both sports wagers.”

State gaming control boards, a 44-state coalition of attorneys general, and licensed casino/lottery/sportsbook trade associations argue sports-event contracts are functionally identical to state-licensed sports wagers, that the CFTC lacks CEA jurisdiction to regulate them, and that federally listed contracts let unlicensed platforms undercut operators who pay state gaming taxes and fund consumer-protection infrastructure.

• Kevin F. O’Toole, Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board: “It is entirely contrary to the public interest for a federal regulator to engineer abstract definitions that actively hollow out a state’s tax base”
• William C. Miller Jr., American Gaming Association: “The CFTC is a financial markets regulator, not a national gaming commission.”

Major professional and collegiate sports bodies and the major players’ associations do not oppose the deregulation itself but demand mandatory — not merely favorable-factor — integrity safeguards: outright prohibition of contracts on player injuries, officiating decisions, and youth/pre-collegiate competitions, required use of official league data for settlement, and mandatory league cooperation on manipulation investigations.

• Mark V. Young, ATP Chief Legal Officer: “There are no circumstances in which such contracts would be consistent with the public interest, and the Commission should therefore prohibit all such contracts.”
• NFLPA, MLBPA, NBPA, NHLPA, MLSPA: “Fans blame a lost bet on players and resort to abusive and harassing behavior.”

CFTC-registered exchanges and their backers broadly support the shift to case-by-case review and the settlement-focused “involves” test, and are pushing for narrower readings of the “gaming” definition (limited to house-banked, chance-based games rather than athletic competition generally) and for crediting the genuine hedging and price-discovery value they say sports and financial-indicator contracts provide.

• Luana Lopes Lara, Kalshi: “‘Gaming’ is best understood as the conduct of gambling, and not necessarily the playing of games”
• Matthew Lischin, Polymarket US: “The proposed definition converts what is intended to be a narrow Enumerated Activity into a general-purpose review trigger”

A cluster of law professors, former officials, and legal-technical commenters argue over the core statutory question independent of industry interest — including two former CFTC chairmen and former Senator Chris Dodd, a co-author of the Dodd-Frank Special Rule itself, all arguing the proposal contradicts what Congress actually intended to authorize in 2010.

• Timothy Massad, former CFTC Chairman: “The Commodity Futures Trading Commission has lost its way… seeks to justify a dramatic expansion of its jurisdiction that would make it the nation’s regulator of sports betting”
• Sen. Christopher J. Dodd: “The CFTC is now engaged in work to amend its regulations to facilitate gambling on derivatives exchanges.”

Consumer-advocacy groups and independent academics argue the deregulation debate is being fought on jurisdictional grounds while ignoring documented consumer harm — citing data that a small fraction of traders capture most platform profits, addictive product design, and (in one submitted research paper) a measurable link between sports-betting losses and intimate-partner violence.

• Les Bernal, Stop Predatory Gambling: “This is a slot machine wearing a ticker symbol”
• Chris Coughlin, Oregon Consumer Justice: “The average consumer fares worse financially on prediction markets than when engaging with casinos and other traditional gambling methods.”

A varied group of niche product developers ask the Commission to explicitly confirm their contract types fall outside the gaming definition entirely: flight-delay/aviation parametric contracts, litigation and regulatory-action outcome contracts, biopharmaceutical trial/FDA-decision contracts, collectibles price indices, GPU-compute derivatives, and music-streaming metrics.

• Seth Bracewell, SkyStop: “Manipulation risk is structurally zero.”
• Daniel Bober, MotorMarkets: “An auction is no more a game than an election is, and for the same reason.”

The largest non-campaign, non-tribal bucket: dozens of individually written, often highly technical submissions from traders, quants, data-integrity vendors, gaming-technology developers, and other subject-matter specialists — each proposing its own specific refinement to the rule’s definitions, surveillance requirements, or contract-design safeguards rather than taking a simple for/against position on deregulation overall. No single sub-topic here reaches campaign scale; the diversity itself is the finding.

• Robert Walker, former Sportsbook Director: “A framework in which the single most commercially valuable product clears every public-interest factor invites the concern that the analysis was reasoned backward from a desired result”

14 records carry no usable inline stance or argument — either the inline text says only “see attached file(s)” and the attachment wasn’t captured in this export, the filing is a bare meeting-log entry noting that CFTC staff met with an industry representative with no substance recorded, or (in one case) the PDF text extraction was corrupted beyond recovery. These are flagged rather than guessed at.