The best online casino experience is now offshore, and that might be a problem.

What does the ideal online casino look like for a player today? A large selection of the latest games, from a wide range of top studios. Maybe some exclusives and first-party games you won't find at other casinos, including innovative formats and concepts. A generous loyalty programme, with rewards for all levels of play. Competitions, tournaments and gamification interwoven throughout the experience. A well-designed, fast-loading website. Celebrity endorsements. Quick, easy sign-up, perhaps even via a social login. A sense of community, with busy forums and chat rooms of like-minded players sharing wins and memes.

The good news for players is that it exists today. The bad news is that it sits completely off-shore, on myriad crypto and telegram casinos, operating outside the more actively policed environment of locally licensed and regulated casinos.

I'd mostly considered the offshore market as a boogeyman, a largely imagined menace promoted by lobbyists to stave off over-regulation. And I think for the most part, that has been true. But we've seen in the last couple of years a wave of innovation driven by Web3 casinos that perhaps for the first time has made offshore the more attractive option for regular players.

• Games: a bigger and broader selection than most mainstream operators, with major titles from all the main studios, including latest releases, as well as live casino. Almost all slots available in free play. Not to mention a selection of instant/crash/turbo games, exclusive games, and even celebrity-branded slots.

• Experience: you can often sign up with less than an email address; link your Google, Facebook, Steam or Metamask, and away you go. Many are event accessible via Telegram bots, which launch you instantly into a clean, responsive casino lobby, no app download needed. Contrast this to the US, where due to onerous geo-location obligations, it's not even possible to play via a mobile web experience.

• Community: Those same Telegram channels are a hive of community. One popular Telegram casino boasts a community of over 200K members. And on-site, there are leaderboards, forums, and challenges. Off-site, many of these casinos are promoted by streamers who further foster community around these sites. "Social betting" has become a running joke in the industry, but it's happening at a huge scale today across these sites.

• Marketing & positioning: Popularity with the streaming community is a reflection of the branding of many of these operators, very much targeting the gamer / tech-bro community rather than sports fans and bored housewives. With sponsorships and endorsements spanning UFC to F1, and Usain Bolt to Snoop Dogg, they have greater reach and legitimacy beyond many locally licensed casinos. From on-site UX through to marketing and partnerships, everything is slick, modern and squarely aimed at that digital-native audience. Much more than a 'games' tab tacked onto a dusty old sportsbook.

Players are willing to seek out quality experiences, and right now crypto casinos tick a lot of boxes. And this is a problem, given how the locally licensed casino operators have been largely on the back foot, trying to stem the losses from enhanced RG controls, greater marketing & product restrictions, technical debt and business inertia. While one part of the industry zooms into the future, the other limps forward, trying to keep up.

It's a problem because history has shown a lot of people will put quality and convenience first. The music industry, selling CDs at ￡20 a pop, lost to Napster, and despite trying to enforce against piracy through the courts, only won when they competed on product, price and convenience with the likes of iTunes and Spotify. The same is true for the TV & movie industry; high prices and long release windows drove people to BitTorrent, and only the rise of Netflix, Disney+ has reined the audience back. And the main reason people do still persist with so-called dodgy boxes is live sport, where the officially licensed product today is both more limited and more expensive than is available via other means.

And so regulators are in a hard place. There are legitimate concerns around advertising, around product features and functionality that can encourage harmful gambling, and around operators' responses to such behaviour. However, with the unregulated alternative both so attractive and so accessible, they need to take a scalpel approach to regulation, and ensure that play is channeled into licensed operators who can offer and promote a strong product, while having controls in place to protect players from harm. To me, that means preserving the experience of the majority of players who don't exhibit harmful behaviours, while going above-and-beyond to protect those that do.

Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.