Prediction markets are ushering in a world in which news becomes about gambling

> Enough "Market for all the things" already..

See, there are two major flavours of pro-market attitudes. The first one is "if we allow many independent individuals to try their own approaches to a problem and let the people with "better" approach to personally profit from it handsomely and make them compete against each other in an environment with objective-ish judgement of "what is better" instead of "impress the (inevitably corruptible) officials to be judged victorious and awarded the fortunes", and also manually guard and regulate against several universally known ways to sabotage such competition, then we'll be able to channel human ingenuity into solving difficult to solve technical problems while also rewarding those who are able to come up with (and implement) such solutions with low overseeing overhead". Of course, such an attitude isn't strictly speaking "pro-market", it's been around since ancient times; hell, the USSR of all places had this attitude in spades until about the 70s or so.

The second one is "Nah, we don't have to try and think about anything ourselves, just let people fend for themselves, they'll figure it out, and it won't have any unforeseen bad side effects, why would it; markets are magical like that!" Yeah, about that...

Is insider betting illegal? I know it's illegal in the sports context, but not necessarily in other areas.

Even for insider trading, it's illegal not because it's unfair, but because the insider is considered to be stealing information from shareholders. For example, it's not illegal for a company to buy back stocks while holding insider information.

Not legal advice of course.

> I'm trying to understand what the criticism is here

You're correct in your understanding of prediction markets with respect to traders using insider information. There are a couple things going on here. One is the subtext from most news media now that Technology Bad. New technologies are treated as guilty until proven innocent, because that is a more engaging narrative for readers. So in this case, those covering this stuff immediately latch onto the rich get richer, insider trading viewpoint, and that gets reported without any analysis of why that might actually be desirable.

Second, prediction markets, in trying to become broadly accessible to "normal" people and desiring liquidity, need a marketing strategy that is understandable. They can't put out a Robin Hanson article as marketing material. So they market by appealing to something people do already understand, which is gambling. The public has this idea now of prediction markets as a way to make money, not as a tool for learning information. So the default perspective on insider trading is now one of unfairness: somebody used their privileged position to make money. The correct perspective is, in fact, that prediction markets are providing users with value by eliciting information from those insiders, information that the public would not otherwise have. The latter perspective is mostly foreign to degenerate gamblers, and the marketing campaigns of Kalshi and Polymarket aren't helping.

I don’t have an opinion on if it’s worse or not because some people mistakenly think they are free.

I meant that from the perspective of how market forces play out, hyper concentration of wealth into a few actors looks the same whether the title of the those actors is “king” or “oligarch”.

You start losing the wisdom of the crowds effect the market gives if you have a handful of people making the decisions for the entire market

Prediction markets are highly regulated, it's just not being enforced... This is just a way to launder money to those with insider info to profit from. Also who the fuck cares if it happened under Biden? Is that some sort of gotcha you conjured up? Democratic members hate the democratic party more than Trump, no one cares about Biden or what he did but they sure do care what he failed to do.