Former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown
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Loquacious former S.F. mayor Willie Brown leaves online gambling conference attendees agape

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 4 min

Online gambling is a controversial subject. At the online gambling’s industry’s latest Gigse Totally Gaming event in San Francisco, three former politicians weighed in on the best and worst parts of the business. One of the trio, former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown, provoked quite a bit of controversy.

Brown (a Democrat) opposes Internet gambling at the moment, though he noted in an opening debate that he’d flip-flopped on the issue multiple times in the 15 years he served as Speaker of the California State Assembly. But now that he has retired, he is speaking out against online gambling, which is legal in five countries in Europe as well as the states of Delaware, Nevada, and New Jersey.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.