Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey is not interested in debating whether daily fantasy sports are gambling or “games of skill.” In either case, she wants to regulate them in a way that should have the industry’s biggest players, FanDuel and DraftKings, cheering.

“This is a form of gambling. The question is whether it’s legal or illegal,” Healey said in a news conference announcing her plan to regulate the industry. “As I’ve said in the past, as I look at the criminal laws that apply to gambling, it is not unambiguously clear that they apply to this new industry that was never envisioned at the time those laws were drafted.”

If the recent crackdown in New York is the worst-case scenario for DraftKings and FanDuel, Healey’s proposed rules offer an alternative they’ll find welcome. She would prohibit the sites from advertising to minors and require the sites to block players under 21, and ban daily fantasy contests on college sports.

None of these regulations would add significant costs to the companies, and by not going further, Healey gave them permission to have at it. She did say she was keeping open the option to take further action against daily fantasy companies, although she has said previously she’s not looking to shut them down. Neither company immediately commented.

Healey stated what is already obvious to many: There is no intellectually honest distinction to be drawn between daily fantasy sports and other games that have been addressed under gambling laws. Both DraftKings and FanDuel defend themselves by arguing that their contests are games of skill. But there are skillful sports gamblers and poker players who have to ply their trades illegally unless they want to live in Las Vegas, and anyone willing to slap down a dollar can make a legal bet on skill-less scratch-off state lotteries.

The only relevant question for betting games is whether lawmakers have made them legal.

For this reason, Jeff Ifrah, a lawyer who represents several small daily fantasy companies, tries to avoid the debate over skill. “Once you start having that discussion, you lose,” he said. Ifrah also represented poker companies in 2011, when the industry collapsed after criminal charges were brought against the major industry players.

Like daily fantasy companies, poker companies have argued that poker should be legal because it is a skill game. This is almost certainly true as an academic argument. But poker never recovered from the crackdown, largely because its companies were based overseas and engaged in other unsavory activities like bank fraud and using player deposits to fund operations.

“There was no one around defending the poker industry, and when you look at the laws that were involved, they’re the same laws, it was the same arguments,” said Ifrah. “It makes you scratch your head.”