It is some 14 months now since the Jockey Club's executive director of racing, Winfried Engelbrecht-Bresges, described betting exchanges as the 'biggest threat to racing's integrity' worldwide and called on all racing jurisdictions to lobby governments for the banning of betting exchange operations on racing.
It is almost exactly a year since former chief steward John Schreck described them as 'a cancer that threatens to ruin the horse racing industry' while betting exchanges became the hot topic of the Asian Racing Federation Conference in Auckland.
For all of that, the exchanges' weapons of mass destruction have not been discovered in the interim and it has taken this latest episode with England's champion jockey, Kieren Fallon, at Lingfield to reawaken the debate.
Fallon sat up on his mount well before the end of a race and has apologised for being the cause of defeat for an otherwise undistinguished horse, Ballinger Ridge.
While Fallon's actual offence in losing on Ballinger Ridge is no more than a curiosity to Hong Kong racing fans, it does seem to have been a shocking lapse in judgment from the undisputed champion rider in that part of the world.
It does happen elsewhere, but not that often and never when someone touted as the champion jockey leads by four lengths at the 200m and on a horse described by all concerned with it as something of a non-chaser - of the sort which should surely be kept going regardless of the margin. For this offence, he was handed a 21-day ban - the maximum allowable under the very gentle racing controls the British appear to have shepherded almost untouched through centuries of the sport.