I spent months working on a dating website. Had Stripe configured, spent the whole time testing with it. Published the site, swapped Stripe to production, and boom, account was closed/banned.
According to their own documentation, dating sites are indeed allowed, so long as there's no adult content. The site I built didn't allow adult content. I argued my case, provided the TOS as well as showed that I had features built into the site to prevent that sort of stuff. Still banned. The next step was to go for CCBill, etc. But they all charge a ~$2,000 setup fee. Not happening.
It had so many features built into it, and was by far my favorite project. Sadly, I just unpublished it and it will probably forever sit in my project folder unused.
It's annoying this is what has to be done, but when all our regulators have their balls chopped off this is the reality.
Rules are made on tiktok, twitter, and in the civil court room. It costs lots of money and is almost never worth it.
Which is why only the big dogs get to play these rules. Apple doesnt care if it burns money on a lawsuit that's stupid. That puts YOU at a huge disadvantage.
IMO payment processors are infrastructure, pseudo public. This amounts to free speech restrictions.
Because authorize.net is a payment gateway, not a processor. You'd still need a processor and the one your bank works with will have similar requirements.
Honestly, those rates are better than I expected. I think OnlyFans has a 20% rate and the one real experience I have had with processors that handle adult industry was nearing 30%. They had legitimate fraud problems though.
Why not Square? Why not crypto? I realize HN kinda hates crypto as a group, but it solves your situation here, does it not? I realize it’s another step for users who don’t already have it, but I guess you need to determine whether it would cause enough friction to not get signups.
I looked for alternatives, such as PayPal, and Square. They consider dating websites "high-risk", so they would most likely ban the account as well. It just seems like too much of a headache to rewrite the codebase to just have the account banned again.
> Why not crypto?
I thought about this as well. I don't dislike the idea of crypto, but what would users think? It would probably be a huge red flag and look like a scam site.
So, the dating sites that are already in existence are it - they own the market. I'm pretty sure I've read that the execs of Stripe are also invested in Tinder/Bumble*, etc. No wonder it's extremely difficult to compete.
Why is the payment processor so strongly coupled to the point that you would need to rewrite it? I understand there's effort to adapt it but I don't think it's good to write the code like that.
Well, of course some things are going to need to be rewritten? It won't be complicated at all, but the primary concern is registering new accounts, looking through documentation for API keys, testing, etc. This seems like wasted effort just to get banned again. Or worse -- get banned and account funds put on a hold.
Most crypto protocols are completely transparent so somebody can write down your wallet address and hassle people you trade crypto with. For instance if you want to turn your crypto into cash the transaction can be blocked there.
I create music videos which can be provocative, though not necessarily pornographic, and this kind of thing really bothers me since I've run into similar problems even just with hosting and donations. Thankfully, I don't try to make this anything more than a creative outlet, so I don't have to worry about taking payments, and I'm happy enough that any expenses are at least covered by a few donations. But it concerns me that it is not an option for others who might find themselves in similar gray areas.
Payments are pretty much 'public infrastructure' at this point and should be treated the same as utilities. ie they should be required to provide service for anything legal.
I mean this is just the ultimate form of price discrimination which happens to be legal. My question is why? This industry (payments) is completely driven by financials and occasionally regulations. They have no dog in a moral fight, so this must be about profits to them.
I did not know this was such a widespread problem until everyone online started talking about it. Going to try and find out if this also affects Portuguese sex workers even though I feel like it 100% does
I agree with the premise of this post, but I'd like to see it made by someone else (and not only because this is on a furry blog.)Their argument is also poorly formed and poorly written.
They start by defending their use of furry art and railing against potential backlash from HN. Then spend a lot of words talking about how Collective Shout isn't anti-LGBTQ, but could potentially become anti-LGBTQ, but even if it's not anti-LGBTQ it's bad because it's anti-abortion. None of this is actually pertinent to the argument.
Then they talk about alternatives to Visa /Mastercard, such as crypto, WERO, FedNOW, petitions, blah blah blah. Next we move on to some good-old-fashioned self promotion, talking about how they helped save some library from the evil right wing politicians.
And the article ends without even making one coherent argument, which should be this: two American companies should not be able to dictate the moral standards of censorship for the world. They have too much power and too little oversight. Let's start with that.
> two American companies should not be able to dictate the moral standards of censorship for the world. They have too much power and too little oversight. Let's start with that.
To be fair, it's more than just two companies (and not all of them are US based). It's an ecosystem of companies with two major choke points.
Groups like Collective Shout work because Visa and MasterCard have deeply conservative Terms & Conditions and you can whine to them enough legally that they aren't taking their T&Cs correctly and "must" do a thing.
Visa and MasterCard's T&Cs are heavily conservative not just because they are conservative banking companies, but because they are conservative banking middlemen. A lot of their T&Cs also reflect all the Merchant Banks that these networks rely on to float the liquidity of the networks. Those Merchant Banks want a minimal risk on their high volume of investments in micro-loans. They express that minimal risk desire in strict, conservative T&Cs.
(It's a fun hypocrisy of the US-based Merchant Banks especially to want such minimal risk given they have the ability to use Federal Reserve 0% loans to back their portfolio of payment network loans. They have almost nothing but upside and surprisingly minimal risk naturally from that. But these are business-to-business banks that make their money the lowest risk ways.)
Visa and MasterCard get squeezed at both ends with what the Merchant Banks want and what these groups like Collective Shout want and become the easy chokepoint to attack. If the Merchant Banks backed off some Visa and MasterCard could potentially loosen their T&Cs.
Unfortunately as business-to-business banks, most of the biggest Merchant Banks (which often don't have recognizable consumer brands), several of which are not US-based, have very little interest in hearing from us and I don't see an easy strategy to encourage them to take more risks in the same way that a vocal minority team can encourage Visa and MasterCard to take fewer risks because their T&Cs already say so.
I can still blame Visa and MasterCard for being cowards on these and related subjects and not pushing back against loud complainers and highly conservative Merchant Banks, while also respecting that their position on some of this is between a rock and a hard place, as much "just a middleman" as a controlling character in what is happening.
Much more interesting is why these two companies were able to wield this much power in the first place, and why are they using it to censor this kind of content specifically?
You can't understand anything about the situation without replacing it in the context of the far right reactionary wave hitting our societies. Similarly, simply preventing these two companies of their power would be a temporary solution at best. There is a political will -and enough support for it- to push the puritan agenda.
If you truly care about fighting censorship, you should recognize where it actually comes from and fight the source.
I think the problem you have is they are clearly supporting one side or other which is accurate but I think they have censorship fear. There is no reason why they can't be called pornographic and lose access to payment systems.
I think there is credibility in saying that hiding behind the banner of stopping abuse as thin veneer of enforcing political or religious ideology. An argument is often made in the same vein for outlawing encryption. Clearly we must be against crime so we need to destroy encryption and if you don't destroy encryption you like crime. This type of argumentation is pretty similar to targeting distributors rather than content directly. Its definitely more effective but it seems like you just want to enforce your ideology rather than anything else.
Maybe you don't feel that argument was made after all it was a little bit all over the place but I saw it and there were a lot of links to organizations and achieve links and bills for you to continue research from. I am trying to balance here though because i see both yours's and the others perspective
Somebody has no appreciation for literature and writing. Philistine. Do you shake your fist at The New Yorker and The Atlantic because they don't get to the point fast enough for your poor code-addled engineer brain?
Cryptocurrencies are sufficiently diverse and popular in this day and age that this should be a non-issue at this time. So many sites accept them already. I even advise using Monero to fully shield the user.
Diverse, yes - but I wouldn't call it popular as a means of making regular financial transaction.
I would certainly only use it as last resort. Too slow, too cumbersome, most of the benefits being overstated or misunderstood. Even in this case, while you certainly can't block the transaction from going through, the site still needs a payment provider to manage transactions which someone might pressure into not working with adult sites.
The alternative is writing their own payment solution entirely to avoid having to work with anyone, but that's an entirely different rat's nest with regulatory complications.
If you don't want to do it, you will find a million ways and excuses to not do it. Those who want or need it will find a way, and such ways have existed for over a decade.
Existing for over a decade is not a stamp of quality, usefulness or convenience, but it is true that it is available, and people are free to use it should they want.
It does not solve the issue discussed here though, as being able to get a money in a intermediate currency from A to B would only be handle a small part of payment processing and operating a business, and does not solve that you're dealing with groups that use any means available to put you out of business due to finding your business immoral according to their beliefs.
They're still miserable from a UX perspective and for those of us in KYC countries? It can be very burdensome to verify ourselves and actually exchange real money for them.
Buying litecoin and sending it to someone else was a huge pain in my butt to put it mildly.
It is burdensome to verify, but once you're past that hurdle, it's absolutely smooth sailing. I don't know which sites or apps you used, but the ones I know of all have an excellent UI.
The website and app UIs for these services weren't my problem, it's the overall UX and KYC is part of that.
I don't want to go over all the issues I had, but to put it simply some were the fault of the service (I had major issues verifying and then reverifying) and some were due to the bank I use and their restrictions.
Furries making their own 00s-themed site website for chat/art/games powered by crypto would be the greatest thing. Small bonus if the website is open-source and provides data dumps, big bonus if it’s federated.
It would alleviate censorship concerns. It sounds practical, my understanding is that furries are statistically much more tech-savvy and willing to spend money and effort. Copyright and CSAM are issues that must be addressed, but hopefully small enough to be manageable, since it’s primarily furries (not realistic, not in aggressively copyrighted pop culture). And it seems like something many people would like, at least the nostalgic people in online spaces like HN. If it gets popular enough to extend to other niches I would join and help fund.
Like payment processors threatening the largest game platform on the planet for decades would, right?
There are no legal protections, it needs to be fixed at the government level with payment neutrality policies. Steam has hundreds of millions of users and couldn't fight it. Itch had to go nuclear and kill every single NSFW game ever put on their platform, likely affecting millions.
1. Blocking coinbase would be anti-compeitive behavior which are totally different laws.
2. Valve is not publicly traded so we cannot do a detailed comparison, but all indications show Playstation is a larger gaming platform than Steam. Steam is not "the largest game platform on the planet".
3. Yeah I agree that strong legal regulations for the payment processing industry would be good. I think a public electronic payment processing system would be better, and wide adoption of a crypto-currency based solution would be the best. My trust in governments and central banks to handle monetary policy is very low. My trust in private for-profit companies to handle payment processing is even lower. It's one thing to do well over a few decades, and another thing to do well over a several centuries and real economies operate on a very long timescale.
4. It's disappointing that we treat NSFW as such a taboo.
The present behavior of payment providers show a present lack of economic value to overcome the pressure against supporting these businesses, meaning the present necessity is not met.
DLSite (the closest thing to a Japanese itch.io) was one of the first targets of this push over a year ago. I'm pretty sure they just stopped accepting Visa/Mastercard on the site but set up a weird 'third party' where you could buy 'DLSite points' with your credit card.
They did back in the 2000s, I used to buy stuff online with Edy. The problem was you had to buy a FeliCa USB adapter, or have a Sony Vaio or similar laptop that had a reader embedded. It never took off and people stopped offering it.
But even more IRL merchants are now accepting 交通系 IC cards as payment methods. I can use mine at the arcade and never worry about coins.
Honestly, I think focusing on what is being censored is missing the point. Today it's adult content, which is an easy target. But what about tomorrow? What if they decide your political donation is 'problematic', or the indie news site you subscribe to is 'misinformation'? We're handing a kill switch for legal commerce to a handful of unelected execs.
> Today it's adult content, which is an easy target.
Not even that easy of a target, because the crazy people in America want to call anything that acknowledges the existence of LGBTQ people or how they exist within greater society is "adult content" or "pornographic."
Banality of evil. Being affable to you in particular doesn't mean not evil, especially to others. And the eliminationism on LGBT status is pretty damn evil.
100% agreed and I think many people are missing the forest from the trees on this issue.
This stuff always starts off with "think of the children" and then evolves into something else entirely.
How about when we have a game spewing rhetoric about religion being bad (the Assassin's Creed franchise being one example) - should card processors force steam to remove those too, to continue using their payments infrastructure?
Combine required/trendy KYC.
With trendy reputation score and similar attributes for purchase/sale/trade.
With machine agent automated decision flows.
With pushing everything into digital.
With near mono/duo/tri-opolization of goods/services.
Then, a near invisible control grid is almost complete.
> I’ve seen some comments floating around that suggest that the fix is to jettison Visa and MasterCard in favor of cryptocurrency.
> I think this is fundamentally a losing strategy: It moves the burden and risk of being unbanked onto the developers and publishers rather than the platforms. Yes, it decentralizes (to a point), but each node has less resources to defend themselves in court when the oppressors change their tactics again. I believe it’s better to stand together than fragment.
The author is very confused. For one, not having access to VISA/Mastercard isn't being unbanked. And more importantly, there is no need for the burden of supporting CC payments to fall on developers at all. Steam, itch, etc can just add it as a payment method. (personally I don't really think it's an amazing solution due to crypto volatility)
Seems that the West has just now realized that the payment processors are a threat to adult content and are getting in an uproar. Japanese sites selling adult content have been banned for years at this point, they've moved on to supporting JCB as the only accepted credit card and otherwise accepting site-specific points you buy at convenience stores. I've seen crypto as well by proxy via Bitcash.
Unfortunately that part never became practicable, and the only use cases that gained traction are speculation, fraud, extortion, and dark web marketplaces.
Honestly I think Visa/MC appreciate being nudged into this situation. Normalization of them as financial gatekeepers gives them a big favor that they can grant to governments by cutting the tap off to orgs/companies/people whenever. Its a direction that is convenient for them and a lot of the heat for the move gets passed on to some Australian non-profit instead of them. Hard for me to square their behavior unless they are quietly quite receptive.
All good and sorry. I get that there is a risk of this board turning into Reddit if too many whimsy/joke comments are permitted. It would indeed be bad if that happened. I'll be more watchful with my posts in the future.
why not bitcoin? because: "Repeat after me: all technical problems of sufficient scope or impact are actually political problems first" - Eleanor Saitta
I don’t care for furries myself but I think so long as it’s legal and doesn’t harm anyone. I don’t care what an adult chooses to spend their own money on.
And neither should payment processors. They have no business being gatekeepers for anyone’s money. My money isn’t and shouldn’t be subject to their shareholders interests.
I'm sorry, did I miss something? You and them said "furries" and now, suddenly, you're talking about porn.
Or are you immediately proving everyone critical of the payment processors right by showing that the "undesirables" will have their existence marked as sexual and then have access to the basic requirements of modern living shut down?
To be fair, it's not uncommon to see accounts with usernames like "throwaway_84723" on here. The barrier to making accounts is low and the site invites a more "don't remember me" crowd.
That’s a personal opinion not a fact with any merit. And as a personal opinion has no bearing on what an adult should be allowed to spend their money on.
“Slavery hurts everyone involved” is true, but is not a reason to ban work that is not slavery. And that is just as true if you limit it to sex work as it is more generally.
I advocate for strong anti-trafficking and consent requirement laws and regulations on how porn sold in the US must be made and you bring up fictional "open drug markets" in SF?
I'm advocating for OSHA and labor unions for sex workers. Guess what, those work.
And you know what never has? Prohibition on alcohol, prohibition on marijuana, or forcing women to wear burkas for modesty. For their safety, of course.
just use bitcoin. there is literally no downside. it is easier to implement than most payment providers that i know. moreover there are payment provider that work with bitcoin so you do not have to.
Horrible fees, long waiting times, forced centralized exchanges. That’s after they claimed cheap, fast, decentralized. Fk that scam, I’ll stay with regular money.
you mean the same protection as cash and a fraction of the energy cost of all banking / visa / mastercard with an economic incentive to use renewables.
dont forget protection against theft inserts someone else to each transaction
That's an obvious flat out lie, crypto consumes much more power than the banking system, because of course it does. It literally relies on proof of work, through arrays of GPUs pointlessly crunching numbers. And that's just to handle a fraction of the number of transactions the banking system does.
it is ok my dude you do not have you use it. you think bitcoin uses more power than all the banks, merchant POS backends like visa and mastercard, things like SEPA, paper transactions, paper printers -because cash- , etc
you even mention gpus not asics and POW as a bad thing. it is the ONLY thing that is worth about bitcoin.
I think a lot of people are missing the point. Most likely what's happening here is that the issuers (not Visa/MC) see a large number of chargebacks/fraud for adult content sites and have determined that it's much easier if they don't accept transactions from these sites.
No, what's happening is that people like NCOSE and Collective Shout are putting pressure on the processors. They've loudly bragged about it. It's not the first time they've done it. And they've been known to enlist government actors to help with the pressure ("Operation Choke Point").
Every time this issue comes up, a bunch of people crawl out of the woodwork trying to prove how "wise" they are by mouthing this idea about chargebacks. And the processors are happy to keep their heads down and not dispute it, or even encourage it, since they really want the whole issue to just go away.
Chargebacks are not the issue here, and if you haven't paid any attention at all to what's actually going on, you're best advised not to make yourself look like a fool by talking about what you guess might "most likely" be happening.
Most likely what's happening here is that the issuers (not Visa/MC) see a large number of chargebacks/fraud for adult content sites and have determined that it's much easier if they don't accept transactions from these sites.
That's definitely what I would claim if I wanted to take down content I didn't want. Who is going to prove them wrong?
Because the money involved is peanuts, they don't want people running around trying to put them in the headlines as "enabling sexual exploitation", and a certain number of their internal people actually believe in the "cause".
Contrary to popular belief, corporations are composed of humans and do not reliably or mechanically follow only financial incentives. Nor are they always perfect in understanding their actual financial interests. Boycott threats are probably empty, but some people may not want to take the chance, or may have other motivations that cause them to overestimate that risk.
When you have advocacy groups going around in public saying "Look, we successfully pressured VISA/MC to do this", Occam's razor would suggest that that was true.
Sure but isn’t allowing those company to pick and choose what industries they service a dangerous precedent? They’ve monopolized the consumer credit markets and as such, can use that weight to dictate competition in consumer markets.
Their point is it isn't just a couple companies arbitrarily making these decisions. It is a vast network of banks and merchant services companies.
Ideally, you could take your business elsewhere. The problem is providers that handle these industries will expect a premium across all transactions and it would come off badly when customers see that large percentage added to each purchase.
So you have the decision of: your customers pay a premium or you don't carry adult material. If all your business is adult, it's an easy choice. You pay the premium.
This activist organization is pressing them until they are forced to make that decision based on a small amount of their hosted content. This is what I see as likely. Admittedly though, there are not enough details given to say for sure.
If this were actually true, then they would have gone after ALL NSFW games on Steam - but they very deliberately targeted specific genres that they didn't like.
You think chargebacks are disproportionately higher on NSFW games revolving around non-consensual themes versus other fetishes? Give me a break.
Payment processors have ways of passing some of the chargeback risks onto the stores, and it's not like Steam itself is chargeback central. If you just want free games, pirating them is extremely easy, and trying to abuse chargebacks gets you banned.
I'm sorry, did you just in one breathe say we need payment processors to enforce an arbitrary morality and then in the next breathe criticize laissez-faire morality?
And what if, tomorrow, the payment processors capitulate with a new morality? They decide women politicians shouldn't be allowed to take donations, for instance?
Sex workers should be better supported and the markets cleansed via strict regulation of the labor and how it's treated, and strong unions.
Payment processors making a shady porn underground using backdoor finances, even more than it already is, will do nothing but make this problem worse.
Shameful that I respect women as equal adults who have a right to have autonomy, and desire strict laws to guarantee their safety alongside an organization of their own labor dedicated to their fair compensation and safe, respectable treatment?
Truly, the horror!
Is infantilizing women as incapable of making their own choices better? Should we also take away their credit cards because they just can't be trusted? Yes, reductio ad absurdum, but I hope you can see the point I'm making.
You rate limit loans to mitigate harm potential, you don't ban them outright.
Most manual labor takes a toll on the body, so we make OSHA and do our best to make sure employers are minimizing how bad it gets. You don't ban manual labor.
Sex, and porn, are normal affairs. Protect the people involved and elevate the working class. Don't drive them into an even shadier, less controlled market.
Unfortunately, I'm fully aware I can't convince you.
Really? Most blue collar labor essentially involves selling your body in much worse ways, taking many good years off one’s life in a lot of cases, especially compared to selling sex videos on OnlyFans, or engaging in legal, regulated, protected prostitution. It is essentially commodifying human bodies, do you have a moral issue with this as well?
I advocate for a moral system in which each individual has total ownership of their body and can do with it and put into it what they want, for the most part. There are always edge cases, and I of course cannot account for them all, so it is more of a rule of thumb. If someone is doing something that is not hurting me or anyone else, it’s not my fucking business.
You advocate for taking ownership over women’s bodies, because clearly you know best apparently?
You advocate for the total atomization of society down to lone individuals whose sole moral precept is not to harm each other during free economic exchanges.
The game theory of this social theory is badly flawed. People who adhere to it will always serve those who form groups and enforce in-out distinctions.
Why does "morality" enforcement always devolve into obsession with what other people do with their genitals among consenting parties and completely ignore empathy, welfare of humankind and others, or any of the inconvenient and possibly expensive "Treating people beneath you nicely?". We never see such "moralists" punishing those who do such profoundly immoral things like actively forbidding helping the homeless.
Conversationally it's probably more about morality. However, for those like myself that have looked into the matter, it becomes a much needed discussion about standards of care. The AMA holds regular meetings to determine standards of care. Fortunately for us, they post these to YouTube. I looked and found the most recent meeting where they adopted standards of care for youth and gender dysphoria. It was a brief section about 1/3 to 1/2 way through the meeting. I'll recant and summarize what I observed from the dozen+ people in this meeting:
Lead speaker: Ok, next is medical transition for youth and adults. I'll admit I just don't know much on this topic so I'm reaching out for someone else to take the lead and discuss it.
pause...
Second speaker: Well, I also don't know that much as it's not my field, but I've looked over the proposal and what I can't find are long term studies on the effects. I think because of that we simply don't know...
Third speaker: Hi this is <?> and while this is also not my field I'm an ally and I can tell you what's been presented to us (the AMA governing body) from the APA is what they ave determined as effaceable procedure.
pause...
Lead speaker: So...I suppose we can take a vote to accept the guidelines sent to us from the APA.
pause...
Then they voted to accept it with no more discussion. I'm shortended the exchange, but it is not much more than what I am presenting to you.
Stop and think about that. We use the terms "standards of care" and understand that to mean there is some authoritative, intelligent, well founded judgement from what you and I assume are experts over these topics. That's not what happened by this review board in the AMA. There was no medical discussion, no weighing of prescriptive protocols, no measure of caution, or even of any medical literature regarding the topic. The American Medical Association simply accepted whatever the American Psychological Association told them was the correct medical protocols. What an abject failure.
I also recently watched a clip, a complaint about how women should not be a special case in medicine. This had to do with menopause and the complaint was that women are (to use a colloquial term) gate-kept from hormonal treatments (in this video, testosterone specifically) where as men not only have an established diagnosis of hypogonadism but that through only a 6 month trial, testosterone was approved by the FDA for treatment, but only for men. The complaint was somewhat of a feminist one, an argument for equity. If men could so easily get testosterone for treatment then why can't women, in terms of ""equity". What surprised me was the approval was only based on a 6 month trial. What of the long term exposure? What are the risks? Why approve something with so little data and medical basis? While I empathize with the video's speaker, I saw what I think is a much more problematic issue. When it comes to medicine, there appears to be less scientific truth underlying these decisions.
So, back to your point:
> what other people do with their genitals
While you may perceive some personal or moral assertion, and I acknowledge that is often true, I submit it is also true that others genitals deserve a lot more medical scrutiny than "we don't know, but someone else said this was better". Because, other people's genitals could potentially be my children's genitals and as a parent, or a grandparent, or other family member, who cares more deeply, I expect there is a factual and provably medically necessary response. If that cannot be proven, then there is no rational basis to move forward with medical treatment. The only treatment that makes sense is psychological, given the other supporting data on this topic.
Incorrect. Politicians defer to experts and that fails when it is shown the governing bodies (as I did above) are not performing the necessary functions to ensure safety and efficacy. Politics follows society, not preempts it.
I had never heard the term "jawboning" before. According to Merriam-Webster it is "the use of public appeals (as by a president) to influence the actions especially of business and labor leaders" or "broadly : the use of spoken persuasion".
Regarding TFA: I don't think trading freedoms of one group (the platform users) for those of another (the platform operators) is a good solution. Visa/Mastercard should have the right to refuse service. The solution being explored in the EU makes more sense: facilitate competition so users have more choice of platforms. Or another alternative: can we reduce the power of small but vocal minorities to prevent them from "jawboning" companies?
> Visa/Mastercard should have the right to refuse service.
Given their market dominance, they should absolutely not have any right to refuse service. At that level of scale, they need to be treated like common carriers, who must handle all communications/transactions.
THIS. Why is this PoV even controversial? Especially given that the videogames in question weren't even illegal.
Hell, I don't even like those games, but it's about the precedent of corporate overreach: if it's all legal, Visa/MasterCard shouldn't be able to decide for me what games I'm allowed to buy, no matter how weird they may be. It's not their job to judge the legal kinks I'm up to in the privacy of my own home.
If the gov doesn't clamp down hard on them, I can only assume the gov is in on this grift of having corporations acting as unofficial censors and freedom of speech moderators for the state under the loophole of "the state didn't mess with your constitutional rights to freedom of expression, but what you did broke the ToS of the payment processors, so now they're free to de-bank you and take away your ability to buy and sell things. Tsk tsk, shouldn't have sent those memes making fun of JD Vance and Trump I guess".
Because it is stating that the government should control private behavior, which bumps into free speech and freedom of association issues. That gets pretty controversial.
There are other solutions to the stated problem:
> Given their market dominance, they should absolutely not have any right to refuse service.
The fix is to address the precondition in that statement: their market dominance. If a single entity is so powerful that it can control entire markets, then the problem is not what it does with that power, but that it has that power in the first place.
The solution to this problem is enforcing our existing anti-trust laws, not passing new laws to compel private behavior. We should not have only one or two entities that control this entire market. That's a sign of a broken market, and that's what must be addressed.
We already compel private behavior all the time when the private sector starts acting public - i.e. by running infrastructure and being vital to the function of the public.
The real solution IMO is even more unpopular: nationalize them. If it's a public service it should be handled by the public sector, such that the entirety of the constitution applies. We might even consider funding it not with payment fees, but tax dollars. Every American has a desire to have reliable instant transactions. So they should all pay.
Effectively, they already are - the 2-3% tax on card processors is a tax. If we nationalize it, we can even lower it, since we'd not longer be burdened by the pursuit of profit.
> We collectively agreed long ago that monopolies do not get to enjoy the same freedoms that other companies do.
I think that's generally only the case for natural monopolies, such as power infrastructure, where breaking them up isn't really a feasible solution (ie we don't want 20 different power lines running to each house). I don't think payment processing meets that standard, we could easily break them up and re-introduce competition into the market.
a) One way or another, that's "not letting them enjoy the same freedoms as other companies"
b) How would you then prevent them from re-amalgamating the way Verizon and AT&T did after the Baby Bell breakup? Not just for a few years afterward, but ever?
c) I think that payment processors actually make a pretty convincing natural monopoly: consider that if we had 400 payment processors with no common interface protocol between them (and let's face it, without being forced to, companies aren't going to make such a standard), your Baby Visa #27 credit card wouldn't be accepted at a merchant who only accepts Baby Mastercard #100-200 cards. And even accepting that many different payment processors would be pretty onerous.
Remember, this isn't the card issuers we're talking about; this is the backend processors. The only reason our current "universal" credit card infrastructure works is because nearly everyone takes Mastercard and Visa, and most credit cards—and many debit cards—are either Mastercard or Visa. Sure, it would be possible to create some kind of an interchange standard that all 400 processors would follow, but again, where's the incentive for any single processor?
> How would you then prevent them from re-amalgamating the way Verizon and AT&T did after the Baby Bell breakup? Not just for a few years afterward, but ever?
By continuing to enforce anti-trust legislation, though this time on the opposite M&A end.
> I think that payment processors actually make a pretty convincing natural monopoly
I guess I don't know enough to make an authoritative statement here, but I don't personally find this argument super convincing. I expect the actual breakup would be on the order of like 6-20 companies at most, and it wouldn't be rocket science for some middle-man to abstract out the processing. We solve many harder problems than that in the software industry every day.
But either way, it's a valid argument, and I think a court would be the right place to duke it out. If they are indeed a natural monopoly, then I agree it would be appropriate to start placing limits on their behavior.
i'd add, they're also not private. i mean, i know a publy-traded company is "in the private sector", but it's still a collectively-owned resource and that's a lot different from compelling a privately-owned company.
you are taking it for granted that corporations should largely be given the same civil rights as private citizens, as decided in citizens united v. FEC, but in my view this was one of the worst decisions to ever come out of the supreme court.
Hmm, maybe, I haven't thought about it much. The angle I'm taking is, as a private citizen I choose not to do business with entities I think are immoral, such as Amazon and Home Depot and Hobby Lobby and Uline and Tesla. If I were a business owner, I would prefer to continue to not to do business with those entities and I'd be pretty pissed if I was forced to by the government. That does seem to agree with your "same rights as private citizens" framing, yes, though I'm not sure I'd go so far as to defend the CU decision. I dunno. Interesting question, I'd welcome your thoughts on this.
Regulatory capture and regional monopolies aren't going anyway any time soon. Let's throw out another hypothetical.
How would you feel if the only broadband ISP in your area automatically blocked entire swaths of websites from you on the grounds that the ISP felt they were "immoral" (whatever that means)? And yes I know VPNs exist but that is missing the point.
Payment processors are "pipelines" in the same manner as ISPs should be. If the major ones (VISA/MC) block you from doing business, that's putting someone's entire livelihood at risk.
EDIT: For clarification, I agree that antitrust has never been weaker and that we do need better trust-busting. I just think that it is more realistic to focus on legislation around payment processors MC/VISA atm.
I agree natural monopolies such as ISPs can justify additional regulation. I'm not convinced payment processors are natural monopolies (see sibling thread, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44683153 ).
> I just think that it is more realistic to focus on legislation around payment processors MC/VISA atm.
I think it would be really, really, really hard to pass legislation requiring payment processors to service all customers, especially if you're using porn video games as the champion of your cause. Even if it did pass, I suspect it'd be pretty quickly declared unconstitutional and personally, I think that would be the correct call.
We already have anti-trust laws. We've used them before. "All" we have to do is enforce them.
This is how it's been done in the USA since 9/11. Data isn't subpoenaed (would getting into people's rights) it's just bought (no rights violation). Controls aren't from the government, they are 'implementing industry standards'. Want to silence someone? Deplatform them. Want to deny access? Flag them with an opaque trust score. No constitutional rights are violated.
Indeed, breaking up the too-big companies nicely solves several of these issues. It's much harder to deplatform someone if there are a dozen viable social media/video/critical Internet infrastructure companies, instead of just one or two.
I have IRL facepalmed reading this. This comment gave me the equivalent exposure to 10 hours on X/Twitter. Mate, the reason you now have clean air, safe to eat food and drinking water is BECAUSE OF government compelling private behavior.
With your logic we should have just waited for free market competition to kick in for Cocal-Cola and McDonalds to decide on their own to stop putting arsenic into our food or for Ford and GM to produce engines with lower emissions.
The reason we have government compelling private behavior is that corporate interests are more likely and more easily to collude to fuck over the consumer together for profit, than consumers can do the same in order to intact desired change on the free market.
You are correct, I don't think not being able to purchase porn games rises to the same level of danger as unsafe food or climate change, to require the government to tell businesses how they may operate.
> With your logic we should have just waited for free market competition to kick in Cocal cola and McDonalds to deiced on their own to stop putting arsenic into our food.
I don't think that's a fair comparison. No one is dying here. I do think the government should step into this market and perform major intervention by breaking up the big two companies into many little ones who can compete. After that, some payment processors may choose to support these business models despite the hit to their stock price (or whatever Visa's dumb argument is for not allowing these games).
>I don't think not being able to purchase porn games rises to the same level of danger as unsafe food or climate change
Holy cow, so many comments here and you still missed the point by a mile. The point isn't video games, the point is payment processors shouldn't be arbiters on what you buy. Because if they can stop you buying/selling video games, they can do the same for other stuff. Where does their right to censor you begin and end?
> the point is payment processors shouldn't be arbiters on what you buy. Because if they can stop you buying/selling video games, they can do the same for other stuff.
We both agree this is bad. What we are discussing is how best to solve it.
In the scenario where we enforced existing anti-trust law and broke up the big 2 to form many smaller payment processors, one of the newly formed processors could pick up the business that the pickier processors don't want and take that profit, right? So it solves the problem, without having to pass any controversial new laws about compelling private business behavior.
> I have IRL facepalmed reading this. This comment gave me the equivalent exposure to 10 hours on X/Twitter.
I don't know man, jumping into a conversation like this is a great way to get people to NOT listen. I agree with your following point and would add I find these matters more complicated. For example, you wouldn't be typing a comment on this site without the kind of corporate freedom that raised the standard of living for the entire planet resulting in a shared technological advancement. Seems this is always a trade off, how much freedom are you willing to give up for centralized fascist governmental control?
> Is it controversial that companies aren't allowed to refuse service based on gender or race (in the US at least)?
Those are legal categories known as "protected classes," and yeah, it was and is pretty controversial[1]. I think you'd have a hard time getting purchasers of porn games declared a protected class.
If I'm the sole owner and only employee of a small business, should I have the right to choose my clients? If so, at what size/scale/level of market capture should I lose my rights?
That's not usually the problem (it can be for some). It's really when your art/"identity" is being used to promote something you don't believe in. That happens across the whole religious and political spectrum... e.g. musicians that don't want their art used in certain contexts.
About the OP, government is the right place where we "fight it out" and try to sloppily design a system to move forward as one; these seemingly activist campaigns to "jawbone" private companies is absolutely a sign that something needs to be done at the government side. However, there are very entitled, rich interests behind the banking system, so yeah, there isn't one easy solution i think.
It's an interesting one - I've always thought that businesses should have no right to refuse business, and it kind of already exists, for example you can't refuse to serve a customer purely on the basis of their skin color.
Likewise, if a casino or betting company (ladbrokes, for example) have customers that win too often, I also think it should be illegal to stop them betting. Fundamentally if you're running a business that is an uneven coin toss (to your favour) and you have customers that are able to make money off you - that's your fault for having a bad business model.
If you run a restaurant and a known dine-and-dasher walks in, can you not refuse to serve them?
If you're a consultant do you have no right to refuse a client? Even if you have other clients you'd rather work for, or that particular client is a bad fit for you, or any other reason?
If you run a transport company, and you think someone is trying to get you to move illegal goods, or goods that you have moral qualms about transporting (such as a vegan being asked to transport livestock for slaughter) do you have no right to refuse?
Known dine-and-dasher - no, I think you should be forced to serve them. You don't know if they're going to dine and dash you, you're not the police or the courts, punishing a dine and dasher. Your job is to serve food to those who pay you. If you've got a problem, make them pay for food first?
Consultant - unless you've got a legitimate need to reject providing services to them, I tend to think the same, you should have to serve them if they're trying to pay you, or there's a legitimate business need to avoid that client.
Transport company - it's not your job to judge what's being moved. It's your job to move something from A to B. If you want to avoid moving livestock, don't go into the transport business. Should that same vegan be allowed to not teach kids in school because the kids they teach eat ham sandwiches? Should they be allowed to reject someone from banking services just because they own a fur coat?
These all sound wild and like their impeding on all kinds of freedoms - you’re saying that a business should be compelled to serve or work with anyone that offers to pay them which is _wild_.
The issue comes down to when you refuse to work with someone because of an immutable property - race, gender, age, etc - denying someone from coming into your restaurant because they’ve ripped you off is completely fine and I can’t see why it shouldn’t be. This smacks of “freedom of speech” when people get mad that a private platform told them they couldn’t say mean things.
But say you're a concreter, you've worked with a client who's an absolute prick - doesn't do anything illegal exactly but he's a total stickler with your work, calls you all the time with stupid questions, tries to find problems everywhere to justify a discount (despite you having hypothetically done the job perfectly), pays as late as possible. Shouldn't you have the right to not take on another job for this guy?
You're right - but in that instance the justification in my mind (and what you'd presumably argue if challenged legally) is that they're difficult to work with - which I'm okay with.
But not wanting to concrete that person's driveway because they're in the army, or because they're a politician or whatever else along those lines I think shouldn't be allowed.
Okay, I will now say "they are difficult to work with" or "i don't have time" every time a client walks up that I don't want to serve. Infact, that's exactly what a lot of handymen say already to avoid the irritation associated with declining a job.
I hope you see how your "ought" will be difficult to implement in practice
Can't you price that into their bill, or require payment before services? That is what most construction companies already do, if you are a pain in the ass they charge you more and more until you either don't want it any more or they are satisfied that their pay is worth your trouble, and if payment is potentially questionable they make you pay beforehand.
But given that companies are made up of people, where does the line get drawn? If your concreting business has a couple of other guys working does it still count?
Large entrenched companies have leverage small businesses do not, in the same way that a large moon orbits in a way a test particle of infinitesimal mass does not. We already recognize this with respect to monopoly law: you lose your right to do certain things to your competitors precisely when you're large enough that you could reasonably suppress them.
That is essentially what we are talking about here: a duopoly that is actively suppressing competition. My understanding is that the big-two payment processors don't just refuse to process certain payments, they also refuse to work with banks who work with payment processors who will. Assuming that I am correct in that understanding (I might not be, this is not my area of expertise), that would prevent (or at least hinders) someone from just saying "there is a market need here" and forming their own payment processor to fill that need. To me, that seems like a problem for the exact same reasons that monopolies are a problem, and regulating against monopolies is not particularly controversial.
That makes sense only if they also have legal responsibilities to go along with their rights.
Take for example PG&E, the large gas/electric utility for the northern 2/3rds of California. PG&E is a convicted felon and was sentenced to five years probation, but they remain un-rehabilitated.[0] Under your theory, the "group" with the rights should have been jailed. Instead, a new layer of rights is created out of thin air for the corporation but no meaningful responsibility was ever assigned, unlike individuals.
> Visa/Mastercard should have the right to refuse service
Really? If this was any other small to medium business where there were potentially tens, hundreds or even thousands of viable alternate businesses that provide what could be deemed as an equivalent service I might agree, but a global payments duopoly is essentially public infrastructure and should not be able to discriminate based on protected characteristics or personal subjective moral compass.
I agree with your assessment of the current situation. But I think the solution is to break up the duopoly, either by leveling the playing field or creating government-run alternatives, rather than force the duopoly to do certain things.
This is the “instead of providing school lunches, eliminate poverty” argument.
I am fully supportive of fostering competition. But until the market actualky changes, monopilies / duopolies should be regulated to prevent this abuse of power.
Rejecting a simple tactical solution in favor of a future systemic overhaul is classic perfect vs good.
Governments put up infinite hurdles to creating new payment processors. There actually used to be more of them before the industry consolidated. Also Discover just got bought and American Express is getting their ass kicked by the big two.
People have been trying and failing to create new payment processing companies since at least the 90s. The richest men in the world, even (Musk).
As public infrastructure shouldn't the public take on the burden of funding and operation risk? Or are we saying we should force others to do what we want with their money?
I think you'll find that's already the case. MC/VISA would have an implicit underwriting by the US govt should they ever be in extreme strife. We've already seen this happen before, the UK govt bailed out RBS, largely because of things like being responsible for 1/3 of all transactions that happened in Europe at the time.
Various airlines were also bailed out over the COVID period. So I'd say that it already exists, except the public sees no benefit.
I agree that governments shouldn't provide bailouts without receiving equity for that compensation. The idea that any company is too big to fail undermines the smaller competitors who are making better decisions and have a strategic advantage in surviving economic challenges.
Absolutely. But on the flip side I can also recognise that frankly, governments are terrible at running things. I think a Singapore style model is best - a giant holding company like Temasek that is wholly government funded and owned, but companies owned by the holding company are still beholden to the free market forces, are the best way to go for things like payment processors, airlines, utilities, etc.
As long as the public gets to benefit from the profits these companies make just like any other shareholder. It could be a nice solution to the deficit problem.
I guess I was using the phrase to broadly mean a service that's intended to be available for use by the general public and with the service itself providing a means to an end without 'public ownership' being part of that (in the same vein as 'public' transport). Not sure if there's a more appropriate term here.
But, effectively, you want to tell other people what to do with their money without taking on any financial risk for those policies. The majority shareholders for Visa are retirement accounts and retail investors. Why does one segment of the public get to tell another segment of the public what to do with their money without putting any skin in the game?
> But, effectively, you want to tell other people what to do with their money without taking on any financial risk for those policies.
For this kind of service (again leaning on a classification as 'public infrastructure') I suppose my answer is yes.
> Why does one segment of the public get to tell another segment of the public what to do with their money without putting any skin in the game?
I'm suggesting that regulation prevents them from _disallowing_ access to payments services for things that are not explicitly illegal. In this case I don't see 'Telling X what to do' and 'Telling X that they're NOT allowed to refuse to provide service in these cases' as the same thing, even though they're both essentially 'Mandating that X operate in a certain way'. The difference here being that refusal of service, while still being a choice about how to run, is explicitly a blocking choice for others in certain situations, and not just a choice to, for example, create a new credit product for the market.
> Why does one segment of the public get to tell another segment of the public what to do with their money without putting any skin in the game?
Is this not also just Collective Shout themselves pressuring the payment processors into refusing transactions from a third party for content that they themselves deem inappropriate?
> The majority shareholders for Visa are retirement accounts and retail investors
Is Visa not refusing a legitimate transaction (non-fraudulent, no rollback or refund) going to hurt these investors when part of their investment income comes from usage fees? And if an investor that has concerns about _how_ their investment makes money is that not now a different issue?
Because we know that not doing so leads to bad outcomes, and in some cases, to outright catastrophe.
A person who was not invested in subprime mortgages in 2006 had no skin in the game - yet the fact that others did invest in subprime mortgages created instabilities that threatened them. Virtually everyone agrees, in retrospect, that something should have been done then. But it wasn't, with precisely the justification you're articulating here. The problem is that that person did in fact have skin in the game, because the outcome had important ramifications for their life even if those ramifications were not in the form of direct financial losses.
Now, sure, your ability to buy furry porn is very different from sparking a global recession. But you're implicitly articulating a very strong claim here, that you cannot regulate economic activity to which you are not a party. That has a clear counterexample well within the memories of most people reading this thread.
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I think we agree that private individuals should be able to purchase legal content from the people who produce it. Without action here, that will become either impossible or very difficult, to the point of having a major chilling effect. I think we also agree that businesses should generally have the right to conduct business as they see fit, both because it allows the exploration of new ideas and because market economics is a powerful force for increasing productivity.
To me, that says that there is a tension between two irreconcilable rights. On one side, we have the rights of businesses to act in their economic best interest (which is important!). On the other side, we have the rights of individuals to (actually and with reasonable effort) engage in lawful private microeconomic activity. And when you encounter such a tension, you need to consider:
- How important the rights are
- How much of one you get by sacrificing some of the other
In this case, I would consider the ability of individuals to conduct microeconomic activity more important than the ability of corporations to conduct what is effectively a PR campaign (since no one seems to be of the opinion that payment processors are actually taking a loss on people buying porn, they're just caving to political pressure). And I think the restriction of payment processors here is small compared to the potential restriction on private individuals. So to me, the trade-off has a clear winner.
If you disagree with this chain of reasoning, can you explain where?
I'm not seeing where private citizens are prevented from engaging in lawful private microeconomic activity when a privately owned payment processor doesn't want to engage in certain transactions. The private citizen has the option to pay cash, bitcoin, trade goods or services, etc. Are these options as convenient in this day and age as tapping a credit card? No, but that doesn't mean everyone is entitled to convenience in every situation.
Also, how do you reconcile the fact that many US citizens, for religious or other reasons, can't in good conscience endorse certain economic exchanges? A government that is supposed to represent the needs of all citizens would fail if it engaged in facilitating transactions that some portion of its population found immoral or inappropriate. The public has no say in private, legal, transactions but public enforcement on private entities is a different story; akin to endorsement.
The best we can do is ensure that private citizens have the freedom to engage in legal transactions. But if we start forcing private entities to participate in every legal transaction, we risk setting a precedent that could backfire. Especially when a future administration decides to enforce or block transactions based on political or ideological grounds that conflict with our own values.
> The private citizen has the option to pay cash, bitcoin, trade goods or services, etc...everyone is[n't] entitled to convenience in every situation.
These options aren't small impositions, they're sufficient added overhead that they dwarf the value of the transaction itself. Bitcoin is the only one of them that seems vaguely realistic to me, but most people don't (and shouldn't) keep their own crypto wallets and don't (and can't) get paid in crypto, so that still requires interaction with third-party processors on two levels. It needs one level to convert fiat to crypto and vice-versa and another to conduct the crypto transaction.
Put another way, the sites that are shutting down this content clearly have substantial financial incentive not to do so. If they thought they had a reasonable alternative, don't you think they'd be using it? And if decent-sized companies with financial incentives cannot find an alternative that seems practicable, what makes you think private individuals are reasonably able to do so?
The broader issue here is one of monopoly, and I guess it might be helpful to zoom out here a bit. Do you think a company with market dominance should be able to engage in (otherwise legal) anticompetitive practices to suppress new companies in their domain? If it were up to you whether to have anti-trust law, would you have it?
If yes: isn't this essentially the same problem? These payment processors have a duopoly and are suppressing alternatives who would take these payments (and might outcompete them in the market on that basis).
If not: are you not concerned about a failure-state where monopolies (a) control critical sectors like finance with an unbreakable grip, (b) intertwine that grip with governments who want to circumvent civil liberties protections to suppress private action, and thus (c) become a de facto shadow government whose behavior - by virtue of being nominally private - isn't subject to constitutional protections or court oversight?
> The private citizen has the option to pay cash, bitcoin, trade goods or services, etc.
As far as I understand, this isn't an option. I'm Brazilian, so I can easily pay with PIX (and I have never used a credit card with Steam, since PIX is just so much more convenient). But Steam isn't allowed to sell me that content; if they try, even if they restrict it only to those who pay with PIX, my understanding is that these two global payment processors will stop working with them. And since unfortunately most of the world doesn't have yet something similar to PIX, that would mean losing access to a lot of people.
> Visa/Mastercard should have the right to refuse service.
No. A company beyond certain size functions more akin to a government body providing public service, and should be treated as such. Imagine the only ISP in the area refusing to provide service because fuck you that's why. Or Microsoft banning you from using Windows ever again. Think about it for a second - if Apple made a policy "iPhones cannot be sold to black people" would you say that a private company has all the rights to refuse service?
I think the market would punish Apple sufficiently enough for something like that and government intervention wouldn't be required...
What about a small, local ISP? Should they be able to refuse to provide service? At what size can/should the government step in a force companies to do things?
Usually it is agreed that sometimes the infra costs are high, so there cannot be two or more competitors, so they are granted a monopoly in exchange for fulfilling the duty to serve the community.
> I think the market would punish Apple sufficiently enough for something like that and government intervention wouldn't be required...
Ah yes. The invisible magic hand of free market that solves all problems. Except it doesn't. See Uber expanding its service where for a small fee you can avoid dealing with people from undesirable social class. Not exactly the same thing, but still the idea of free market promoting immoral solutions rather than eliminating them.
> At what size can/should the government step in a force companies to do things?
At a size when the society starts depending on your service for daily functioning. When it becomes essential. For example in my country it's an issue that you can't have a business without a bank account but sometimes banks just... refuse to make an account for you and your company won't function.
> For example in my country it's an issue that you can't have a business without a bank account but sometimes banks just... refuse to make an account for you and your company won't function.
But is everyone entitled to have a business? Is that written in the country's laws somewhere that everyone must be allowed to have a business?
>Ah yes. The invisible magic hand of free market that solves all problems. Except it doesn't. See Uber expanding its service where for a small fee you can avoid dealing with people from undesirable social class. Not exactly the same thing, but still the idea of free market promoting immoral solutions rather than eliminating them.
I think you are mistaking the market for the people. The market is a natural manifestation of what people want. If people want high social class drivers and are willing to pay for it...taking away the option is not going to make them not want those drivers.
This a myopia similar to the war on drugs. The government thought regulating the drug market (that is, total ban) would make people not want to do drugs. We all know how well that worked out.
>The government thought regulating the drug market (that is, total ban) would make people not want to do drugs
Eh, that is what was sold to the mainstream idiot. The 'war on drugs' has almost always been a fight against immigrants and minorities. The free market doesn't solve racism against minorities.
> I think the market would punish Apple sufficiently enough for something like that and government intervention wouldn't be required...
There was a time when if you served "Negroes" at your soda fountain, you could expect the market to punish you. You'd lose your white customers, who had a lot more money to spend at soda fountains.
It took a whole lot to change over to a world where doing the opposite would lead to market "punishment", and it's not obvious that it wouldn't be damned easy to change back.
Get out of fantasyland and stop worshipping the market. It's not a benevolent god.
Clarifying I find the furry art weird, and not pornographic. (Weird is fine btw, normal is the worse insult imho)
I think the biggest issue is the damage that the word "Censorship" has taken in the last few years. If I ran a payment processor, the first thing I would do is try to be as neutral as my moral compass allows. The second thing I would do is intentionally stop processing payments on behalf of anyone I was uncomfortable with on a personal level. I dont support a thing, so I wont give material support to a thing. Thats not censorship. Its not censorship when amazon removes a book, or a publisher takes something out of print. If everything is censorship, including freedom of association, nothing is censorship.
I think the best thing that can be done about this problem is to promote and create alternate payment processors. The second best thing is to help these sites accept crypto payments (yes I know the article hung a lantern on that, but still)
While freedom of association is fine on a personal level and maybe for small businesses, big corporation that are monopolies or oligopolies shouldn't have this freedom. They should be regulated and forced to serve everyone otherwise they have the power to exclude some people completely from such services with no alternative. Due to their power, their decisions affect people as if they are government decisions, yet we don't have a say on it like we do with the government so it's even worse than government censorship yet some people justify it because they are "private companies" as if that means something.
>big corporation that are monopolies or oligopolies
Monopolies and Duopolies suck even with regulation. If you want a state owned payment processor, pursue that goal. But you will end up in the same place, with reactionary leaders using the service to ban things that the voters disagree with, which sometimes will be porn in all likelihood.
>"private companies" as if that means something.
A private company can be competed with. You can legally pay these websites just not via those 2 most popular options. If something is actually censored, the state will use violence to prevent you accessing it. Theres a video kicking around the internet of NSW cops snatching a VHS tape from the hands of people trying to run a small banned film festival. Thats definitionally censorship. I know you want to take the anger people have at censorship, and transfer it away from the government to people you dont like, but its simply not censorship.
> Due to their power, their decisions affect people as if they are government decisions
The inertia of people who wont change their purchasing decisions to avoid those to options is the issue. Not their choice not to process payments.
Why do we have this idea that big corporations are these giant scary entities disconnected from real people? Majority shareholders for Visa are the retirement accounts of regular people and retail investors. We want the public to dictate the actions of what other regular people do with their money without taking on any financial risk for those policies.
Why do we have this idea that non-democratic centrally-planned governments are these giant scary entities disconnected from real people? Majority stakeholders for state insurance, state healthcare, state pensions, state police, etc. are regular people. People calling for "democracy" want the public collectively to dictate the actions of what other regular people do with their money etc., but when you ask people in democracies if the electorate should take the *blame* when they pick a stupid government, they always say no and look at you appalled as if you'd suggest eating doggie biscuits.
To put it another way, why should society collectively make our pensions 1% better when the trade-off that entire categories of legal work, that our democracies have decided should remain legal, are made impossible to perform by the choices of a handful of private businesses that are big enough to set rules without being accountable to the democracies they operate within?
> Why do we have this idea that big corporations are these giant scary entities disconnected from real people?
Because they are. The corporate structure as well as the internal and external systems in our political/legal/economic systems are designed specifically to make corporations work as economic engines where risk, responsibility, and liability are distributed and diluted to the point it they pretty much evaporate. This means that corporations can do things like commit full on crimes, without any real person going to jail. Why? Because they are disconnected from real people by design.
I think this is a core reason behind the amount of public elation seen when the United Healthcare CEO was killed: people were happy to see an example of the piercing of a corporate structure carefully constructed to shield leadership from personal responsibility for its decisions.
Analogies like this are misleading, IMO. Like if a theater chooses not to show a certain movie that's obviously not censorship, but if the water company effectively prevents the movie from showing by threatening to cut off the theater's water, colloquially the term would certainly apply. And what happened here seems a lot closer to the latter than the former.
> best thing .. to promote and create alternate payment processors
That would only make sense in your analogy, where the shutoff stemmed from the payment processor owner's moral compass. What actually happened here is that an advocacy group hounded the biggest processors into it, so as other processors get big enough, by symmetry the same thing will repeat.
It seems to me that what's needed here is other advocacy groups willing to hound the processors in the other direction.
In a perfect world, Visa/Mastercard would turn around to the advocacy groups and say "Alright, obviously you are not happy with our service level, so we do not force you to be our customers. In fact, we just cancelled all the cards of your members. Have a nice day."
It would even make sense financially, because porn sure brings in more dough in processing fees than Kristian Karen who pays for her Starbucks Latte with plastic.
As long as being unreasonable does carry no risk people will continue to be unreasonable.
how would a group hound the processors in the other direction?
also, how are these "puritan" groups doing the hounding? I mean, are they threatening some kind of legal action? based on old (or not so old) obscenity laws?
could the against hounding group do the same? on what legal basis? or is it enough to do the usual "securities fraud" angle?
maybe what matters is how much money the hounding group credibly has to spend on lawyers?
> also, how are these "puritan" groups doing the hounding? I mean, are they threatening some kind of legal action? based on old (or not so old) obscenity laws?
They're not suing them in civil court, they're threatening to use the court of public perception against them. If they allow these payments the activism groups will set up a campaign titled something like "Visa facilitates incest and child abuse!" and "Mastercard allows you to see women getting beaten".
This is a very effective strategy because there's nothing more important to these companies than a squeaky clean brand image. And what they perceive as damaging to their brand image is entirely subjective and just depends on whether an activist group can spin it in a way that looks bad for them.
To me it doesn't look like this group is so powerful that they forced the payment processors to do stuff. It looks more like, this group campaigns tirelessly, year in, year out, against all kinds of miscellaneous stuff they dislike, and every so often they get a W somewhere because they're more persistent than groups pushing in the other direction.
Broadly speaking I'd usually agree, except that Visa/Mastercard are a two-company oligopoly at this point, with effectively no meaningful competition. Yes, other payment mechanisms exist, but consider how much it limits the viability of an online business to not accept credit cards.
> consider how much it limits the viability of an online business to not accept credit cards
For the vast majority of online businesses, accepting exclusively crypto, or exclusively bank payments, would result in much less business. Orders of magnitude less business. They are not viable alternatives for the vast majority of purposes.
> For the vast majority of online businesses, accepting exclusively crypto, or exclusively bank payments, would result in much less business. Orders of magnitude less business.
I would add a qualifier to your statement: for the vast majority of global online businesses. An online business serving a single country could make use of country-specific payment systems, which are often very popular. If a Brazil-only online business accepted only payments through PIX and boleto bancário, that could result in less business, but not orders of magnitude less business.
Sure; that was exactly the kind of case that previously led me to edit my comment to add the "for the vast majority" qualifier. Similarly, bank payments are popular in European countries because there are convenient wrappers around them, if you're only selling to certain countries.
Along the same lines, I qualified it as "online businesses" because there are still some brick-and-mortar businesses that require cash. It's still limiting your business, but less so, especially if you're in a context where people expect many businesses to be that way (e.g. a farmer's market).
But for online businesses that aren't country-specific, which I'd argue is the vast majority of online businesses? You accept credit cards or you get a lot less business. (And the next-most-popular option, PayPal, does even more of this kind of thing than Visa and MasterCard do, and much more capriciously.)
This is fair, as long as you're a small operation, and those you didn't like can go shop elsewhere. Visa + MasterCard are a duopoly controlling the overwhelming majority of the market, and if they ban a seller, there's little else the seller can switch to.
I think a processor like Visa could benefit a lot from the status similar to the "common carrier". Like a telephone network must offer service to anyone, but cannot be held liable for the content of the communication (even if criminals are using it), Visa could accept the requirement to pass payments to any counterparty in exchange for dropping the KYC requirements. Let banks and merchants care about that.
I don't think that the US or EU government would agree to grant such a status though.
If your water company stops delivering water to you because you post furry porn it becomes a problem. The problem is when a company becomes so big that it is a natural monopoly (or effectively part of a cartel), while basically being necessary infrastructure to operate in a modern society.
These payment networks fit that description, and should either be broken apart so that you get the necessary competition, or be regulated so that they have to provide service for legal goods and services in a given jurisdiction.
This is a mis-definition of censorship, similar to what happens to 'propaganda', where you're only considering the censorship that you don't like to be censorship.
I spent months working on a dating website. Had Stripe configured, spent the whole time testing with it. Published the site, swapped Stripe to production, and boom, account was closed/banned.
According to their own documentation, dating sites are indeed allowed, so long as there's no adult content. The site I built didn't allow adult content. I argued my case, provided the TOS as well as showed that I had features built into the site to prevent that sort of stuff. Still banned. The next step was to go for CCBill, etc. But they all charge a ~$2,000 setup fee. Not happening.
It had so many features built into it, and was by far my favorite project. Sadly, I just unpublished it and it will probably forever sit in my project folder unused.
You should kick up a major fuss. Call the media. Write a blog post. These companies should not be the moderator of what is socially acceptable.
if only a decentralized alternative had not become a money laundering tool and financial instrument
Hmm I wonder how that happened?
It's annoying this is what has to be done, but when all our regulators have their balls chopped off this is the reality.
Rules are made on tiktok, twitter, and in the civil court room. It costs lots of money and is almost never worth it.
Which is why only the big dogs get to play these rules. Apple doesnt care if it burns money on a lawsuit that's stupid. That puts YOU at a huge disadvantage.
IMO payment processors are infrastructure, pseudo public. This amounts to free speech restrictions.
What did the processing fees on CCBill look like, or did you get that far?
Here's a part of the message I received from them:
- $25.00 - Monthly fee for the merchant account.
- $19.95 - Monthly fee for the Authorize.net payment gateway (API Connection to your website)
- 3.95% - Keyed rate
- $0.25 - per transaction fee
- $1,450 - HIGH-RISK fee
- 10% Rolling reserve
It just seems unfair, as these fees are for "adult content" sites (i.e. nudity, etc.), which is not what I built.
Why not just go straight to authorize.net? Or your local bank can probably set you up with them... always worked for me.
Because authorize.net is a payment gateway, not a processor. You'd still need a processor and the one your bank works with will have similar requirements.
Honestly, those rates are better than I expected. I think OnlyFans has a 20% rate and the one real experience I have had with processors that handle adult industry was nearing 30%. They had legitimate fraud problems though.
I didn't even consider that as an option. I will look into it. Thanks for the suggestion!
More than it's worth. Even if their fees weren't astronomical, their platform is a nightmare to work with.
Could it run on lightspark?
Why not Square? Why not crypto? I realize HN kinda hates crypto as a group, but it solves your situation here, does it not? I realize it’s another step for users who don’t already have it, but I guess you need to determine whether it would cause enough friction to not get signups.
> Why not Square?
I looked for alternatives, such as PayPal, and Square. They consider dating websites "high-risk", so they would most likely ban the account as well. It just seems like too much of a headache to rewrite the codebase to just have the account banned again.
> Why not crypto?
I thought about this as well. I don't dislike the idea of crypto, but what would users think? It would probably be a huge red flag and look like a scam site.
So, the dating sites that are already in existence are it - they own the market. I'm pretty sure I've read that the execs of Stripe are also invested in Tinder/Bumble*, etc. No wonder it's extremely difficult to compete.
* - not sure if this is actually true.
Why is the payment processor so strongly coupled to the point that you would need to rewrite it? I understand there's effort to adapt it but I don't think it's good to write the code like that.
Well, of course some things are going to need to be rewritten? It won't be complicated at all, but the primary concern is registering new accounts, looking through documentation for API keys, testing, etc. This seems like wasted effort just to get banned again. Or worse -- get banned and account funds put on a hold.
Most crypto protocols are completely transparent so somebody can write down your wallet address and hassle people you trade crypto with. For instance if you want to turn your crypto into cash the transaction can be blocked there.
also, there's no legitimate uses for crypto currentl.
I create music videos which can be provocative, though not necessarily pornographic, and this kind of thing really bothers me since I've run into similar problems even just with hosting and donations. Thankfully, I don't try to make this anything more than a creative outlet, so I don't have to worry about taking payments, and I'm happy enough that any expenses are at least covered by a few donations. But it concerns me that it is not an option for others who might find themselves in similar gray areas.
Payments are pretty much 'public infrastructure' at this point and should be treated the same as utilities. ie they should be required to provide service for anything legal.
I mean this is just the ultimate form of price discrimination which happens to be legal. My question is why? This industry (payments) is completely driven by financials and occasionally regulations. They have no dog in a moral fight, so this must be about profits to them.
This feels naive. Power is a goal too and clearly they’re pursuing that.
Not sure if stuff like WERO will help.
I talked to a social worker who works with sex workers, and apparently a major problem they have is that local banks refuse them as customers.
Which is ridiculous. Why should a sex worker not be able to open a bank account?
Because whores must be punished.
First day in the USA?
And for those that need it: */s*
I don't live in the US, I live in Austria. Different country, same hypocricy.
I did not know this was such a widespread problem until everyone online started talking about it. Going to try and find out if this also affects Portuguese sex workers even though I feel like it 100% does
I agree with the premise of this post, but I'd like to see it made by someone else (and not only because this is on a furry blog.)Their argument is also poorly formed and poorly written.
They start by defending their use of furry art and railing against potential backlash from HN. Then spend a lot of words talking about how Collective Shout isn't anti-LGBTQ, but could potentially become anti-LGBTQ, but even if it's not anti-LGBTQ it's bad because it's anti-abortion. None of this is actually pertinent to the argument.
Then they talk about alternatives to Visa /Mastercard, such as crypto, WERO, FedNOW, petitions, blah blah blah. Next we move on to some good-old-fashioned self promotion, talking about how they helped save some library from the evil right wing politicians.
And the article ends without even making one coherent argument, which should be this: two American companies should not be able to dictate the moral standards of censorship for the world. They have too much power and too little oversight. Let's start with that.
> two American companies should not be able to dictate the moral standards of censorship for the world. They have too much power and too little oversight. Let's start with that.
To be fair, it's more than just two companies (and not all of them are US based). It's an ecosystem of companies with two major choke points.
Groups like Collective Shout work because Visa and MasterCard have deeply conservative Terms & Conditions and you can whine to them enough legally that they aren't taking their T&Cs correctly and "must" do a thing.
Visa and MasterCard's T&Cs are heavily conservative not just because they are conservative banking companies, but because they are conservative banking middlemen. A lot of their T&Cs also reflect all the Merchant Banks that these networks rely on to float the liquidity of the networks. Those Merchant Banks want a minimal risk on their high volume of investments in micro-loans. They express that minimal risk desire in strict, conservative T&Cs.
(It's a fun hypocrisy of the US-based Merchant Banks especially to want such minimal risk given they have the ability to use Federal Reserve 0% loans to back their portfolio of payment network loans. They have almost nothing but upside and surprisingly minimal risk naturally from that. But these are business-to-business banks that make their money the lowest risk ways.)
Visa and MasterCard get squeezed at both ends with what the Merchant Banks want and what these groups like Collective Shout want and become the easy chokepoint to attack. If the Merchant Banks backed off some Visa and MasterCard could potentially loosen their T&Cs.
Unfortunately as business-to-business banks, most of the biggest Merchant Banks (which often don't have recognizable consumer brands), several of which are not US-based, have very little interest in hearing from us and I don't see an easy strategy to encourage them to take more risks in the same way that a vocal minority team can encourage Visa and MasterCard to take fewer risks because their T&Cs already say so.
I can still blame Visa and MasterCard for being cowards on these and related subjects and not pushing back against loud complainers and highly conservative Merchant Banks, while also respecting that their position on some of this is between a rock and a hard place, as much "just a middleman" as a controlling character in what is happening.
Great explanation, I think most people don't even consider the merchant banks at all.
Much more interesting is why these two companies were able to wield this much power in the first place, and why are they using it to censor this kind of content specifically?
You can't understand anything about the situation without replacing it in the context of the far right reactionary wave hitting our societies. Similarly, simply preventing these two companies of their power would be a temporary solution at best. There is a political will -and enough support for it- to push the puritan agenda.
If you truly care about fighting censorship, you should recognize where it actually comes from and fight the source.
I think the problem you have is they are clearly supporting one side or other which is accurate but I think they have censorship fear. There is no reason why they can't be called pornographic and lose access to payment systems.
I think there is credibility in saying that hiding behind the banner of stopping abuse as thin veneer of enforcing political or religious ideology. An argument is often made in the same vein for outlawing encryption. Clearly we must be against crime so we need to destroy encryption and if you don't destroy encryption you like crime. This type of argumentation is pretty similar to targeting distributors rather than content directly. Its definitely more effective but it seems like you just want to enforce your ideology rather than anything else.
Maybe you don't feel that argument was made after all it was a little bit all over the place but I saw it and there were a lot of links to organizations and achieve links and bills for you to continue research from. I am trying to balance here though because i see both yours's and the others perspective
Somebody has no appreciation for literature and writing. Philistine. Do you shake your fist at The New Yorker and The Atlantic because they don't get to the point fast enough for your poor code-addled engineer brain?
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When did furries decimate communities due to addiction, war-on-drugs-isn and gangsterism?
For real? What is the prevalence? 1/100000?
Cryptocurrencies are sufficiently diverse and popular in this day and age that this should be a non-issue at this time. So many sites accept them already. I even advise using Monero to fully shield the user.
Diverse, yes - but I wouldn't call it popular as a means of making regular financial transaction.
I would certainly only use it as last resort. Too slow, too cumbersome, most of the benefits being overstated or misunderstood. Even in this case, while you certainly can't block the transaction from going through, the site still needs a payment provider to manage transactions which someone might pressure into not working with adult sites.
The alternative is writing their own payment solution entirely to avoid having to work with anyone, but that's an entirely different rat's nest with regulatory complications.
If you don't want to do it, you will find a million ways and excuses to not do it. Those who want or need it will find a way, and such ways have existed for over a decade.
Existing for over a decade is not a stamp of quality, usefulness or convenience, but it is true that it is available, and people are free to use it should they want.
It does not solve the issue discussed here though, as being able to get a money in a intermediate currency from A to B would only be handle a small part of payment processing and operating a business, and does not solve that you're dealing with groups that use any means available to put you out of business due to finding your business immoral according to their beliefs.
They're still miserable from a UX perspective and for those of us in KYC countries? It can be very burdensome to verify ourselves and actually exchange real money for them.
Buying litecoin and sending it to someone else was a huge pain in my butt to put it mildly.
It is burdensome to verify, but once you're past that hurdle, it's absolutely smooth sailing. I don't know which sites or apps you used, but the ones I know of all have an excellent UI.
The website and app UIs for these services weren't my problem, it's the overall UX and KYC is part of that.
I don't want to go over all the issues I had, but to put it simply some were the fault of the service (I had major issues verifying and then reverifying) and some were due to the bank I use and their restrictions.
Furries making their own 00s-themed site website for chat/art/games powered by crypto would be the greatest thing. Small bonus if the website is open-source and provides data dumps, big bonus if it’s federated.
It would alleviate censorship concerns. It sounds practical, my understanding is that furries are statistically much more tech-savvy and willing to spend money and effort. Copyright and CSAM are issues that must be addressed, but hopefully small enough to be manageable, since it’s primarily furries (not realistic, not in aggressively copyrighted pop culture). And it seems like something many people would like, at least the nostalgic people in online spaces like HN. If it gets popular enough to extend to other niches I would join and help fund.
At some point they'd probably want to convert back to fiat and that's the trick. Coinbase or whichever company will probably follow suit.
I think payment processors blocking Coinbase would open them up to large legal liabilities.
Like payment processors threatening the largest game platform on the planet for decades would, right?
There are no legal protections, it needs to be fixed at the government level with payment neutrality policies. Steam has hundreds of millions of users and couldn't fight it. Itch had to go nuclear and kill every single NSFW game ever put on their platform, likely affecting millions.
1. Blocking coinbase would be anti-compeitive behavior which are totally different laws.
2. Valve is not publicly traded so we cannot do a detailed comparison, but all indications show Playstation is a larger gaming platform than Steam. Steam is not "the largest game platform on the planet".
3. Yeah I agree that strong legal regulations for the payment processing industry would be good. I think a public electronic payment processing system would be better, and wide adoption of a crypto-currency based solution would be the best. My trust in governments and central banks to handle monetary policy is very low. My trust in private for-profit companies to handle payment processing is even lower. It's one thing to do well over a few decades, and another thing to do well over a several centuries and real economies operate on a very long timescale.
4. It's disappointing that we treat NSFW as such a taboo.
It just needs the economic value of supporting this trade to outweigh the value they assign to control and influence.
Which we can conclude from the current situation is not the case.
The word 'needs' indicates a present necessity.
The present behavior of payment providers show a present lack of economic value to overcome the pressure against supporting these businesses, meaning the present necessity is not met.
At least in Japan, I'm surprised that they haven't expanded Suica and similar systems to include online shopping.
DLSite (the closest thing to a Japanese itch.io) was one of the first targets of this push over a year ago. I'm pretty sure they just stopped accepting Visa/Mastercard on the site but set up a weird 'third party' where you could buy 'DLSite points' with your credit card.
They did back in the 2000s, I used to buy stuff online with Edy. The problem was you had to buy a FeliCa USB adapter, or have a Sony Vaio or similar laptop that had a reader embedded. It never took off and people stopped offering it.
But even more IRL merchants are now accepting 交通系 IC cards as payment methods. I can use mine at the arcade and never worry about coins.
So that Visa buys them, like it happened to French Carte bleue the moment it started targetting online shopping?
Visa can only buy you if you sell.
PayPay?
Honestly, I think focusing on what is being censored is missing the point. Today it's adult content, which is an easy target. But what about tomorrow? What if they decide your political donation is 'problematic', or the indie news site you subscribe to is 'misinformation'? We're handing a kill switch for legal commerce to a handful of unelected execs.
> Today it's adult content, which is an easy target.
Not even that easy of a target, because the crazy people in America want to call anything that acknowledges the existence of LGBTQ people or how they exist within greater society is "adult content" or "pornographic."
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Banality of evil. Being affable to you in particular doesn't mean not evil, especially to others. And the eliminationism on LGBT status is pretty damn evil.
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100% agreed and I think many people are missing the forest from the trees on this issue.
This stuff always starts off with "think of the children" and then evolves into something else entirely.
How about when we have a game spewing rhetoric about religion being bad (the Assassin's Creed franchise being one example) - should card processors force steam to remove those too, to continue using their payments infrastructure?
Correct.
Combine required/trendy KYC. With trendy reputation score and similar attributes for purchase/sale/trade. With machine agent automated decision flows. With pushing everything into digital. With near mono/duo/tri-opolization of goods/services.
Then, a near invisible control grid is almost complete.
But that's the goal on the face of it.
Let's use it for good, all.
Isn't that already the case? Gofundme has definitely canceled donations for racist endeavors. That's kinda similar, isn't it?
It pains me to say this, but this might actually be a valid use case for cryptocurrency. These companies are cowards.
The article linked by this post disagrees:
> I’ve seen some comments floating around that suggest that the fix is to jettison Visa and MasterCard in favor of cryptocurrency.
> I think this is fundamentally a losing strategy: It moves the burden and risk of being unbanked onto the developers and publishers rather than the platforms. Yes, it decentralizes (to a point), but each node has less resources to defend themselves in court when the oppressors change their tactics again. I believe it’s better to stand together than fragment.
The author is very confused. For one, not having access to VISA/Mastercard isn't being unbanked. And more importantly, there is no need for the burden of supporting CC payments to fall on developers at all. Steam, itch, etc can just add it as a payment method. (personally I don't really think it's an amazing solution due to crypto volatility)
Seems that the West has just now realized that the payment processors are a threat to adult content and are getting in an uproar. Japanese sites selling adult content have been banned for years at this point, they've moved on to supporting JCB as the only accepted credit card and otherwise accepting site-specific points you buy at convenience stores. I've seen crypto as well by proxy via Bitcash.
This is literally the original use case for cryptocurrency.
Unfortunately that part never became practicable, and the only use cases that gained traction are speculation, fraud, extortion, and dark web marketplaces.
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Honestly I think Visa/MC appreciate being nudged into this situation. Normalization of them as financial gatekeepers gives them a big favor that they can grant to governments by cutting the tap off to orgs/companies/people whenever. Its a direction that is convenient for them and a lot of the heat for the move gets passed on to some Australian non-profit instead of them. Hard for me to square their behavior unless they are quietly quite receptive.
If this were the case, we'd probably see very different policies for every country.
Yet this doesn't seem to be the case. Pornhub doesn't say 'payment for interracial porn is available in all countries except Opressionland'.
Contact Numbers Payments— they are experts in this space.
Waiting for the furry-led, sex-positive counter activist group called "Collective Snout".
Please don't do this here.
I know puns are considered the lowest form of humor, but I still appreciate the occasional bit of levity to lighten the mood in serious discussions.
Gee sometimes it's hard to know what's going to be considered egregious vs whimsical by this community! I've taken off the penalties.
All good and sorry. I get that there is a risk of this board turning into Reddit if too many whimsy/joke comments are permitted. It would indeed be bad if that happened. I'll be more watchful with my posts in the future.
https://yellat.money/
found this useful resource to clap back
why not bitcoin? because: "Repeat after me: all technical problems of sufficient scope or impact are actually political problems first" - Eleanor Saitta
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I don’t care for furries myself but I think so long as it’s legal and doesn’t harm anyone. I don’t care what an adult chooses to spend their own money on.
And neither should payment processors. They have no business being gatekeepers for anyone’s money. My money isn’t and shouldn’t be subject to their shareholders interests.
> as it’s legal and doesn’t harm anyone
Porn harms everyone involved.
I'm sorry, did I miss something? You and them said "furries" and now, suddenly, you're talking about porn.
Or are you immediately proving everyone critical of the payment processors right by showing that the "undesirables" will have their existence marked as sexual and then have access to the basic requirements of modern living shut down?
You perhaps missed the original article.
Is sex work a requirement of modern life? Should it be?
Every single reply you have given is a non-sequitor or wildly misreads what someone has said.
Payment processors are a basic requirement of modern life.
All that’s being banned is sex work. If people obey the rules they still have recourse to payment processors.
There’s cash, bitcoin, etc., your argument is invalid.
Their username has "poast" in it. This should be the only breadcrumb you need to realize you're replying to a troll.
To be fair, it's not uncommon to see accounts with usernames like "throwaway_84723" on here. The barrier to making accounts is low and the site invites a more "don't remember me" crowd.
Yeah, I just wanted to gently let you know you're wasting your time hoping for good faith discussion out of them is all.
If ideas can’t stand on their own outside the echo chamber then they are wrong.
I am not trolling. There are gaping holes in these arguments.
I am a founder who cannot stand what weak discourse passes here.
That’s a personal opinion not a fact with any merit. And as a personal opinion has no bearing on what an adult should be allowed to spend their money on.
Tell that to the sex trafficking victims. Are you a Tate supporter?
In reality, the belief that porn is harmless has no evidentiary support.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_pornography
> Tell that to the sex trafficking victims.
“Slavery hurts everyone involved” is true, but is not a reason to ban work that is not slavery. And that is just as true if you limit it to sex work as it is more generally.
How much poison has to be mixed into the egg salad before we avoid eating it?
Precisely the same amount that's in each of the other metaphorical sandwiches in the metaphorical buffet that is all other labour.
If you really care: normalize sex work, regulate labor requirements, and support sex worker unions.
“Regulation will fix it” is a common liberal cognitive failure. Proof by example: the open drug markets in SF.
Your solution to normalize violence against women and girls is a moral failure.
Oh, please.
I advocate for strong anti-trafficking and consent requirement laws and regulations on how porn sold in the US must be made and you bring up fictional "open drug markets" in SF?
I'm advocating for OSHA and labor unions for sex workers. Guess what, those work.
And you know what never has? Prohibition on alcohol, prohibition on marijuana, or forcing women to wear burkas for modesty. For their safety, of course.
just use bitcoin. there is literally no downside. it is easier to implement than most payment providers that i know. moreover there are payment provider that work with bitcoin so you do not have to.
The downside is of course that you limit your potential clientele to those who have bitcoin, and that every transaction is publicly logged forever.
you can just add them along with others. then limit ie adult content to bitcoin payments
Horrible fees, long waiting times, forced centralized exchanges. That’s after they claimed cheap, fast, decentralized. Fk that scam, I’ll stay with regular money.
so you are quite wrong on fees
https://phoenix.acinq.co/faq#where-is-my-on-chain-balance
if you want to read about recent bitcoin wallets.
Unless you live in China, Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, Bolivia, Bangladesh, Nepal, Iraq...
they first have to prove you have bitcoin.
No protection against theft, insane energy consumption.
you mean the same protection as cash and a fraction of the energy cost of all banking / visa / mastercard with an economic incentive to use renewables.
dont forget protection against theft inserts someone else to each transaction
That's an obvious flat out lie, crypto consumes much more power than the banking system, because of course it does. It literally relies on proof of work, through arrays of GPUs pointlessly crunching numbers. And that's just to handle a fraction of the number of transactions the banking system does.
It's estimated that Bitcoin alone uses up as much power as an entire country: https://www.polytechnique-insights.com/en/columns/energy/bit...
And how many people use crypto again?
As for the thievery part: https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com
it is ok my dude you do not have you use it. you think bitcoin uses more power than all the banks, merchant POS backends like visa and mastercard, things like SEPA, paper transactions, paper printers -because cash- , etc
you even mention gpus not asics and POW as a bad thing. it is the ONLY thing that is worth about bitcoin.
> https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/
try ctrl+f bitcoin lol
I think a lot of people are missing the point. Most likely what's happening here is that the issuers (not Visa/MC) see a large number of chargebacks/fraud for adult content sites and have determined that it's much easier if they don't accept transactions from these sites.
No, what's happening is that people like NCOSE and Collective Shout are putting pressure on the processors. They've loudly bragged about it. It's not the first time they've done it. And they've been known to enlist government actors to help with the pressure ("Operation Choke Point").
Every time this issue comes up, a bunch of people crawl out of the woodwork trying to prove how "wise" they are by mouthing this idea about chargebacks. And the processors are happy to keep their heads down and not dispute it, or even encourage it, since they really want the whole issue to just go away.
Chargebacks are not the issue here, and if you haven't paid any attention at all to what's actually going on, you're best advised not to make yourself look like a fool by talking about what you guess might "most likely" be happening.
Most likely what's happening here is that the issuers (not Visa/MC) see a large number of chargebacks/fraud for adult content sites and have determined that it's much easier if they don't accept transactions from these sites.
That's definitely what I would claim if I wanted to take down content I didn't want. Who is going to prove them wrong?
Why would visa/mc want to decline money? They love making money.
Because the money involved is peanuts, they don't want people running around trying to put them in the headlines as "enabling sexual exploitation", and a certain number of their internal people actually believe in the "cause".
Contrary to popular belief, corporations are composed of humans and do not reliably or mechanically follow only financial incentives. Nor are they always perfect in understanding their actual financial interests. Boycott threats are probably empty, but some people may not want to take the chance, or may have other motivations that cause them to overestimate that risk.
The money in adult content is not peanuts
I would wager it is closer to "economically load bearing" than it is to peanuts
What makes that "most likely," other than that you thought of it?
Occam's razor?
When you have advocacy groups going around in public saying "Look, we successfully pressured VISA/MC to do this", Occam's razor would suggest that that was true.
Sure but isn’t allowing those company to pick and choose what industries they service a dangerous precedent? They’ve monopolized the consumer credit markets and as such, can use that weight to dictate competition in consumer markets.
Their point is it isn't just a couple companies arbitrarily making these decisions. It is a vast network of banks and merchant services companies.
Ideally, you could take your business elsewhere. The problem is providers that handle these industries will expect a premium across all transactions and it would come off badly when customers see that large percentage added to each purchase.
So you have the decision of: your customers pay a premium or you don't carry adult material. If all your business is adult, it's an easy choice. You pay the premium.
This activist organization is pressing them until they are forced to make that decision based on a small amount of their hosted content. This is what I see as likely. Admittedly though, there are not enough details given to say for sure.
Isn't their official explanation that a religious group in Australia forced their hand?
Besides it not being a valid reason at all, they are not even trying to claim chargeback costs.
If this were actually true, then they would have gone after ALL NSFW games on Steam - but they very deliberately targeted specific genres that they didn't like.
You think chargebacks are disproportionately higher on NSFW games revolving around non-consensual themes versus other fetishes? Give me a break.
No. That's an often-repeated bullshit excuse.
Payment processors have ways of passing some of the chargeback risks onto the stores, and it's not like Steam itself is chargeback central. If you just want free games, pirating them is extremely easy, and trying to abuse chargebacks gets you banned.
China just banned OnlyFans as degenerate, as did Sweden. We should probably be _increasing_ enforcement of public morality through private systems.
“You can just start your own payment processor.”
Who’s morals? Yours, specifically, I’m assuming?
I support the anti-porn feminists resisting the capitalist commodification of the female body, yes.
What moral system do you advocate? Laissez-faire?
I'm sorry, did you just in one breathe say we need payment processors to enforce an arbitrary morality and then in the next breathe criticize laissez-faire morality?
And what if, tomorrow, the payment processors capitulate with a new morality? They decide women politicians shouldn't be allowed to take donations, for instance?
Sex workers should be better supported and the markets cleansed via strict regulation of the labor and how it's treated, and strong unions.
Payment processors making a shady porn underground using backdoor finances, even more than it already is, will do nothing but make this problem worse.
I'm not saying morality is arbitrary, no. I'm saying that commodifying human bodies is reprehensible and your advocacy for same is shameful.
Live sex work already involves existing payment processors.
Porn addicts are definitionally addicted to fantasy. I wish you luck with the rest of your comment.
Porn addicts aren't a real thing.
There is scientific consensus on this!
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/women-who-stray/2018...
Shameful that I respect women as equal adults who have a right to have autonomy, and desire strict laws to guarantee their safety alongside an organization of their own labor dedicated to their fair compensation and safe, respectable treatment?
Truly, the horror!
Is infantilizing women as incapable of making their own choices better? Should we also take away their credit cards because they just can't be trusted? Yes, reductio ad absurdum, but I hope you can see the point I'm making.
You rate limit loans to mitigate harm potential, you don't ban them outright.
Most manual labor takes a toll on the body, so we make OSHA and do our best to make sure employers are minimizing how bad it gets. You don't ban manual labor.
Sex, and porn, are normal affairs. Protect the people involved and elevate the working class. Don't drive them into an even shadier, less controlled market.
Unfortunately, I'm fully aware I can't convince you.
Really? Most blue collar labor essentially involves selling your body in much worse ways, taking many good years off one’s life in a lot of cases, especially compared to selling sex videos on OnlyFans, or engaging in legal, regulated, protected prostitution. It is essentially commodifying human bodies, do you have a moral issue with this as well?
[dead]
I advocate for a moral system in which each individual has total ownership of their body and can do with it and put into it what they want, for the most part. There are always edge cases, and I of course cannot account for them all, so it is more of a rule of thumb. If someone is doing something that is not hurting me or anyone else, it’s not my fucking business.
You advocate for taking ownership over women’s bodies, because clearly you know best apparently?
You advocate for the total atomization of society down to lone individuals whose sole moral precept is not to harm each other during free economic exchanges.
The game theory of this social theory is badly flawed. People who adhere to it will always serve those who form groups and enforce in-out distinctions.
No, you need to learn to read. Please do that, maybe also learn to come up with some sort of coherent argument, and get back to me.
Why does "morality" enforcement always devolve into obsession with what other people do with their genitals among consenting parties and completely ignore empathy, welfare of humankind and others, or any of the inconvenient and possibly expensive "Treating people beneath you nicely?". We never see such "moralists" punishing those who do such profoundly immoral things like actively forbidding helping the homeless.
Conversationally it's probably more about morality. However, for those like myself that have looked into the matter, it becomes a much needed discussion about standards of care. The AMA holds regular meetings to determine standards of care. Fortunately for us, they post these to YouTube. I looked and found the most recent meeting where they adopted standards of care for youth and gender dysphoria. It was a brief section about 1/3 to 1/2 way through the meeting. I'll recant and summarize what I observed from the dozen+ people in this meeting:
Lead speaker: Ok, next is medical transition for youth and adults. I'll admit I just don't know much on this topic so I'm reaching out for someone else to take the lead and discuss it.
pause...
Second speaker: Well, I also don't know that much as it's not my field, but I've looked over the proposal and what I can't find are long term studies on the effects. I think because of that we simply don't know...
Third speaker: Hi this is <?> and while this is also not my field I'm an ally and I can tell you what's been presented to us (the AMA governing body) from the APA is what they ave determined as effaceable procedure.
pause...
Lead speaker: So...I suppose we can take a vote to accept the guidelines sent to us from the APA.
pause...
Then they voted to accept it with no more discussion. I'm shortended the exchange, but it is not much more than what I am presenting to you.
Stop and think about that. We use the terms "standards of care" and understand that to mean there is some authoritative, intelligent, well founded judgement from what you and I assume are experts over these topics. That's not what happened by this review board in the AMA. There was no medical discussion, no weighing of prescriptive protocols, no measure of caution, or even of any medical literature regarding the topic. The American Medical Association simply accepted whatever the American Psychological Association told them was the correct medical protocols. What an abject failure.
I also recently watched a clip, a complaint about how women should not be a special case in medicine. This had to do with menopause and the complaint was that women are (to use a colloquial term) gate-kept from hormonal treatments (in this video, testosterone specifically) where as men not only have an established diagnosis of hypogonadism but that through only a 6 month trial, testosterone was approved by the FDA for treatment, but only for men. The complaint was somewhat of a feminist one, an argument for equity. If men could so easily get testosterone for treatment then why can't women, in terms of ""equity". What surprised me was the approval was only based on a 6 month trial. What of the long term exposure? What are the risks? Why approve something with so little data and medical basis? While I empathize with the video's speaker, I saw what I think is a much more problematic issue. When it comes to medicine, there appears to be less scientific truth underlying these decisions.
So, back to your point:
> what other people do with their genitals
While you may perceive some personal or moral assertion, and I acknowledge that is often true, I submit it is also true that others genitals deserve a lot more medical scrutiny than "we don't know, but someone else said this was better". Because, other people's genitals could potentially be my children's genitals and as a parent, or a grandparent, or other family member, who cares more deeply, I expect there is a factual and provably medically necessary response. If that cannot be proven, then there is no rational basis to move forward with medical treatment. The only treatment that makes sense is psychological, given the other supporting data on this topic.
If there is such a thing as "sexual politics" then it is properly the domain of the state.
Incorrect. Politicians defer to experts and that fails when it is shown the governing bodies (as I did above) are not performing the necessary functions to ensure safety and efficacy. Politics follows society, not preempts it.
This is a conversation about forcing payment processors to work with immoral businesses. How is that consensual?
What moral standards do you think should be enforced? Do you think that "models" should have age verification?
we have it is called bitcoin my dude.
Exactly, why drag a nice clean payment processor into the muck when we already have Bitcoin?
I had never heard the term "jawboning" before. According to Merriam-Webster it is "the use of public appeals (as by a president) to influence the actions especially of business and labor leaders" or "broadly : the use of spoken persuasion".
Regarding TFA: I don't think trading freedoms of one group (the platform users) for those of another (the platform operators) is a good solution. Visa/Mastercard should have the right to refuse service. The solution being explored in the EU makes more sense: facilitate competition so users have more choice of platforms. Or another alternative: can we reduce the power of small but vocal minorities to prevent them from "jawboning" companies?
> Visa/Mastercard should have the right to refuse service.
Given their market dominance, they should absolutely not have any right to refuse service. At that level of scale, they need to be treated like common carriers, who must handle all communications/transactions.
THIS. Why is this PoV even controversial? Especially given that the videogames in question weren't even illegal.
Hell, I don't even like those games, but it's about the precedent of corporate overreach: if it's all legal, Visa/MasterCard shouldn't be able to decide for me what games I'm allowed to buy, no matter how weird they may be. It's not their job to judge the legal kinks I'm up to in the privacy of my own home.
If the gov doesn't clamp down hard on them, I can only assume the gov is in on this grift of having corporations acting as unofficial censors and freedom of speech moderators for the state under the loophole of "the state didn't mess with your constitutional rights to freedom of expression, but what you did broke the ToS of the payment processors, so now they're free to de-bank you and take away your ability to buy and sell things. Tsk tsk, shouldn't have sent those memes making fun of JD Vance and Trump I guess".
> THIS. Why is this PoV even controversial?
Because it is stating that the government should control private behavior, which bumps into free speech and freedom of association issues. That gets pretty controversial.
There are other solutions to the stated problem:
> Given their market dominance, they should absolutely not have any right to refuse service.
The fix is to address the precondition in that statement: their market dominance. If a single entity is so powerful that it can control entire markets, then the problem is not what it does with that power, but that it has that power in the first place.
The solution to this problem is enforcing our existing anti-trust laws, not passing new laws to compel private behavior. We should not have only one or two entities that control this entire market. That's a sign of a broken market, and that's what must be addressed.
We already compel private behavior all the time when the private sector starts acting public - i.e. by running infrastructure and being vital to the function of the public.
The real solution IMO is even more unpopular: nationalize them. If it's a public service it should be handled by the public sector, such that the entirety of the constitution applies. We might even consider funding it not with payment fees, but tax dollars. Every American has a desire to have reliable instant transactions. So they should all pay.
Effectively, they already are - the 2-3% tax on card processors is a tax. If we nationalize it, we can even lower it, since we'd not longer be burdened by the pursuit of profit.
The companies in question are monopolies. If you can't get your payments processed by Visa and Mastercard, you are effectively debanked.
We collectively agreed long ago that monopolies do not get to enjoy the same freedoms that other companies do.
> We collectively agreed long ago that monopolies do not get to enjoy the same freedoms that other companies do.
I think that's generally only the case for natural monopolies, such as power infrastructure, where breaking them up isn't really a feasible solution (ie we don't want 20 different power lines running to each house). I don't think payment processing meets that standard, we could easily break them up and re-introduce competition into the market.
Having a payment processing industry with a lot of competing providers would be miserable
Imagine having to support every single type of provider for every transaction. I don't think it is a good idea at all
It wouldn't be so bad if they all supported some same standard.
I don't think this would happen without massive regulation.
And operating in different regulatory markets across the world is likely difficult
a) One way or another, that's "not letting them enjoy the same freedoms as other companies"
b) How would you then prevent them from re-amalgamating the way Verizon and AT&T did after the Baby Bell breakup? Not just for a few years afterward, but ever?
c) I think that payment processors actually make a pretty convincing natural monopoly: consider that if we had 400 payment processors with no common interface protocol between them (and let's face it, without being forced to, companies aren't going to make such a standard), your Baby Visa #27 credit card wouldn't be accepted at a merchant who only accepts Baby Mastercard #100-200 cards. And even accepting that many different payment processors would be pretty onerous.
Remember, this isn't the card issuers we're talking about; this is the backend processors. The only reason our current "universal" credit card infrastructure works is because nearly everyone takes Mastercard and Visa, and most credit cards—and many debit cards—are either Mastercard or Visa. Sure, it would be possible to create some kind of an interchange standard that all 400 processors would follow, but again, where's the incentive for any single processor?
> How would you then prevent them from re-amalgamating the way Verizon and AT&T did after the Baby Bell breakup? Not just for a few years afterward, but ever?
By continuing to enforce anti-trust legislation, though this time on the opposite M&A end.
> I think that payment processors actually make a pretty convincing natural monopoly
I guess I don't know enough to make an authoritative statement here, but I don't personally find this argument super convincing. I expect the actual breakup would be on the order of like 6-20 companies at most, and it wouldn't be rocket science for some middle-man to abstract out the processing. We solve many harder problems than that in the software industry every day.
But either way, it's a valid argument, and I think a court would be the right place to duke it out. If they are indeed a natural monopoly, then I agree it would be appropriate to start placing limits on their behavior.
i'd add, they're also not private. i mean, i know a publy-traded company is "in the private sector", but it's still a collectively-owned resource and that's a lot different from compelling a privately-owned company.
you are taking it for granted that corporations should largely be given the same civil rights as private citizens, as decided in citizens united v. FEC, but in my view this was one of the worst decisions to ever come out of the supreme court.
Hmm, maybe, I haven't thought about it much. The angle I'm taking is, as a private citizen I choose not to do business with entities I think are immoral, such as Amazon and Home Depot and Hobby Lobby and Uline and Tesla. If I were a business owner, I would prefer to continue to not to do business with those entities and I'd be pretty pissed if I was forced to by the government. That does seem to agree with your "same rights as private citizens" framing, yes, though I'm not sure I'd go so far as to defend the CU decision. I dunno. Interesting question, I'd welcome your thoughts on this.
Regulatory capture and regional monopolies aren't going anyway any time soon. Let's throw out another hypothetical.
How would you feel if the only broadband ISP in your area automatically blocked entire swaths of websites from you on the grounds that the ISP felt they were "immoral" (whatever that means)? And yes I know VPNs exist but that is missing the point.
Payment processors are "pipelines" in the same manner as ISPs should be. If the major ones (VISA/MC) block you from doing business, that's putting someone's entire livelihood at risk.
EDIT: For clarification, I agree that antitrust has never been weaker and that we do need better trust-busting. I just think that it is more realistic to focus on legislation around payment processors MC/VISA atm.
I agree natural monopolies such as ISPs can justify additional regulation. I'm not convinced payment processors are natural monopolies (see sibling thread, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44683153 ).
> I just think that it is more realistic to focus on legislation around payment processors MC/VISA atm.
I think it would be really, really, really hard to pass legislation requiring payment processors to service all customers, especially if you're using porn video games as the champion of your cause. Even if it did pass, I suspect it'd be pretty quickly declared unconstitutional and personally, I think that would be the correct call.
We already have anti-trust laws. We've used them before. "All" we have to do is enforce them.
The alternative is to allow private behavior to do the dirty jobs instead, which is even worse
This is how it's been done in the USA since 9/11. Data isn't subpoenaed (would getting into people's rights) it's just bought (no rights violation). Controls aren't from the government, they are 'implementing industry standards'. Want to silence someone? Deplatform them. Want to deny access? Flag them with an opaque trust score. No constitutional rights are violated.
Indeed, breaking up the too-big companies nicely solves several of these issues. It's much harder to deplatform someone if there are a dozen viable social media/video/critical Internet infrastructure companies, instead of just one or two.
>not passing new laws to compel private behavior.
I have IRL facepalmed reading this. This comment gave me the equivalent exposure to 10 hours on X/Twitter. Mate, the reason you now have clean air, safe to eat food and drinking water is BECAUSE OF government compelling private behavior.
With your logic we should have just waited for free market competition to kick in for Cocal-Cola and McDonalds to decide on their own to stop putting arsenic into our food or for Ford and GM to produce engines with lower emissions.
The reason we have government compelling private behavior is that corporate interests are more likely and more easily to collude to fuck over the consumer together for profit, than consumers can do the same in order to intact desired change on the free market.
You are correct, I don't think not being able to purchase porn games rises to the same level of danger as unsafe food or climate change, to require the government to tell businesses how they may operate.
> With your logic we should have just waited for free market competition to kick in Cocal cola and McDonalds to deiced on their own to stop putting arsenic into our food.
I don't think that's a fair comparison. No one is dying here. I do think the government should step into this market and perform major intervention by breaking up the big two companies into many little ones who can compete. After that, some payment processors may choose to support these business models despite the hit to their stock price (or whatever Visa's dumb argument is for not allowing these games).
>I don't think not being able to purchase porn games rises to the same level of danger as unsafe food or climate change
Holy cow, so many comments here and you still missed the point by a mile. The point isn't video games, the point is payment processors shouldn't be arbiters on what you buy. Because if they can stop you buying/selling video games, they can do the same for other stuff. Where does their right to censor you begin and end?
> the point is payment processors shouldn't be arbiters on what you buy. Because if they can stop you buying/selling video games, they can do the same for other stuff.
We both agree this is bad. What we are discussing is how best to solve it.
In the scenario where we enforced existing anti-trust law and broke up the big 2 to form many smaller payment processors, one of the newly formed processors could pick up the business that the pickier processors don't want and take that profit, right? So it solves the problem, without having to pass any controversial new laws about compelling private business behavior.
> I have IRL facepalmed reading this. This comment gave me the equivalent exposure to 10 hours on X/Twitter.
I don't know man, jumping into a conversation like this is a great way to get people to NOT listen. I agree with your following point and would add I find these matters more complicated. For example, you wouldn't be typing a comment on this site without the kind of corporate freedom that raised the standard of living for the entire planet resulting in a shared technological advancement. Seems this is always a trade off, how much freedom are you willing to give up for centralized fascist governmental control?
>I don't know man, jumping into a conversation like this is a great way to get people to NOT listen.
Nobody said I was wrong though. You can disagree with the messenger, but you can't disagree with the message.
I'm saying you're wrong because you cannot substantiate your point. Quantify it and I will admit I'm wrong.
That gets pretty controversial.
Is this issue always controversial?
Is it controversial that companies aren't allowed to refuse service based on gender or race (in the US at least)?
> Is it controversial that companies aren't allowed to refuse service based on gender or race (in the US at least)?
Those are legal categories known as "protected classes," and yeah, it was and is pretty controversial[1]. I think you'd have a hard time getting purchasers of porn games declared a protected class.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964 ; further reading, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_group
Actually, it's not really controversial anymore [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964
Companies shouldn't have rights.
If I'm the sole owner and only employee of a small business, should I have the right to choose my clients? If so, at what size/scale/level of market capture should I lose my rights?
Well there's a difference between a small business and the effective duopoly that is Visa/Mastercard.
To some extent, no. In my opinion* you shouldn't get to say "I refuse to design websites for gay people."
*: Not always the same as Sam Alito's
That's not usually the problem (it can be for some). It's really when your art/"identity" is being used to promote something you don't believe in. That happens across the whole religious and political spectrum... e.g. musicians that don't want their art used in certain contexts.
About the OP, government is the right place where we "fight it out" and try to sloppily design a system to move forward as one; these seemingly activist campaigns to "jawbone" private companies is absolutely a sign that something needs to be done at the government side. However, there are very entitled, rich interests behind the banking system, so yeah, there isn't one easy solution i think.
It's an interesting one - I've always thought that businesses should have no right to refuse business, and it kind of already exists, for example you can't refuse to serve a customer purely on the basis of their skin color.
Likewise, if a casino or betting company (ladbrokes, for example) have customers that win too often, I also think it should be illegal to stop them betting. Fundamentally if you're running a business that is an uneven coin toss (to your favour) and you have customers that are able to make money off you - that's your fault for having a bad business model.
So to answer your question, any size.
If you run a restaurant and a known dine-and-dasher walks in, can you not refuse to serve them?
If you're a consultant do you have no right to refuse a client? Even if you have other clients you'd rather work for, or that particular client is a bad fit for you, or any other reason?
If you run a transport company, and you think someone is trying to get you to move illegal goods, or goods that you have moral qualms about transporting (such as a vegan being asked to transport livestock for slaughter) do you have no right to refuse?
Known dine-and-dasher - no, I think you should be forced to serve them. You don't know if they're going to dine and dash you, you're not the police or the courts, punishing a dine and dasher. Your job is to serve food to those who pay you. If you've got a problem, make them pay for food first?
Consultant - unless you've got a legitimate need to reject providing services to them, I tend to think the same, you should have to serve them if they're trying to pay you, or there's a legitimate business need to avoid that client.
Transport company - it's not your job to judge what's being moved. It's your job to move something from A to B. If you want to avoid moving livestock, don't go into the transport business. Should that same vegan be allowed to not teach kids in school because the kids they teach eat ham sandwiches? Should they be allowed to reject someone from banking services just because they own a fur coat?
These all sound wild and like their impeding on all kinds of freedoms - you’re saying that a business should be compelled to serve or work with anyone that offers to pay them which is _wild_.
The issue comes down to when you refuse to work with someone because of an immutable property - race, gender, age, etc - denying someone from coming into your restaurant because they’ve ripped you off is completely fine and I can’t see why it shouldn’t be. This smacks of “freedom of speech” when people get mad that a private platform told them they couldn’t say mean things.
But say you're a concreter, you've worked with a client who's an absolute prick - doesn't do anything illegal exactly but he's a total stickler with your work, calls you all the time with stupid questions, tries to find problems everywhere to justify a discount (despite you having hypothetically done the job perfectly), pays as late as possible. Shouldn't you have the right to not take on another job for this guy?
You're right - but in that instance the justification in my mind (and what you'd presumably argue if challenged legally) is that they're difficult to work with - which I'm okay with.
But not wanting to concrete that person's driveway because they're in the army, or because they're a politician or whatever else along those lines I think shouldn't be allowed.
Okay, I will now say "they are difficult to work with" or "i don't have time" every time a client walks up that I don't want to serve. Infact, that's exactly what a lot of handymen say already to avoid the irritation associated with declining a job. I hope you see how your "ought" will be difficult to implement in practice
Can't you price that into their bill, or require payment before services? That is what most construction companies already do, if you are a pain in the ass they charge you more and more until you either don't want it any more or they are satisfied that their pay is worth your trouble, and if payment is potentially questionable they make you pay beforehand.
None of this has anything to do with companies having rights. You as a person can choose to not to business with another person.
But given that companies are made up of people, where does the line get drawn? If your concreting business has a couple of other guys working does it still count?
This is completely unworkable in the real world
"Small" is doing a lot of work there.
Large entrenched companies have leverage small businesses do not, in the same way that a large moon orbits in a way a test particle of infinitesimal mass does not. We already recognize this with respect to monopoly law: you lose your right to do certain things to your competitors precisely when you're large enough that you could reasonably suppress them.
That is essentially what we are talking about here: a duopoly that is actively suppressing competition. My understanding is that the big-two payment processors don't just refuse to process certain payments, they also refuse to work with banks who work with payment processors who will. Assuming that I am correct in that understanding (I might not be, this is not my area of expertise), that would prevent (or at least hinders) someone from just saying "there is a market need here" and forming their own payment processor to fill that need. To me, that seems like a problem for the exact same reasons that monopolies are a problem, and regulating against monopolies is not particularly controversial.
Plenty of laws around the world have exemptions for small businesses so it is a moot point
Please elaborate?
Companies are groups of people. Why should people have rights separately but not when they decide to work together in a group?
That makes sense only if they also have legal responsibilities to go along with their rights.
Take for example PG&E, the large gas/electric utility for the northern 2/3rds of California. PG&E is a convicted felon and was sentenced to five years probation, but they remain un-rehabilitated.[0] Under your theory, the "group" with the rights should have been jailed. Instead, a new layer of rights is created out of thin air for the corporation but no meaningful responsibility was ever assigned, unlike individuals.
[0]https://liberationnews.org/pges-rap-sheet-the-criminal-histo...
PG&E is certainly a grotesque entity, no argument there. Of course, it's a government created and strictly regulated monopoly as well.
Agreed. Trump should shut down the NYT, Bluesky, and any other media corporation that questions him.
> Visa/Mastercard should have the right to refuse service
Really? If this was any other small to medium business where there were potentially tens, hundreds or even thousands of viable alternate businesses that provide what could be deemed as an equivalent service I might agree, but a global payments duopoly is essentially public infrastructure and should not be able to discriminate based on protected characteristics or personal subjective moral compass.
I agree with your assessment of the current situation. But I think the solution is to break up the duopoly, either by leveling the playing field or creating government-run alternatives, rather than force the duopoly to do certain things.
This is the “instead of providing school lunches, eliminate poverty” argument.
I am fully supportive of fostering competition. But until the market actualky changes, monopilies / duopolies should be regulated to prevent this abuse of power.
Rejecting a simple tactical solution in favor of a future systemic overhaul is classic perfect vs good.
Calling for the creation of a government run alternative isn't arguing against School Lunches. It's the exact opposite.
There is still an alternative, plain paper cash, and is run by the government. Won't trust most governments these days to do it though
Governments put up infinite hurdles to creating new payment processors. There actually used to be more of them before the industry consolidated. Also Discover just got bought and American Express is getting their ass kicked by the big two.
People have been trying and failing to create new payment processing companies since at least the 90s. The richest men in the world, even (Musk).
Governments prefer the current status quo.
As public infrastructure shouldn't the public take on the burden of funding and operation risk? Or are we saying we should force others to do what we want with their money?
I think you'll find that's already the case. MC/VISA would have an implicit underwriting by the US govt should they ever be in extreme strife. We've already seen this happen before, the UK govt bailed out RBS, largely because of things like being responsible for 1/3 of all transactions that happened in Europe at the time.
Various airlines were also bailed out over the COVID period. So I'd say that it already exists, except the public sees no benefit.
I agree that governments shouldn't provide bailouts without receiving equity for that compensation. The idea that any company is too big to fail undermines the smaller competitors who are making better decisions and have a strategic advantage in surviving economic challenges.
Absolutely. But on the flip side I can also recognise that frankly, governments are terrible at running things. I think a Singapore style model is best - a giant holding company like Temasek that is wholly government funded and owned, but companies owned by the holding company are still beholden to the free market forces, are the best way to go for things like payment processors, airlines, utilities, etc.
As long as the public gets to benefit from the profits these companies make just like any other shareholder. It could be a nice solution to the deficit problem.
I guess I was using the phrase to broadly mean a service that's intended to be available for use by the general public and with the service itself providing a means to an end without 'public ownership' being part of that (in the same vein as 'public' transport). Not sure if there's a more appropriate term here.
But, effectively, you want to tell other people what to do with their money without taking on any financial risk for those policies. The majority shareholders for Visa are retirement accounts and retail investors. Why does one segment of the public get to tell another segment of the public what to do with their money without putting any skin in the game?
> But, effectively, you want to tell other people what to do with their money without taking on any financial risk for those policies.
For this kind of service (again leaning on a classification as 'public infrastructure') I suppose my answer is yes.
> Why does one segment of the public get to tell another segment of the public what to do with their money without putting any skin in the game?
I'm suggesting that regulation prevents them from _disallowing_ access to payments services for things that are not explicitly illegal. In this case I don't see 'Telling X what to do' and 'Telling X that they're NOT allowed to refuse to provide service in these cases' as the same thing, even though they're both essentially 'Mandating that X operate in a certain way'. The difference here being that refusal of service, while still being a choice about how to run, is explicitly a blocking choice for others in certain situations, and not just a choice to, for example, create a new credit product for the market.
> Why does one segment of the public get to tell another segment of the public what to do with their money without putting any skin in the game?
Is this not also just Collective Shout themselves pressuring the payment processors into refusing transactions from a third party for content that they themselves deem inappropriate?
> The majority shareholders for Visa are retirement accounts and retail investors
Is Visa not refusing a legitimate transaction (non-fraudulent, no rollback or refund) going to hurt these investors when part of their investment income comes from usage fees? And if an investor that has concerns about _how_ their investment makes money is that not now a different issue?
Edit: Added last point about shareholders.
Because we know that not doing so leads to bad outcomes, and in some cases, to outright catastrophe.
A person who was not invested in subprime mortgages in 2006 had no skin in the game - yet the fact that others did invest in subprime mortgages created instabilities that threatened them. Virtually everyone agrees, in retrospect, that something should have been done then. But it wasn't, with precisely the justification you're articulating here. The problem is that that person did in fact have skin in the game, because the outcome had important ramifications for their life even if those ramifications were not in the form of direct financial losses.
Now, sure, your ability to buy furry porn is very different from sparking a global recession. But you're implicitly articulating a very strong claim here, that you cannot regulate economic activity to which you are not a party. That has a clear counterexample well within the memories of most people reading this thread.
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I think we agree that private individuals should be able to purchase legal content from the people who produce it. Without action here, that will become either impossible or very difficult, to the point of having a major chilling effect. I think we also agree that businesses should generally have the right to conduct business as they see fit, both because it allows the exploration of new ideas and because market economics is a powerful force for increasing productivity.
To me, that says that there is a tension between two irreconcilable rights. On one side, we have the rights of businesses to act in their economic best interest (which is important!). On the other side, we have the rights of individuals to (actually and with reasonable effort) engage in lawful private microeconomic activity. And when you encounter such a tension, you need to consider:
- How important the rights are
- How much of one you get by sacrificing some of the other
In this case, I would consider the ability of individuals to conduct microeconomic activity more important than the ability of corporations to conduct what is effectively a PR campaign (since no one seems to be of the opinion that payment processors are actually taking a loss on people buying porn, they're just caving to political pressure). And I think the restriction of payment processors here is small compared to the potential restriction on private individuals. So to me, the trade-off has a clear winner.
If you disagree with this chain of reasoning, can you explain where?
I'm not seeing where private citizens are prevented from engaging in lawful private microeconomic activity when a privately owned payment processor doesn't want to engage in certain transactions. The private citizen has the option to pay cash, bitcoin, trade goods or services, etc. Are these options as convenient in this day and age as tapping a credit card? No, but that doesn't mean everyone is entitled to convenience in every situation.
Also, how do you reconcile the fact that many US citizens, for religious or other reasons, can't in good conscience endorse certain economic exchanges? A government that is supposed to represent the needs of all citizens would fail if it engaged in facilitating transactions that some portion of its population found immoral or inappropriate. The public has no say in private, legal, transactions but public enforcement on private entities is a different story; akin to endorsement.
The best we can do is ensure that private citizens have the freedom to engage in legal transactions. But if we start forcing private entities to participate in every legal transaction, we risk setting a precedent that could backfire. Especially when a future administration decides to enforce or block transactions based on political or ideological grounds that conflict with our own values.
> The private citizen has the option to pay cash, bitcoin, trade goods or services, etc...everyone is[n't] entitled to convenience in every situation.
These options aren't small impositions, they're sufficient added overhead that they dwarf the value of the transaction itself. Bitcoin is the only one of them that seems vaguely realistic to me, but most people don't (and shouldn't) keep their own crypto wallets and don't (and can't) get paid in crypto, so that still requires interaction with third-party processors on two levels. It needs one level to convert fiat to crypto and vice-versa and another to conduct the crypto transaction.
Put another way, the sites that are shutting down this content clearly have substantial financial incentive not to do so. If they thought they had a reasonable alternative, don't you think they'd be using it? And if decent-sized companies with financial incentives cannot find an alternative that seems practicable, what makes you think private individuals are reasonably able to do so?
The broader issue here is one of monopoly, and I guess it might be helpful to zoom out here a bit. Do you think a company with market dominance should be able to engage in (otherwise legal) anticompetitive practices to suppress new companies in their domain? If it were up to you whether to have anti-trust law, would you have it?
If yes: isn't this essentially the same problem? These payment processors have a duopoly and are suppressing alternatives who would take these payments (and might outcompete them in the market on that basis).
If not: are you not concerned about a failure-state where monopolies (a) control critical sectors like finance with an unbreakable grip, (b) intertwine that grip with governments who want to circumvent civil liberties protections to suppress private action, and thus (c) become a de facto shadow government whose behavior - by virtue of being nominally private - isn't subject to constitutional protections or court oversight?
> The private citizen has the option to pay cash, bitcoin, trade goods or services, etc.
As far as I understand, this isn't an option. I'm Brazilian, so I can easily pay with PIX (and I have never used a credit card with Steam, since PIX is just so much more convenient). But Steam isn't allowed to sell me that content; if they try, even if they restrict it only to those who pay with PIX, my understanding is that these two global payment processors will stop working with them. And since unfortunately most of the world doesn't have yet something similar to PIX, that would mean losing access to a lot of people.
> Visa/Mastercard should have the right to refuse service.
No. A company beyond certain size functions more akin to a government body providing public service, and should be treated as such. Imagine the only ISP in the area refusing to provide service because fuck you that's why. Or Microsoft banning you from using Windows ever again. Think about it for a second - if Apple made a policy "iPhones cannot be sold to black people" would you say that a private company has all the rights to refuse service?
I think the market would punish Apple sufficiently enough for something like that and government intervention wouldn't be required...
What about a small, local ISP? Should they be able to refuse to provide service? At what size can/should the government step in a force companies to do things?
A small local ISP serving a small area would be a https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly
Usually it is agreed that sometimes the infra costs are high, so there cannot be two or more competitors, so they are granted a monopoly in exchange for fulfilling the duty to serve the community.
> I think the market would punish Apple sufficiently enough for something like that and government intervention wouldn't be required...
Ah yes. The invisible magic hand of free market that solves all problems. Except it doesn't. See Uber expanding its service where for a small fee you can avoid dealing with people from undesirable social class. Not exactly the same thing, but still the idea of free market promoting immoral solutions rather than eliminating them.
> At what size can/should the government step in a force companies to do things?
At a size when the society starts depending on your service for daily functioning. When it becomes essential. For example in my country it's an issue that you can't have a business without a bank account but sometimes banks just... refuse to make an account for you and your company won't function.
> For example in my country it's an issue that you can't have a business without a bank account but sometimes banks just... refuse to make an account for you and your company won't function.
But is everyone entitled to have a business? Is that written in the country's laws somewhere that everyone must be allowed to have a business?
>Ah yes. The invisible magic hand of free market that solves all problems. Except it doesn't. See Uber expanding its service where for a small fee you can avoid dealing with people from undesirable social class. Not exactly the same thing, but still the idea of free market promoting immoral solutions rather than eliminating them.
I think you are mistaking the market for the people. The market is a natural manifestation of what people want. If people want high social class drivers and are willing to pay for it...taking away the option is not going to make them not want those drivers.
This a myopia similar to the war on drugs. The government thought regulating the drug market (that is, total ban) would make people not want to do drugs. We all know how well that worked out.
The market is the messenger, don't shoot it.
>The government thought regulating the drug market (that is, total ban) would make people not want to do drugs
Eh, that is what was sold to the mainstream idiot. The 'war on drugs' has almost always been a fight against immigrants and minorities. The free market doesn't solve racism against minorities.
The prohibition then if that one is easier to grasp. Same deal. It didn't stop anyone from liking alcohol, and just swept it all under the rug.
> I think the market would punish Apple sufficiently enough for something like that and government intervention wouldn't be required...
There was a time when if you served "Negroes" at your soda fountain, you could expect the market to punish you. You'd lose your white customers, who had a lot more money to spend at soda fountains.
It took a whole lot to change over to a world where doing the opposite would lead to market "punishment", and it's not obvious that it wouldn't be damned easy to change back.
Get out of fantasyland and stop worshipping the market. It's not a benevolent god.
Clarifying I find the furry art weird, and not pornographic. (Weird is fine btw, normal is the worse insult imho)
I think the biggest issue is the damage that the word "Censorship" has taken in the last few years. If I ran a payment processor, the first thing I would do is try to be as neutral as my moral compass allows. The second thing I would do is intentionally stop processing payments on behalf of anyone I was uncomfortable with on a personal level. I dont support a thing, so I wont give material support to a thing. Thats not censorship. Its not censorship when amazon removes a book, or a publisher takes something out of print. If everything is censorship, including freedom of association, nothing is censorship.
I think the best thing that can be done about this problem is to promote and create alternate payment processors. The second best thing is to help these sites accept crypto payments (yes I know the article hung a lantern on that, but still)
While freedom of association is fine on a personal level and maybe for small businesses, big corporation that are monopolies or oligopolies shouldn't have this freedom. They should be regulated and forced to serve everyone otherwise they have the power to exclude some people completely from such services with no alternative. Due to their power, their decisions affect people as if they are government decisions, yet we don't have a say on it like we do with the government so it's even worse than government censorship yet some people justify it because they are "private companies" as if that means something.
>big corporation that are monopolies or oligopolies
Monopolies and Duopolies suck even with regulation. If you want a state owned payment processor, pursue that goal. But you will end up in the same place, with reactionary leaders using the service to ban things that the voters disagree with, which sometimes will be porn in all likelihood.
>"private companies" as if that means something.
A private company can be competed with. You can legally pay these websites just not via those 2 most popular options. If something is actually censored, the state will use violence to prevent you accessing it. Theres a video kicking around the internet of NSW cops snatching a VHS tape from the hands of people trying to run a small banned film festival. Thats definitionally censorship. I know you want to take the anger people have at censorship, and transfer it away from the government to people you dont like, but its simply not censorship.
> Due to their power, their decisions affect people as if they are government decisions
The inertia of people who wont change their purchasing decisions to avoid those to options is the issue. Not their choice not to process payments.
What philosophical argument would you make for or against excommunication in the Middle Age?
There's a good reason religious tolerance was an outcome of the Enlightenment.
That religion and government have no place with each other.
Why do we have this idea that big corporations are these giant scary entities disconnected from real people? Majority shareholders for Visa are the retirement accounts of regular people and retail investors. We want the public to dictate the actions of what other regular people do with their money without taking on any financial risk for those policies.
Allow me to explain by analogy:
To put it another way, why should society collectively make our pensions 1% better when the trade-off that entire categories of legal work, that our democracies have decided should remain legal, are made impossible to perform by the choices of a handful of private businesses that are big enough to set rules without being accountable to the democracies they operate within?> Why do we have this idea that big corporations are these giant scary entities disconnected from real people?
Because they are. The corporate structure as well as the internal and external systems in our political/legal/economic systems are designed specifically to make corporations work as economic engines where risk, responsibility, and liability are distributed and diluted to the point it they pretty much evaporate. This means that corporations can do things like commit full on crimes, without any real person going to jail. Why? Because they are disconnected from real people by design.
I think this is a core reason behind the amount of public elation seen when the United Healthcare CEO was killed: people were happy to see an example of the piercing of a corporate structure carefully constructed to shield leadership from personal responsibility for its decisions.
> Its not censorship when amazon removes a book
Analogies like this are misleading, IMO. Like if a theater chooses not to show a certain movie that's obviously not censorship, but if the water company effectively prevents the movie from showing by threatening to cut off the theater's water, colloquially the term would certainly apply. And what happened here seems a lot closer to the latter than the former.
> best thing .. to promote and create alternate payment processors
That would only make sense in your analogy, where the shutoff stemmed from the payment processor owner's moral compass. What actually happened here is that an advocacy group hounded the biggest processors into it, so as other processors get big enough, by symmetry the same thing will repeat.
It seems to me that what's needed here is other advocacy groups willing to hound the processors in the other direction.
In a perfect world, Visa/Mastercard would turn around to the advocacy groups and say "Alright, obviously you are not happy with our service level, so we do not force you to be our customers. In fact, we just cancelled all the cards of your members. Have a nice day."
It would even make sense financially, because porn sure brings in more dough in processing fees than Kristian Karen who pays for her Starbucks Latte with plastic.
As long as being unreasonable does carry no risk people will continue to be unreasonable.
how would a group hound the processors in the other direction?
also, how are these "puritan" groups doing the hounding? I mean, are they threatening some kind of legal action? based on old (or not so old) obscenity laws?
could the against hounding group do the same? on what legal basis? or is it enough to do the usual "securities fraud" angle?
maybe what matters is how much money the hounding group credibly has to spend on lawyers?
> also, how are these "puritan" groups doing the hounding? I mean, are they threatening some kind of legal action? based on old (or not so old) obscenity laws?
They're not suing them in civil court, they're threatening to use the court of public perception against them. If they allow these payments the activism groups will set up a campaign titled something like "Visa facilitates incest and child abuse!" and "Mastercard allows you to see women getting beaten".
This is a very effective strategy because there's nothing more important to these companies than a squeaky clean brand image. And what they perceive as damaging to their brand image is entirely subjective and just depends on whether an activist group can spin it in a way that looks bad for them.
Also, it's worth reading the wiki page on the group behind this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melinda_Tankard_Reist#Collecti...
To me it doesn't look like this group is so powerful that they forced the payment processors to do stuff. It looks more like, this group campaigns tirelessly, year in, year out, against all kinds of miscellaneous stuff they dislike, and every so often they get a W somewhere because they're more persistent than groups pushing in the other direction.
The defender needs to win every battle, the attacker only needs to win one.
Broadly speaking I'd usually agree, except that Visa/Mastercard are a two-company oligopoly at this point, with effectively no meaningful competition. Yes, other payment mechanisms exist, but consider how much it limits the viability of an online business to not accept credit cards.
There's a gajillion currencies, banking systems, wallets, crypto, amex.
Widen your category definition and you'll see it.
I say again:
> consider how much it limits the viability of an online business to not accept credit cards
For the vast majority of online businesses, accepting exclusively crypto, or exclusively bank payments, would result in much less business. Orders of magnitude less business. They are not viable alternatives for the vast majority of purposes.
> For the vast majority of online businesses, accepting exclusively crypto, or exclusively bank payments, would result in much less business. Orders of magnitude less business.
I would add a qualifier to your statement: for the vast majority of global online businesses. An online business serving a single country could make use of country-specific payment systems, which are often very popular. If a Brazil-only online business accepted only payments through PIX and boleto bancário, that could result in less business, but not orders of magnitude less business.
Sure; that was exactly the kind of case that previously led me to edit my comment to add the "for the vast majority" qualifier. Similarly, bank payments are popular in European countries because there are convenient wrappers around them, if you're only selling to certain countries.
Along the same lines, I qualified it as "online businesses" because there are still some brick-and-mortar businesses that require cash. It's still limiting your business, but less so, especially if you're in a context where people expect many businesses to be that way (e.g. a farmer's market).
But for online businesses that aren't country-specific, which I'd argue is the vast majority of online businesses? You accept credit cards or you get a lot less business. (And the next-most-popular option, PayPal, does even more of this kind of thing than Visa and MasterCard do, and much more capriciously.)
I don't think the debate people are having is about Brazil.
And how many are viable alternatives?
> The second thing I would do is intentionally stop processing payments on behalf of anyone I was uncomfortable with on a personal level
Corporations do not have a "personal level"
They do lol. They are run by humans.
This is fair, as long as you're a small operation, and those you didn't like can go shop elsewhere. Visa + MasterCard are a duopoly controlling the overwhelming majority of the market, and if they ban a seller, there's little else the seller can switch to.
I think a processor like Visa could benefit a lot from the status similar to the "common carrier". Like a telephone network must offer service to anyone, but cannot be held liable for the content of the communication (even if criminals are using it), Visa could accept the requirement to pass payments to any counterparty in exchange for dropping the KYC requirements. Let banks and merchants care about that.
I don't think that the US or EU government would agree to grant such a status though.
It's censorship because literally a censor activist group engaged in a campaign to push these processors to do this.
If your water company stops delivering water to you because you post furry porn it becomes a problem. The problem is when a company becomes so big that it is a natural monopoly (or effectively part of a cartel), while basically being necessary infrastructure to operate in a modern society.
These payment networks fit that description, and should either be broken apart so that you get the necessary competition, or be regulated so that they have to provide service for legal goods and services in a given jurisdiction.
This is a mis-definition of censorship, similar to what happens to 'propaganda', where you're only considering the censorship that you don't like to be censorship.