> Put simply, we allow all lawful purchases on our network.
But their "Rule 5.12.7" is... not so clear:
> A Merchant must not submit to its Acquirer, and a Customer must not submit to the Interchange System, any Transaction that is illegal, or in the sole discretion of the Corporation, may damage the goodwill of the Corporation or reflect negatively on the Marks.
Well, which one is it now? All lawful purchases (pretty clear-cut) or only lawful purchases that will not "reflect negatively" on Mastercard in Mastercard's opinion (vague as hell)?
We need Congress to make a law here in the US that businesses involved in facilitating financial transactions in the United States are considered “common carriers” and must not discriminate against, cancel or disadvantage any customer or legal transaction, without a court order.
We can write language to allow booting people for fraud, hacking, etc if “legal” + “court order” are insufficient.
>(b) Prohibition.—No payment card network, including a subsidiary of a payment card network, may, directly or through any agent, processor, or licensed member of the network, by contract, requirement, condition, penalty, or otherwise, prohibit or inhibit the ability of any person who is in compliance with the law, including section 8 of this Act, to obtain access to services or products of the payment card network because of political or reputational risk considerations.
Then the goalposts shift to: “This isn’t for reputational risk, it’s because we consider fraud more likely for this type of industry, and we are within our rights to take a proactive approach to fraud.” And there is no requirement that they disclose the reasons for that decision.
Don’t get me wrong: it’s progress. But it’s far from a panacea.
It would be a hard sell to finger Steam as being at high risk of fraud. Steam has a very generous refund policy, and if you don't consider it generous enough, and chargeback a purchase on your Steam account, they just lock it (and access to all your games) until you pay them.
I don't have insider information about how often Steam gets hit with fraud alleged chargebacks, but I can't imagine it's a significant percentage.
> Don’t get me wrong: it’s progress. But it’s far from a panacea.
Progress in this day and age is great. Progress right now is at least 2 orders of magnitude better than patiently waiting for a panacea.
For fraud related risk they should still be considered a common carriers but may adjust rates for certain types of transactions or businesses, if, in good faith and backed by empirical data, they can demonstrate the monetary risk to the card processor, and that the increased transaction costs are aligned with the level of risk and are not punitive or discriminatory.
The key point here is ”good faith”.
I don’t want to disadvantage their business or make them absorb fraud costs, but I want all excuses off the table.
OTOH Visa and MasterCard testified in front of Congress a couple of months ago that they have >50% profit margins which indicates to me that there is a regulatory failure in antitrust here.
i think that sounds like a perfectly fine compromise - choosing not to provide services that are an especially high risk of fraud should be within their rights.
it just means that they could be forced to defend those decisions in court, which is good and exactly the sort of thing that courts are supposed to decide.
This sounds great on paper, but what incentive does Valve have fighting for a game listing with only 100 players?
I get the feeling many companies would find it easier to allow payment processors to censor something if the product isn't earning them much anyway.
"That's one of our least popular items we sell so honestly we don't really care..."
Which is within the right for the reseller to decide, but it does nothing for protecting access to a product that's otherwise only available on a select few digital storefronts.
Then it becomes an issue for the game studio, who may not have the funding to fight a case to remain available. And then you have a situation where the game studio has become a victim of a payment processor's conspiracy theory that they're tied to fraud.
The section is not without its own flaws, mainly in 5(c):
> (c) Civil penalty.—Any payment card network that violates subsection (b) shall be assessed a civil penalty by the Comptroller of the Currency of not more than 10 percent of the value of the services or products described in that subsection, not to exceed $10,000 per violation.
I see 2 problems as it is currently written: (1) The penalty's too low, & (2) restricting dispense of the law to only the Comptroller renders it ineffective.
(1) is easily solvable with regards to editing the text alone: raise the limit to 50% & $100k respectively.
(2) is also solvable, by striking out "by the Comptroller of the Currency", or adding in ", or by a federal court, whichever penalty is higher, " at the end of that part.
Right now there are things that a significant majority think are terrible and shouldn't exist but aren't a high enough priority to actually make illegal because they are small because most mainstream service providers don't want to serve them.
Take that away an those things might grow enough that they do become a priority for legally banning.
The US barely has any genuinely left-wing politicians (Bernie Sanders, AOC, DSA). There are no one who realistically could be called far left in any significant position of governing power.
Even these are not far left, they're just basic liberal left.
Which groups or media that are commonly labeled 'far left' that are calling for nationalizing all land. Or eliminating all inheritances. Or nationalizing all communications and transportation industries. Or nationalizing the Federal Reserve (that one's really gone horseshoe theory, and is a republican plan now).
The only thing 'far left' people want to nationalize is health care, and that's simply the fiscally responsible policy. The thing that is crushing the federal budget is the obscene level of graft occurring in that industry, and the only way out is to nationalize or otherwise burn the existing system to the ground via government policy.
There's a whole bunch of socialism to the right of *!=) Marx and the left of classic liberalism.
Words have meaning, trying to characterise "far left" as some sort of US caricature of Blue haired liberal types is less than useful and only serves right wing outlets.
There is very little left wing discourse in the US.
GP was saying that there are hardly far left politicians, saying that the few that exist are Sanders/AOC/DSA.
I was just pointing out that even these are not actual socialists, they're Democratic Socialists of the stripe you find in the mainstream in a lot of staunchly capitalist European nations. There are definitely zero literal far-left politicians, objectively speaking.
Socialist/social democrat are two related but distinct concepts are confusing for those not versed in political science, but their definitions have certainly not changed: democratic socialists for example don't advocate for communal ownership or central planning. The actual policies put forward by DSA candidates in the US, viewed through a political science analysis, are vanilla liberal. The only thing making them 'far left' is that actual far right monied interests have systematically dragged the Overton Window into a place where "public figure performing the Nazi salute on the capitol steps" is "controversial, in some circles" rather than "immediately career-ending."
Yes - the Overton window in the US has shifted so far right that a Nazi salute is more or less mainstream, whereas democratic socialists like Sanders/AOC are now "far left". And judges who dare block Trump's actions are, of course, "radical left lunatics" (https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/federal-judge...).
This is a case where left and right can work together for totally different reasons. The left is fighting for rape porn in video games, and the right doesn’t want gun stores definanced. Both win with credit platform neutrality.
"that businesses involved in facilitating financial transactions in the United States are considered “common carriers” and must not discriminate against, cancel or disadvantage any customer or legal transaction, without a court order"
provide? It might have prevented Visa and Mastercard from being brought into the PornHub lawsuit... in the US. It wouldn't have protected them from Australian laws weaponized by organizations such as Collective Shout.
... and risk adverse international companies (like Visa and Mastercard) need to follow the laws everywhere despite what various jurisdictions shield them from in those jurisdictions.
No: it’s cheaper for them to follow the minimum common compliance across all countries, but Mastercard-sized firms absolutely can and often do vary compliance per country (gestures at Google, Facebook) when it’s profitable to do so. Mastercard could have simply enforced Australia-specific rules on Itch if they’d wanted to, but they’re anxious about being labeled as smutty due to domestic U.S., and apparently exported Australian, puritanism. The solution is to ensure that cowardice does more lasting harm to their brand than they feel that their strategy prevents — which requires both loud and immediate response, as well as sustained pressure over time.
Mastercard and Visa have rather corse information about the transactions.
They've got the credit card number, the merchant name, the time, and the total amount of the transaction.
They do not have line item level filtering of a transaction. Remember those old carbon paper credit card thingies? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_card_imprinter - that's all that's needed and all they get. Similarly, the credit card terminals where the merchant enters the amount, swipes the card (or reads the chip) and that's it is sufficient.
Mastercard and Visa would only be able to say "that merchant" not "that product." Filtering based on products and if it's legal there needs to be done by the merchant. Mastercard cannot check to see if someone is selling liquor to an underage customer... but if a merchant is doing that, Mastercard may drop that merchant as one of their clients.
If Itch and Valve are unable to enforce Australia specific laws on their own storefront, Mastercard and Visa can only enforce it at the "this merchant isn't allowed to transact with our network."
Mastercard can deny all transactions from Australia-billed cards to one merchant if they wish to. They are absolutely wired up for “Area of Use” internally and have this data available to their transaction approval processes. That they chose not to use it, instead pressuring merchants to remove content disliked by an Australian puritanical fringe group, is the corporate laziness I describe. Why respond with their own effort when they can just externalize the problem onto their customers, etc.
Mastercard does not have that information. Mastercard doesn't do the billing. The bank does the billing.
Mastercard does not know the location where a given card holder is (or for that matter, any demographic information about the card holder). They know where the merchant is, but that's less useful for digital goods.
Per section 7 here — https://www.mastercard.us/content/dam/public/mastercardcom/n... — MasterCard could simply remove Australia from Itch’s Area of Use, at which point they would not be permitted to accepted MasterCard from Australian customers, which the merchant could trivially enforce by country filter on the billing address.
I suspect we’re going to find out that Stripe is unwilling to risk losing Mastercard in Australia and also unwilling to implement passthrough AoU restrictions to their sublicensees, and Mastercard isn’t willing to act against any single customer of Stripe or else they don’t profit from the “not our problem” discount rate they issue Stripe to make it their problem.
If an American company chooses to enter a foreign market and do business there, they should be subject to the laws and customs of said market. The complexity that comes with it is their problem to deal with. I echo the earlier sentiment that the U.S. shouldn't be the world's police (although we do behave like that now).
I'm glad the Mastercard-Visa duopoly is finally getting some attention, these companies shouldn't be allowed to exercise the financial control they do. Payment infrastructure is not a free market - you can't just choose to pay via some other processor if they turn you down, they ARE the processors. Therefore, they should be under intense scrutiny when they refuse.
Is there another source that says what exactly happened in that executive order? I can't find one signed on june 6th that had anything to do with payments.
[0] was from March, and demanded treasury modernization (like paperless and stuff), but didn't really say anything about crypto or FedNow. And FedNow's website mentions nothing about the program being slowed down (just announcements about new things happening in Q3 and a bunch of new signed on banks).
I can find nothing about FedNow being replaced or even changed recently. Your source is the only one about this, and it's some no-name crypto junk site nobody's ever heard of.
I think the federal reserve is too close to the status quo to be effective for this. It is owned by the federally chartered banks, the same ones that all have longstanding relationships with the current payment processors.
A government organization like the mint should be in charge of the layer 1 of money transfer. Let the current providers adapt and sell their other services on top of it. It could be crypto, copy the existing systems, or be something new all together. It doesn't even have to be free, they could add in a small transfer tax or whatever. The point is that any person or business should be able to send money to any other, for any reason. At the very least within the country.
The banks have longstanding relationships with payment processors but they aren’t stupid. The duopoly has fat margins that the banks want a cut of, hence earlier initiatives like Zelle.
That's boilerplate that's been attached on most of all EO's for decades now.
The point of EOs is that they aren't laws and cannot change laws, but they can provide [mandatory] guidance to entities, under the Executive, on how to implement laws. So imagine there's a law that says some agency can ban whatever widgets they want. An EO requiring that they not ban widgets made in Timbuktu would not contravene that law, but provide guidance on how the law will be implemented. By contrast if the law said that the agency must ban any harmful widgets, an EO would not be able to prevent them from banning harmful widgets, even if they happen to be made in Timbuktu.
Thankfully modern EO's are (contrary to intuition) pretty much weak sauce because of this balancing act. See, for contrast the dictatorial mandate that is executive order 6102. [1]
Government agencies in the executive branch don't have independent authority. They work for the president, and an EO isn't much different than the email you get from your boss directing you to do work a certain way.
An email from my boss telling me to implement something using rust transpiled to wasm certainly impairs my authority to determine the best approach.
My argument is not the EO has the legality to make a claim; it's that the top half of the EO is at odds with the disclaimer at the end. If you mandate somebody to do something then you're impairing their authority to have chosen not to do something.
Like by definition the EO impairs agencies that were using their authority to issue paper checks to continue doing so. It may be advantageous to stop issuing checks but to claim mandating that they don't doesn't impair their authority is just false.
You're conflating authority, the authorization to do something, with autonomy - the ability to use that authority at your own personal discretion. The law grants a regulatory agency the authority to do something that they would not otherwise be able to do, like nationally ban widgets. But the law does not also inherently grant them to the autonomy to do so entirely at their own discretion. For agencies under the Executive branch, the President is free to direct them to utilize their authority at his discretion.
It's the law that must not be ordering some action. Laws generally provide e.g. regulatory agencies with some degree of discretion on how to apply a given law, like ban a widget. But that discretion can be defined by executive order. By contrast, if a law says an agency must do something, then an EO cannot override that law and direct them not to do that thing.
Every time we have this discussion someone brings up FedNow, and I will repeat the same question I always ask: when I visit the farmer's market this weekend, will anyone there be able to practically accept payment in FedNow? What would that even look like? (FYI the vendors take most cards, Apple/Google Pay, Venmo, paper cash, Square Cash, Apple Cash, etc.)
If the answer is "no for these reasons", then this probably shines a big light on why FedNow is not serving the same use case.
What is preventing any of those mentioned card vendors from integrating with FedNow either directly or via some abstractive layer through another entity? I don't understand why the answer would be 'no for these reasons'.
The retail payment companies I've seen all use the same structure: they provide a retail interface and then handle monetary transfers within their own proprietary network (effectively a centralized database). To interface with the financial system, they provide a mechanism to occasionally wire funds to/from a traditional bank account. If FedNow has any role in these systems, it's just to speed up the occasional funds-wiring process by a few hours. I have yet to see anyone actually directly using FedNow in any meaningful sense for retail payments.
Most likely, what it would look like is they would have a routing and account number posted. You'd go into your bank app and push a payment to those numbers, and they'd say yeah great; not confirm the transaction and everything would probably work out.
Is that satisfying? Not really. Is it possible? Yes.
There are over a thousand different companies affiliated with FedNow, so the answer is going to be "it won't look like FedNow, but you will use some wrapper for it"
I cannot think of anything worse than an official post office email I have to maintain. Do you not remember how many government sites would simply shut down after business hours because they couldn't figure out how to do on-call? Have you ever used US-treasury direct?
This site would be slow, the code base would be unmaintained, it'd get enormous amounts of spam you have to sort through to get some important tax document, and it would be down all the time. Think the line at the post office but for server up-times.
Similarly if the mint maintained a payment processor then they'd just create a legal monopoly (like the USPS did) and ban new processors. Not only would they be worse than VISA and MasterCard, but they'd make paypal and venmo illegal. Don't forget the USPS bans competitors from being cheaper than itself, and this is exactly what would happen if the Mint had its own payment processor.
Hard disagree on every point. Just because implementations aren't always perfect does not mean you should not have public services.
I know a librarian who spends an inordinate amount of time helping the elderly and tech illiterate members of the public with creating emails, because they're necessary. However, you can't create emails anywhere without a phone number these days - a post office option would fix that.
Email already gets enormous amounts of spam, and the only reason most don't see it is because private service providers like Google expend resources filtering them out. Why would a business not be able to charge for premium filter services on an email they don't host? Not to mention that private email services send you ads.
To be clear, I'm not saying we should shut down Gmail tomorrow, but having a free public email service option would allow many people to use internet infrastructure they don't have. It's an accessibility problem that should be addressed in the public's interest as well as shareholders.
I'm not trying to take away from the thrust of your point. But pragmatically it seems like it could be in the scope of libraries to maintain some $4/mo prepaid SIMs to facilitate people signing up for new online accounts. Win-win for serving both the poor and people who care about privacy.
But what happens when the Gov decides they don't want to fund it anymore? Or the gov decides something shouldn't be funded.. Say truckers on strike, or wiki-leaks? Well then boom we have the same game, just a different player.
None of what you say is inherent in a public service.
The DMV often gets singled out as an inefficient system that is emblematic of the failure of public option, but I assure you as someone who's had to deal with a privatized version, you're not getting better service and in fact the fees are much more expensive without recourse or oversight.
The answer to a bad system is a good system. Adding a middleman who is only interested in extracting as much money as possible is rarely the improvement the consultants would have you believe.
I was under the impression that government sites having "business hours" had as much or more to do with their backends dating from the mainframe era, with nightly batch jobs that take all cpu time or prohibit database writes.
Anyway, I agree that government provided services functioning as you described would be intolerable, but disagree that's somehow inevitable. Rather than expecting government services to be unaccountable monopolies of the "line at the DMV" archetype, what if we expected effective and valuable baseline services of the IRS FreeFile archetype? Or models like unemployment benefits and FDIC insurance, where the government quietly provides citizens an umbrella without limiting access to alternatives?
I strongly resonate with gp's sentiment that when services like email or payment processing become requirements for modern life, ensuring access to them becomes a government prerogative. We're in agreement that it must be a net improvement, not trading one monopoly for another.
My local city runs a water heater rental company. It provides water heaters more or less at cost to residents because we have exceptionally hard water here and they need to be replaced every ten years or so. It's a well run, valuable public program, and its cost is minimal.
The US Digital Service made a number of good web services for the US federal government while it lasted. They didn't close at night.
There are many times where governments do a bad job of things, and times where they do a good job. They're just institutions made of people, but they have no other default orientation. Describing faults in some non-existent service you're just imagining, as though they would obviously happen, is frankly a bizarre thing to do.
May I suggest: consider getting involved in the governance of your world. You could meet the many humans who are already doing so, working to improve it, and learning something. You can actually do that! It might surprise you how much good work is being done.
You might also then be able to help prevent others from implementing your worst dreams, instead of treating them as obvious or foregone conclusions.
Largely opinion here, but the glaring issue with many modern governments is that they don't do. They get some consultants to come in, make some requirements, then shop for a contractor. IMO, governments should do a lot more themselves, should own infrastructure/utilities outright & ongoingly.
Particularly hard in today's climate where so so many people are empowered to say no, or to come in and add their own pet complications/expenses to a project. The meta-governance of staying to mission, to relentlessly caring about value optimization (in the pursuit of public good) is fraught with failure modes. Yet still it feels vastly less dangerous and expensive than shopping the work out, than governments perpetually seeking to do things it itself doesn't know much about & can't do.
We've had decades of nihilism that sees this juncture of difficulty & says: maybe we shouldn't have a government. But some day, I hope, maybe, possibly, we'll
redisocver the spirit of makers and doers, and the eternal jibing critically can give way to a some will & make happen.
It's telling that in order to interact in many ways with the IRS online, you have to verify your identity using a private company (ID.me). Identification of citizens and residents has to be on the short list for core competencies of any government, but we outsource even that.
I thought they still had the on-screen keyboard? They had it as of 6 months ago at least.
But still, atrocious site. I can't use the back button or it logs you out; logging in is like a 5 step chore, it's unintuitive and looks like it's from 2005. I can only assume it's unsafe and doing simple things like checking your balance take 20 minutes. There will never be an app and I'm sure they will continue to do no innovation on the customer service side.
I hate this approach so much. Something doesn't work very well, so instead of putting pressure on making it work better, let us abandon it!
Don't get me wrong. There are cases when it makes sense, but only when it is certain that there is no way to make it better, or when making it better would be a waste of resources.
And neither is case here.
In my country, we have, what is essentially, a centralized email for communication with authorities. Taxes, permits, trials, it all goes there. There is no spam, you can set it up so that reminders about unread go to your normal email. It's not perfect, but it saves me hours of time I would otherwise have to waste in line.
So try for something like this. Instead of just giving up.
> Don't forget the USPS bans competitors from being cheaper than itself
That’s a disingenuous take. USPS legally cannot be undercut on certain types of postal services but in exchange they must serve EVERY permanent address without price discrimination.
No private company has to do that, nor would any sane profit maximising company want to.
It's also a necessary protection because, for some ass-backward reason, we force the USPS to operate in the black instead of funding it with taxpayer money.
Wouldn't it be better to try to regulate the necessity of needing these services out of existence?
For the sake of reducing complexity in an already very complex world, I'd rather that it be illegal to require an email address to sign up for an account (or, alternatively, make it illegal to require an account for things like making a reservation at a restaurant) then being provided with an email by the USPS.
Doubly so given the interactions that I've had with digital services provided by my country's government and the bad (and in several cases extremely bad) experiences that I've had with them.
To be clear - I don't object to e.g. an address from the USPS complementing my existing email - I just don't want to be forced to use it for anything due to it being given some special properties that normal email providers aren't.
> Wouldn't it be better to try to regulate the necessity of needing these services out of existence?
No because these things are genuinely useful. As much as people lament that we are going cashless, it's very convenient to be able to just carry one card and it's genuinely useful to just give my email as an identifier when registering for stuff.
Regulating their necessity means forcing people to accept cash and then using this as a reason why MasterCard and Visa should be allowed exist. In practice if something is that ingrained into daily interaction, then it should have something like the common carrier rules, set the fee to a static percentage of the transaction and that's it. The current 50% profit margins rent-seeking approach is just inefficient.
I completely agree with a lot of what you said! I'm not against technology in general or think that things like email aren't useful.
I think my argument is harder to make for payment processors, but in the case of email, it is preferable to not need an email address to create an account (even if it's convenient to have the option), and have other identifiers that can be used, like OAuth using an existing account or phone number, for instance.
Or, like I said, even better if you don't even need to create an account to participate in a one-time transaction (instead of a service relationship) with an entity.
The USPS and state DMVs should also collaborate on the novel role of identity management. Right now if you lose your phone, half of your life disappears because Google won't even log you into the email address that contains every "lost my password" redirect without 2FA on a new device. This is a bad scene. We need boring old meatspace ways to establish, re-establish, and federate our identity as a real person. Something that demands that I wait in line, that I show them a utility bill or drivers' license, that I confirm with a retina scan or fingerprint printed out on a sheet of paper that nobody else has access to. Something that is only trackable in one direction, from which you can generate a new identity if one is compromised. This is so close to the functional role of the "Credit card number" that you may as well tack bank transfer verification on there.
The One Digital Identity Service To Rule Them All is always vulnerable to mass hacking. We need to connect it with something slower, something more private, and the interface to that slow identity needs to be something that already has a branch open in the middle of nowhere.
Post office offering emails is an interesting idea if you extend it further in the physical world. As in, using this identifier to deliver correspondence/parcels as well.
pros:
- privacy. Senders have zero idea where you actually are. mapping to physical addresses is performed by the post.
- no need to update addresses in a million accounts when you move, your email points to the new physical address automatically (no idea how that works in other countries, but here you can set automatic forwarding for at most 1.5 years after you move).
How does that fix censorship concerns? The main issue is that political pressure campaigns has a lever over the entire payment processing sector because of cartel like behaviour. A public service could provide an alternative for sure but it'd have to be done very carefully and independent.
Actual government stuff is way more legally constrained than private sector stuff. It would be trivially to sue for freedom of speech if I was gov.
Public-private partnerships like chartered banks, and outright cartels like Visa MasterCard, are much more fruitful mechanisms for this sort of civil liberties abuse.
Junk mail is advertising mail that someone paid to send to you. You what it is not? Illegal. Scams, fraud, and other illegal things get shut down because of postal inspectors. And there is no anonymity. The USPS knows both ends of the transaction.
> the post office should maintain an official email address for everyone.
Assuming this is a good idea, what is my email address going to look like?
Am I going to have to be xx_toast_xx@postalcustomer like at yahoo? or will it be my address ... if so, what about the other three adults who get mail at my address; do I have to change my email address when I move? Will it be my real name, but if so, what about the other hundred people with the same name as me? (Which isn't that bad, I know lots of people with a way larger highlander list) Will it just be my social security number and we can pretend duplicates don't exist?
What qualifies someone to be an everyone for this purpose?
You say /s, but a government issued and USPS operated e-mail service may be very profitable. In the Netherlands we have a government message system where the tax office, local counties, water companies, etc can send you 'official' messages. Thing is though, each message costs €0.25 to send. I think this is ridiculously expensive for a glorified email, but I suppose they have a lot of certifications and audits and the like. I hope, anyway.
Anyway, email itself is broken, but this system works because if it costs money to send a message, it discourages any spambot and/or misuse.
There's no meaningful attention, here. Until it is on the US Gov't radar, this 'attention' is just a collection of upset redditors furiously posting forum messages which will fissile out in a few months, at most.
Besides, it's not like you can boycott Mastercard or VISA.
A tangential nitpick: it's fizzle out, from a Middle English etymology meaning "to fart"; not to fission (fissile being an adjectival form), from Latin "to split".
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fizzle#Etymology ("Attested in English since 1525-35. From earlier fysel (“to fart”). Related to fīsa (“to fart”). Compare with Swedish fisa (“to fart (silently)”). See also feist.")
I don't think having this on USgov radar would improve the situation. Since FOSTA/SESTA, and various state level age verification laws, it seems likely that government attention would simply bring a bigger hammer down on games. It's the US anti-money-laundering system that ultimately exerts a lot of financial control, after all.
> it's not like you can boycott Mastercard or VISA
In many countries, if you pay locally, you absolutely can. China's UnionPay, India's UPI, PayNow in Singapore, PromptPay in Thailand, PayPal, Cash App, and more.
And places like Steam take a lot of payment options. Most online services that wanted to have wide international appeal in the 90s and 2000s had to simply because credit cards were rare in many places, and a lot of those services still have a wide array of options
Steam added recently a rule 15th what you should not publish:
15. Content that may violate the rules and standards set forth by Steam’s payment processors and related card networks and banks, or internet network providers. In particular, certain kinds of adult only content.
Maybe they could come out with a client named "Steamy" where they post all the nudie games and take all forms of shady, underground, scandalous payment methods, like btc and doge.
Does that actually help? Because it would send a pretty strong message if the payment screen said, "sorry you can only buy this with amex/discover" (click here for why) but that doesn't seem to be how this plays out.
You need the government to cajole the market to create safe and free inter bank transfer programs. We're not going to do that in the USA -- no one's buddies would get their kickbacks!
Granted, but Pix didn't have to compete against entrenched political interests.
I expect the meta-plot with FedNow is to commoditize the backend network, then allow private companies to compete on top of it (e.g. Zelle on FedNow), then after adoption as the backbone, finally roll out P2P and P2B type support that finally kills off Visa / Mastercard / Amex (as processing networks).
Not sure why you were downvoted. Pix is a fantastic example of how much more efficient p2p payments can be, without relying on the Visa-Mastercard duopoly.
Of course Pix had the backing of the government, so it had a huge initial boost, and didn't have to compete with entrenched players for market share.
Still, the fact is that it's universal, fast, efficient, lower cost for merchants, and less prone to censoring. What's not to like?
In a way it's more convenient than making congress pass laws to define payment providers as common carriers. With Pix, payment companies are free to chose their policies, but now citizens have options. Unfortunately that's not the reality in the US.
It is not really US-centric. VISA and Mastercard actions resulted in delisting content in all the markets globally. Steam and Itch.io pulled games from all regions, Manga Library Z was hit in Japan, Patreon and Stripe are pressured globally. Suggesting to boycott VISA and Mastercard if you have an alternative is valid.
In principle, a service like this could be offered in the US as well, without any credit card companies acting as middle men: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FedNow
Germany actually uses their own card system .. or cash. They are very much against visa/mastercard due to their “high commission fees” and “privacy concerns”
You're comparing a regional debit network to an overarching network that includes lots of different fee structures. The USA has debit networks (STAR, etc) with similar cost structures too - Germany is not unique in this regard.
That's somewhat outdated and Wikipedia even slightly alludes to it with "Some banks are phasing out girocards". "some" in reality is "nearly all". Girocard is practically dead and I don't see it coming back without state intervention.
There's a few holdouts in stores here and there that only accept Girocard and no other cards (my vet for example), but it's on the decline there, too.
"Privacy concerns" won't hold out long against relentless pushes for more deregulation of privacy laws for AI/other tech/"the economy"/etc and removal of data access hurdles for police/security services/etc coming from certain political spectrum - whose voters generally don't have high concern for such fundamental rights issues when at the ballot box.
Unfortunately, that's not enough to shake the MasterCard/Visa stranglehold. Even if all of Valve's German customers used Girocard and Steam sold those particular games only in Germany, they would still have to yield to pressure from MC and Visa because losing them would cost them many more of their global customers.
It's not enough to simply have an alternative to the credit cards, that alternative has to be in the pockets of 90% of your user base before you'd be willing to lose the method of transaction they currently rely on.
> Payment service providers shall not offer or request a per transaction interchange fee of more than 0,2 % of the value of the transaction for any debit card transaction.
So does Russia, Denmark, Belgium/Netherlands, Iran, China. I’m sure there’re others. I know someone working on unified payment platform for games in Africa. They have dozens of different payment systems instead of the two.
> Besides, it's not like you can boycott Mastercard or VISA.
Why not? Lots of people, especially in lower income brackets, don't have ANY credit cards at all. I know many. They buy groceries and gas with cash and pay their utilities by ACH or mailing a check. Everything else they need, they buy locally.
What you mean to say is that it's _inconvenient_ for you personally to boycott Visa/Mastercard. Which may be true enough.
That depends entirely on who you are paying. Many places reject checks, fail to setup ACH, etc. Those aren't direct competitors anyway: that would be American Express, which is often rejected since their business model is centered on customer bonuses funded through high transaction fees.
I use cash for 90% of my expenses, and I bank with a local credit unions, but this and every other bank and credit union around use visa or mastercard for debit card services and I have to use the card for most online purchases.
Well, we are discussing an online storefront/distribution service for a digital good (with obvious relevance to people here). Are you suggesting that it's merely inconvenient for Valve and its customers to not transact in cash?
You can switch to Amex, but here in Argentina like half of the postnets don't recognize it.
Also there are a few QR networks, some made by the banks like "Modo" and other no-a-bank ones like "MercadoPago" and a few minor ones. Even the guy/gal that sells hot bread on the street accept most of them.
Amex is only available on Steam in the US. I have a basic free Amex card as a backup, but I wouldn't be able to use it for my Steam purchases. Presumably because the processing fees are just that much higher.
Somehow I'm able to use a JCB card though. As far as I'm aware, JCB cards aren't even available here.
Whole heartedly agree. I would also rather the discussion be how can we disrupt the problem rather than a mob mentality to take down Visa (which is never going anywhere anyway).
It is on their radar, but they only care that the whole world pays a US tax via these payment providers. The US does look to kindly on local payment systems.
Honestly, I'm really critical towards EU, but this is one of the few things that EU does well. When the market is stagnating, it's better than nothing to propose an alternative or some kind of benefits in order to change the market a bit. Like the Roaming in EU.
Regarding the rest, the EU is mining competition with the obsession of regulating everything.
> Regarding the rest, the EU is mining competition with the obsession of regulating everything.
Like with DMA/DSA that force gatekeepers to open up? SEPA that mandates free immediate bank transfers? Caps on credit/debit card transaction fees? The million infrastructure projects? Ensuring that AI can't be used to make life or death decisions if it's decision making can't be explained (which the AI act boils down to)? Ensuring there is competition on e.g. railway operations?
It's such a common refrain that EU is just stifling competition with "regulating everything", but quite oftne EU regulations are actually forcing competition where none was possible before.
I stated quite clearly that not every regulation is bad. But it seems that you want to hear that every decision made by the EU is right. I'm sorry, but I'm not a religious person. And I think self-criticism is a great privilege of democratic (not dictatorial) countries, so let's use it.
> Ensuring that AI can't be used to make life or death decisions if its decision-making can't be explained (which the AI Act boils down to)? Ensuring there is competition on, for example, railway operations?
It's such a naive question that I can't understand how you can take it seriously.
Just because you can explain how you arrived at a specific decision does not mean that failure does not exist. Every machine is fallible. Every human is fallible. Moreover, you cannot determine decision-making made by humans. So how can you trust humans? Why should you trust them?
I would like to see the data, not the social or individual biases. It's only a matter of "when" AI will prove to be safer than humans at performing task X. I find it absurd to deprive ourselves of such an advantage, supported by data, just because our understanding isn't absolute.
Can we prove the safety or determinism of what we use or do on a daily basis? I doubt.
Shouldn't we experiment with physics because our understanding is limited, and we might accidentally create a black hole? I doubt.
Also, I find it such a generic definition... Google Maps implements AI, and accidentally sends you into a ditch. What do you do? Ban AI from Google Maps? What doesn't put people's lives at risk?
I totally understand the skepticism and fear. The risks, etc. But I'll leave it to the fortune tellers to pass judgment before it's even "a thing".
> It's such a common refrain that EU is just stifling competition with "regulating everything", but quite oftne EU regulations are actually forcing competition where none was possible before.
Is killing the car market "forcing the competition"? How?
> I stated quite clearly that not every regulation is bad. But it seems that you want to hear that every decision made by the EU is right. I'm sorry, but I'm not a religious person. And I think self-criticism is a great privilege of democratic (not dictatorial) countries, so let's use it.
But you still said that you think most of the EU's are bad, so I'm opening the discussion with multiple that I consider to be good.
> Just because you can explain how you arrived at a specific decision does not mean that failure does not exist. Every machine is fallible. Every human is fallible. Moreover, you cannot determine decision-making made by humans. So how can you trust humans? Why should you trust them?
Of course not, but being able to explain the decision, and thus prove that it is wrong, and have humans being able to correct it, is good. It means that stuff like United Healthcare Group using algorithms to decide if care can be paid for, with a terrible failure rate, and employees just shrugging "computer said no" cannot happen in the EU. The fact that this kind of things are considered as "EU is killing AI with too much regulation" is really concerning to me.
> Is killing the car market "forcing the competition"? How?
> But you still said that you think most of the EU's are bad, so I'm opening the discussion with multiple that I consider to be good.
I understand your point, but I see no reason to invest time defending the EU's positive aspects. What's the point?
> Of course not, but being able to explain the decision, and thus prove that it is wrong, and have humans being able to correct it, is good. It means that stuff like United Healthcare Group using algorithms to decide if care can be paid for, with a terrible failure rate, and employees just shrugging "computer said no" cannot happen in the EU. The fact that this kind of things are considered as "EU is killing AI with too much regulation" is really concerning to me.
I don't see why "asking for less regulation" concerns you. The EU seems to listen to people like you, not people like me. I should be the one who's concerned, haha. I'm worried because bureaucracy is a slow-acting cancer. It's a process that's easy to start but incredibly difficult to stop or reverse.
The problem with bureaucracy, regulation, and welfare is that they all come with a price. Increasing costs require a strong, cutting-edge economy to sustain them. Yet, no one seems to be concerned. In the US and China, new technologies are constantly being created, while in Europe, innovation is stagnating. No one seems to care that Europe's wealth is fragile, based mainly on "old" companies or banks.
Of course, no one is against welfare; my concern is its unsustainability. As an Italian (living elsewhere in Europe), I find the situation worrying. The demographic decline is dramatic, and pension and healthcare costs are skyrocketing. In Italy, a worker under 40 often earns less than a retiree. With such a sharp demographic decline, retirees have enormous political power.
Europe is aging, and so is its appetite for innovation and risk. Yet, we keep adding costs upon costs. Even if the goals of initiatives like GDPR, the AI Act, and the Green Deal are "right", we can't deny that they come with a price. This added cost inevitably makes companies less efficient in Europe. This is a simple consequence. Can we truly afford this?
How long can we keep going? The rope will break sooner or later. And why doesn't anyone seem to care?
> I don't see why "asking for less regulation" concerns you.
Because the "less regulation" is in response to the EU saying you can't have algorithms making life or death decisions if they can't be explained and can't be escalated to a human. People are literally asking for companies to be able to shrug behind "computer says no" with no recourse. We have the UK Post Office scandal for a closer to home example on why this is a terrible idea. "Less regulation" here would be plainly terrible for everyone.
> No one seems to care that Europe's wealth is fragile, based mainly on "old" companies or banks.
Along with migration, it's probably the two most discussed topics. Funnily for it too, everyone says "nobody cares", yet it's literally among the most discussed things.
> Even if the goals of initiatives like GDPR, the AI Act, and the Green Deal are "right", we can't deny that they come with a price. This added cost inevitably makes companies less efficient in Europe. This is a simple consequence. Can we truly afford this?
I get what you're saying, and there's a point at which I would agree; but I also fully consider that allowing companies to let people die and hide behind "The Algorithm" is something so fundamentally wrong, that we cannot (humanely) afford not to have regulations against it.
> In the US and China, new technologies are constantly being created, while in Europe, innovation is stagnating
Because you're comparing massive economies with lots of capital to burn, vs a loose collection of much smaller countries. There is tons of innovation in various European countries, it's just of different types, and doesn't scale nearly to the same extent. And that is a problem (because, as you said, a lot of the economy is reliant on big old players, which isn't necessarily bad, but is lacking in economic diversification).
> As an Italian (living elsewhere in Europe), I find the situation worrying. The demographic decline is dramatic, and pension and healthcare costs are skyrocketing. In Italy, a worker under 40 often earns less than a retiree. With such a sharp demographic decline, retirees have enormous political power
It's the same in France too, and it is indeed worrying. Public budgets are getting increasingly more complicated to balance.
But, allowing companies to deploy AI to make life or death decisions won't change anything around this. Allowing them to harvest personal data without even knowing what they have won't change anything around this either. Allowing gatekeepers to stifle any possible competition (not having DMA/DSA), same thing.
The biggest changes needed are capital investments to help the tons of startups all over Europe scale; and complex policies to help minimise the demographic collapse. Some of it is natural and nothing can be done about it (if a couple doesn't want kids, no amount of aid is going to change their mind), but for others it's a matter of being unable to afford (more) kids.
> Along with migration, it's probably the two most discussed topics. Funnily for it too, everyone says "nobody cares", yet it's literally among the most discussed things.
Its disscussed here, still nobody is acting. This is a bubble.
> I get what you're saying, and there's a point at which I would agree; but I also fully consider that allowing companies to let people die and hide behind "The Algorithm" is something so fundamentally wrong, that we cannot (humanely) afford not to have regulations against it.
This sentence is fundamentally wrong, no one is dying. And for me, it perfectly sums up the issues we're discussing.
We've reached the point where if there's a risk of something happening, no matter the probability neither the magnitude, something must be done. Even if the solution is totally destructive, inappropriate for the problem, etc. Or even worse, deciding when the problem does not yet exist. Or the technology is still in its early stages. Like AI. This is what you are proposing. This is what I criticize.
Slowing down or stopping everything because MAYBE it's the right thing to do, MAYBE something we don't like might happen. This comes at a cost, especially if you apply this principle to everything around you in small doses. It's poison for productivity and efficiency.
I don't know if you are for or against nuclear power. I am quite pro nuclear power. But everyone knows about the European Pressurized Reactor (EPR) project, it is a failure in terms of costs and bureaucracy. China and South Korea are able to build reactors quickly and at low cost. The same EPR reactors built in China have low costs and short construction times (I am referring to the Taishan Nuclear Power Plant). The problem is exclusively European.
In the name of some ideology, we are destroying our productivity and efficency. Again. Why?
And I know very well that the answer is always the same. Safety. But it's just an excuse to sell you the services of yet another bureaucrat. There are very precise risk analyses that show nuclear reactors to be orders of magnitude safer than all other energy sources. So why this ideological obsession? Safety has nothing to do with it.
No one cares about risk analyses. Because the answer will always be “it's never enough.” But at what cost? Again, no one cares.
And thanks to this choices, in the name of safety, building reactors in Europe is difficult and expensive. But in the meantime, it is perfectly legitimate to build gas or coal-fired power plants.
No, it's discussed everywhere, at the EU and the local level. There has been plenty of action at various levels (like in France, under Macron first as minister of the economy and later president; and he's been decried and criticised a lot, but has also gotten a ton of reforms through).
> This sentence is fundamentally wrong, no one is dying. And for me, it perfectly sums up the issues we're discussing.
That's the point though. Literally the main thing the law does is that if the AI can make decision that can result in deaths, there should be a human escalation and its decision making should be explainable. That's it. If that's too much burden, something is wrong.
> Or even worse, deciding when the problem does not yet exist. Or the technology is still in its early stages. Like AI
But the problem already exists, again, cf. United Healthcare Group in the US. We know they're killing people and hiding behind a well known faulty "AI". We don't want that shit in the EU.
> I don't know if you are for or against nuclear power. I am quite pro nuclear power. But everyone knows about the European Pressurized Reactor (EPR) project, it is a failure in terms of costs and bureaucracy
If you're pro nuclear, you should know what the real problems with EPR are. The main are failures at EDF with the quality of their work, due to lack of qualified personnel, like welders. This has been well documented for Flamanville and Hinkley Point, and EDF has even written extensively about all the lessons learned from those disasters that have been incorporated. They even flat out say that Flamanville has allowed them to build industrial capacity and human know how to be able to build the next ones.
Do you have anything to back your claim that somehow bureaucracy is to blame? EDF are a state owned company, but I'm pretty sure that the British wouldn't stop yapping around if EDF were bungling Hinkley Point because of French/EU bureaucracy. There should be at least as much material on it as there are about the quality control issues, right?
> The same EPR reactors built in China have low costs and short construction times (I am referring to the Taishan Nuclear Power Plant). The problem is exclusively European.
Yes, because we stopped building reactors for decades, and nobody is around that knows the intricacies of that. Hence the investment in EPR, to improve on the failures at Flamanville, Hinkley Point, Olkiluoto, and be able to reliably deliver EPR reactors with predictable costs.
I don't even think this is a problem of competition (although more is welcome).
This is just Visa+Mastercard abusing their market position and the EU should come down on them like a ton of bricks.
Incur heavy fines or break them up if necessary.
Go to Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Japan, Taiwan and see that there are 20-30 payment systems at every convenience store, electronics store, grocery store, etc... Then go to the US where there's effectively 2. The government claims this is because Visa and Mastercard have prevented competition.
I disagree. The need for regulation in this case stems from a lack of competition.
Regulations are empirical decisions, based on a very limited amount of data, whose implications can be endless. Regulations are a shortcut capable of poisoning the market and competition. Just look at what's been done with energy, automobiles, AI, GDPR, etc. Bureaucrats are not gods; they often make mistakes and don't predict the future. Regulations should be the last resort.
Furthermore, we're talking about a US monopoly here. The goal would be to grab a share of the pie through honest competition, not to enstablish golden collars.
Regulation should facilitate competition, not legitimize the status quo.
Oh the EU will happily pass new laws to screen your entire life when you'd like to buy a game (and to record and store everything you talk about with fellow gamers in case you say something that goes against EU policies).
EU will even arrange a special new bank account for ya outside of Visa Mastercard called CBDC.
That’s factually untrue. 1984 takes place in Britain (now known as “Airstrip one”) which in the universe of the book is part of Oceania along with Australia, southern Africa and the Americas.
The other two superpowers are Eurasia (which as the name suggests is Europe less the UK and Ireland but with Asia) and Eastasia, which is South-East Asia more or less
> Besides, it's not like you can boycott Mastercard or VISA
Most countries have some kinds of domestic transaction systems, or at least a more local credit card brand. They're also usually instant. It's more or less an US-only situation that people use Visa/Mastercard even for intranational stuff.
Most countries I've been to use Visa as their most common card. Living in a major Asian country and every bank and credit card company offers Visa as their main card as well.
China is kind of an outlier with Union Pay, and while a large number of countries offer their own alternatives, I'd say most are Visa-first. Apparently about 37% of cards around the world are Visa, so that's a huge chunk. JCB is the biggest non-Chinese non-American provider by revenue, and even they're a minor player in their home country.
That is absolutely false. In pretty much any western country, you're forced to use the VISA network, even for debit cards. Take a closer look at your locally branded card, and you'll almost certainly see a VISA log tucked away somewhere.
Depends, in France for instance all the cards are dual "VISA/Mastercard" and "CB ". They will use CB in france and use the partner network in foreign countries.
The EU should certainly look into this though. I don't always like what they do, but a conglomerate of many large markets (countries) means that these shitty fucking companies and scumbag executives get forced to sit up and listen.
Does the government view it as 2 throats to choke and so the risk is 'worth it' or is it just a condition of gilded age II and corp and political greed and corruption?
Why did we make all those monopoly laws only to completely forget they exist or why we ever made them?
Isn't Bitcoin impractical for these sorts of transactions (slow, high fees, no privacy, etc)? People always say Bitcoin was designed to solve this sort of thing but whenever I've looked into it it's been fairly impractical for use in most day-to-day transactions.
Bitcoin is so much faster than a credit card transaction that it's not even close. A lightning transaction is near instant, regular bitcoin transfers take in the order of 10 minutes. Credit card transactions take weeks before you get the money, and after that the money can be yoinked back for a multitude of reasons beyond your control as a merchant. The fees are often lower, too. Bitcoiners are for some reason opposed to solving that last issue (no privacy) despite the technology existing in monero. NIH syndrome, I guess.
The real unsolved issue for cryptocurrency is between chair and keyboard. People make mistakes, people are afraid of being robbed. Your average person does not want to be their own bank. You can have a bank or payment processor manage your money for you, but then we're back to the regulated world where Visa and Mastercard can determine what games you're allowed to buy.
I'll have to look at the lightning transactions. My problems with crypto are generally less philosophical (I've known people who ran legal businesses that had trouble getting access to banks so I'm sympathetic to having ways around traditional banks/payment processors) but more practical, the times I've tried it in the past the experience just hasn't been good.
Honestly buying a digital game is perfect. Steam can just give it to you right away, and if the transaction doesn't clear they can just revoke the game later.
That's only addressing one issue with Bitcoin but the issues abound. I don't know all the issues that would happen but even my rudimentary understanding of payments can see that the high transaction costs are a problem when most of the games I buy are less than 5$.
There are ways to design around these glaring issues but Bitcoin is just a worse product for many transactions (and it's not like payment processors are a particularly good product to begin with).
It might have been but it is very much not. It's non fungible and transparent resulting in coins, wallets and transactions getting easily traced and blacklisted meaning they can be put into a limbo where nobody is willing to accept them anymore burning there value.
The actual solution would be a fungible and private coin like monero where any of that is impossible by design.
Yes, I agree that Monero is likely a better option. I am also a big fan of Nano because of its instant transactions and zero transaction fees. However it has the same privacy problem as Bitcoin. It would be interesting to see a hybrid of Nano and Monero.
"Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down, but Valve says payment processors 'specifically cited' a Mastercard rule about damaging the brand"
(For the people who don't click the link to read the article.)
It was Mastercard's rule, but any one of the companies in the payment network could have brought it up to Valve. The whole system is set up so one transaction has to go through up to 6 different companies, and they all have to abide by each other's rules. The US Internet Preservation Society explained it recently:
>Each of these companies maintains its own terms of service and each of them can block a transaction by themselves. Additionally, intermediary companies that handle card transactions are mutually and individually bound to the terms of every Card Network, so even if you never do business with Discover or American Express, you must still obey their rules if you want to accept Visa or Mastercard. For online businesses, there are no alternatives: you will do exactly what they want, or you will not do business at all.
>If you are banned from processing payments, you will not be informed why or by which point of failure. "Risk management" is considered a trade secret in the industry. You have no right to know, you cannot sue to discover what has happened, and you also have no right to appeal.
I'd be interesting to know if Valve is big enough to start their own payment system. Yea, I know it would be hard but their customers have libraries of games in their system and Valve has lots of good will. Valve could also offer discounts ($X off if you use ValvePay). It would take years. They'd have to drop the adult games now, start ValvePay, promote it until the majority of their customers used it. Then put the games back and tell Visa and MC they can eff-off.
Simpler: why can't I buy nsfw games with a regular dumb bank transaction (SEPA €) in my case?
If MasterCard/Visa don't want these transactions, stupid, their loss. But at least let me use a payment method that works & doesn't have these morale restrictions?
Or even a Plausible Deniability system - you can't buy these games with currency, you have to use tokens. Here's a token store where you can buy tokens with your currency.
Valve's payment processors told Valve they would withdraw payment processing unless Valve banned specific categories of game from their online store.
The payment processors did not cite any law; Valve selling those games was not illegal. Instead they cited Mastercard's rules, which say that they cannot submit transactions that Mastercard believe might damage Mastercard's goodwill or reflect negatively on its brand. Those rules also say Mastercard has sole discretion as to what it considers breach these rules, and Mastercard gives a list of what it deems unacceptable:
> A Merchant must not submit to its Acquirer, and a Customer must not submit to the Interchange System, any Transaction that is illegal, or in the sole discretion of the Corporation, may damage the goodwill of the Corporation or reflect negatively on the Marks.
> The Corporation considers any of the following activities to be in violation of this Rule:
> 2. The sale of a product or service, including an image, which is patently offensive and lacks serious artistic value (such as, by way of example and not limitation, images of nonconsensual sexual behavior, sexual exploitation of a minor, nonconsensual mutilation of a person or body part, and bestiality), or any other material that the Corporation deems unacceptable to sell in connection with a Mark.
The payment processors threatened Valve first. Mastercard doesn't need to threaten Valve or even contact them at all to force its will on them: it just needs to threaten its payment processors, the same outcome is achieved. Valve did not remove games from sale until threatened. If they did not do that, and instead initiated some kind of fightback, they would most likely find themselves completely removed from all payment processors, with no recourse. If you want to call that "precompliance", so be it.
Click on the article link at the top of this page and find out. Let me quote the article for you:
> In a statement provided to PC Gamer, Valve said that it had tried to work things out with Mastercard directly prior to removing the games, and suggested that Mastercard did have at least an indirect influence on the outcome.
> "Mastercard did not communicate with Valve directly, despite our request to do so," a Valve representative said. "Mastercard communicated with payment processors and their acquiring banks. Payment processors communicated this with Valve, and we replied by outlining Steam’s policy since 2018 of attempting to distribute games that are legal for distribution.
> "Payment processors rejected this, and specifically cited Mastercard’s Rule 5.12.7 and risk to the Mastercard brand."
This text is also consistent with Valve making a determination, checking with payment processors and not being told no. (Versus the payment processors reaching out to Valve first.)
Like yes, there is a problem with Mastercard. But I want to know this isn’t Valve having complied with some activists trying to cover their tracks.
If this is just evil old Valve, why did itch.io - a site founded on openness and the right to sell adult-only games, especially if they cover LGBT themes, tell everyone that their payment processors also want them not to offer adult-only games?
Which is more likely:
1. Porn-hating, sex-hating, LGBT-hating activist group from Australia bombards Mastercard with complaints that Valve and Itch are selling adult games. Mastercard reminds its payment processors not to bring shame on The Mark. Valve's and Itch's payment processors tell them not to sell adult games.
2. Porn-hating, sex-hating, LGBT-hating activist group from Australia bombards Mastercard with complaints that Valve and Itch are selling adult games. Valve and Itch agree with these harpies and remove their revenue streams and support for developers (because they hate revenue and hate supporting their developers; they'd much rather align with moral prudes from Australia in order to lose money and abandon the people who make them that money), then they sneakily pin the blame on Mastercard. Valve and Itch also use telepathy to know Collective Shout's desires, which they agree with, to ban games precisely at the time Collective Shout are calling up Mastercard, in order for it to be Collective Shout -> Valve/Itch rather than Collective Shout -> Mastercard -> Payment processors -> Valve/Itch
> why did itch.io - a site founded on openness and the right to sell adult-only games, especially if they cover LGBT themes, tell everyone that their payment processors also want them not to offer adult-only games?
What is more likely is the processors made the decision themselves and cited Mastercard's rule without interacting with Mastercard.
If Mastercard cared about this stuff then processors like CCBill wouldn't exist. The absurd amount of money that porn brings in on the internet would dry up over night.
This was a decision made by paysafe and paypall and so far they are the only ones not getting the blame pinned on them.
> What is more likely is the processors made the decision themselves
If you think that, please explain how the payment processors didn't say anything since Valve started selling adult games in 2018... and only a few days after Collective Shout specifically started targeting MasterCard and Visa (not PayPal or Paysafe)... the payment processors used by Valve cited MasterCard's rules to Valve?
It's also MasterCard that set the rules. Valve can always get another payment processor. They can't get another payment processor that is not beholden to Visa and/or MasterCard.
Payment processors that handle adult material exist but they charge a premium rate. These companies could switch to CCBill as quick as they could code it up. Exactly the same as what OnlyFans did. They would have to explain to their entire customer base across the board why they have to charge more though.
They absolutely targeted paysafe and paypall. Paypall was the very first on their list, I wonder why that is. They knew the processor is the weak link.
After 10 years in the POS industry, I can assure you it came from their processor. The only card network I have ever seen take action like this is AMEX and they have have separate processing. Processors involve themselves in their customers' business constantly for risk assessment. Collective action like this is enough to make them ask, "Should we treat this as a video game vendor or as adult industry?" It's that simple to tip the scale.
Also, it doesn't make sense that Itch did it themselves. Why would they throw their vendors under the bus instead of just pulling the titles? Or are we supposed to believe they facilitated collective shout just to pull a couple of low value titles? I can't see any angle here that doesn't border on conspiracy.
OK, I read the link. They targeted Paysafe and PayPal AND VISA AND MASTERCARD AND DISCOVER AND JCB. All of them, in no particular order. Why did you not mention those?
Why are Valve's and Itch's payment processors, instead of citing their own policies, citing MasterCard's policies?
If "MasterCard doesn't care" then section 5.12.7 "Illegal or Brand-damaging Transactions" of MasterCard's rules, that specifically lists out transactions MasterCard prohibit processors from performing, specifically citing the percieved risk to MasterCard's brand... that's a really weird way for MasterCard to say they "don't care" about those exact sorts of transactions, which Valve's payment processors have been facilitating for Valve since 2018... until now, when a media campaign has put them and MasterCard, Visa, Discover and JCB on blast.
If MasterCard "doesn't care", let them show it by completely removing section 5.12.17 of their own rules. They made those rules, and those rules say they care, no matter how much you say they don't.
>We don't permit PayPal account holders to buy or sell: Sexually oriented digital goods or content delivered through a digital medium. Examples of digital goods include downloadable pictures or videos and website subscriptions.
Yeah it's a good question, why would they cite mastercard instead of their own policy?
It's entirely anecdotal, but in my 10 years of experience dealing with a multitude of processors and payment gateways... that's what processors do. Their very first instinct is to make things someone else's problem. With maybe the exception of First Data, this has held up consistently for me. Of course a lot of our high dollar business was through First Data so who knows what other people's experience is.
You are still completely avoiding the fact that processors that can handle this stuff exist. Sure Mastercard should probably change their rule, but that isn't going to change the situation.
So the question is, could both Valve and Itch take on several payment processors, and choose which game on their store goes through which processor? Or would porn-shy processors have blanket rules saying your whole company can't have any porn in the same store, even if it's locked away, even if you use not-us to process payments for it?
And secondly, let's say Valve moves to a porn-friendly processor (Itch has said it's looking for one, not that it's found one). MasterCard clearly has a rule, right there in black and white, saying don't facilitate this particular type of porn. How do you think it will look if for any potential processor, and MasterCard, if Valve switches processor and continues accepting MasterCard payments for games in direct contravention of MasterCards's given rule, while the world's press, and the angry lobby group, is watching?
As far as it goes, collective shout claimed Valve didn't respond to them and that's why they complained to MC visa about it. They even mention how many calls they made to them to get the complaint heard.
So everyone would have to be pretty invested in this show for it to have originated from Valve?
> Some types of pornography (both real and fictitious) are technically illegal in Australia and if classified would be rated RC and therefore banned in Australia. This includes any pornography depicting violent BDSM, incest, paedophilia, zoophilia, certain extreme fetishes (such as golden showers) and/or indicators of youth (such as wearing a school uniform).
Steam already has the ability to block certain countries and regions from buying specific products. IIRC many of the adult games were already banned in the German region for example.
If it was about the laws, at worst Valve could block Australian users from buying adult content and that would be it.
1. Everything on your banned list that Steam sells was already banned in Australia (you can tell by looking it up on SteamDB and noticing it has "n/a" for the Australian price e.g. https://steamdb.info/app/2456420/)
2. Collective Shout aren't weaponising Australian laws in this case - those only apply in Australia. At best they could get games banned in Australia by drawing the state censor's attention to them. What Collective Shout did was weaponise American corporations fear of negative publicity by calling them repeatedly and threatening them with negative campaigning, and as a result got games banned in countries they don't live in, over and above the say-so of the people who do live in those countries, and the laws of those countries allowing them to purchase such games.
Of course - they've never invoked a legal justification. What they seem to be leaning on is basically "we can create bad press about you supporting payments for X", promising headlines like "MasterCard is paying for women to be beaten and raped!" or other sensational nonsense.
Mastercard pressured their processors and the processors turned around and talked to Valve about it and cited Mastercard's rules. It wasn't pre-compliance, but there was a proxy that allows Mastercard to deflect responsibility.
An intermediary between Valve and Mastercard likely was the one that brought it up because they have to comply with those rules, or the rules of someone upstream of them that has to and imports them into their own rules, so they have to interpret vague "brand damage" rules and they err to the conservative side because if they run afoul of the rules they could lose access to process Mastercard transactions ~20% of US transactions, which would really mean losing most of their customers not just the 20% of Mastercard flows.
They cite a rule about Mastercard brand damage. If Mastercard didn't specify that such content would result in MC brand damage why would they cite it rather than their own rules?
a) they are worried Mastercard might randomly decide it does and punish them
b) it's convenient to be able to blame someone else
c) someone somewhere said something and the rest of the orgs isn't aware or over-interpreted a statement
Vague rules like this are great to dilute responsibility. It can both be true that Mastercard didn't tell the payment processors to force the issue and that the payment processors strongly thought they had to.
There are definitely a lot of links in this chain. Maybe leafo can chime-in and say exactly what happened with Itch.io. But I suspect that someone downstream of Visa/Mastercard anticipated that the payment card companies would not permit the transactions and relayed that back up to the merchants, and they shut it off preemptively.
But it's hard to say. Mastercard is now saying that they never said or did anything. So where did the outrage come from? Someone must have done something.
> But I suspect that someone downstream of Visa/Mastercard anticipated that the payment card companies would not permit the transactions and relayed that back up to the merchants, and they shut it off preemptively.
It sure is tragic that benevolent and majestic Mastercard is having their name thrown into the mud over this. Coincidentally, it sure is convenient that they have a number of middleman scapegoats who can take the blame on their behalf.
All Mastercard has to do is say “We ordered payment processors to let Valve sell their games”. It is sure convenient that they stop at “We didn’t say the opposite.”
Indeed, and the keywords are vague and they refuse to rigorously define them. Adult payment processors just run around in the dark until they trip over one of these landmines.
Even the (rare) categories of content that have been legally determined to be non-obscene (e.g., werewolf erotica [1]) can fall under banned keywords (in this case, “bestiality”).
It’s a stupid extralegal system and ought to be destroyed.
Throughout this our only contacts have been representatives at Stripe and PayPal. They indicated that they got a notice and kicked off their own audit.
As far as I'm aware, the Collective Shout letter caused a "formal card network inquiry" to originate from both Mastercard and Visa. I did not have access to the actual inquiry, but my assumption is that it wasn't "we see this content, take it down" and more like "we saw this letter, look into whats going on before we do our own investigation and fine you"
The US has some clear laws against government controlling speech and, in the abstract, that makes it pretty much impossible to censor games. Various factions - exactly who it is difficult to pin down - have been working hard to set up a system where they can shut things down without ever explicitly instructing anyone to do anything. This appears to be the system engaging by accident because some crazy from Australia accidentally said the right thing to the right people.
So I do actually believe Mastercard when they say this, but holding them accountable anyway is probably for the best. They're likely the single group with the most influence over the regulators.
Is there proof the government actually uses this apparatus?
I don't think there's any government involvement necessary here - Mastercard has some censorship apparatus (which they claim to be necessary for their brand's reputation), and they used it (apparently through pressure from an Australian group) towards video games.
This is really bad but I don't think it makes sense to believe a government was ever involved here. Of course, there should be laws put in place to regulate mastercard into a common infrastructure. They should not be able to deny processing a legal payment because of nebulous "brand reputation" reason.
There are laws in place to regulate this behavior, but the government has chosen to protect mastercard from enforcement in this instance. That's the smoking gun.
Mastercard could simply refuse service for those games in particular instead of demanding (through proxies) that the games be banned from Steam. There's a clear antitrust violation.
if we're going to point to this there are much much more problematic instances of this happening, in particular democratic pressure to platforms like twitter and facebook to suppress certain information as "disinformation" even when it later came out to be true (hunter biden laptop)
We need to break them up solely based on size - if they’re too big on revenue or profit or market cap or employees, break them up. Or at least huge taxes on the largest companies and lower taxes on small ones. Market cap about 500B? Here’s an additional 25% tax on profits. Above 1T? Make that 50%.
I would argue that entities such as VISA and Mastercard have so much power that they are government-like entities and should be treated as such (i.e. a common carrier).
> This appears to be the system engaging by accident because some crazy from Australia accidentally said the right thing to the right people.
This has been happening for years already, this is not an accident caused by a crazy lady from Australia complaining to the right people. She simply took advantage of Mastercard already engaging in censorship and challenged them and their payment processors to take on an even broader interpretation of Mastercard's obscenity rules.
Ehh, mastercard and visa have been playing these kind of games for years. For example hypnosis is a censored term on most porn sites, and most try to take down videos using or referencing marijuana in videos. Not because either of those things are against the law to have in a video, but because payment processors like Visa and Mastercard will blacklist sites that don't of their own volition. Go ahead and go type hypnosis in any major porn site and you will see you get zero results.
In addition to the sibling comment about safe harbor hours, the FCC regulates not speech but the shared airwaves. Print is irrelevant, and that’s why you can do whatever you want on cable.
Also, the FCC does not directly set standards and instead responds to complaints from the communities in which the broadcast is available. So it’s conceivable that in an environment where nobody cared, you could do this at any time of day.
I am quite surprised how wrong opinions like yours are. There is no argument of free speech here, they are a private business and as such can decide what they allow and don’t allow on their network. It’s no different than if cloudflare had a click through that said no adult material.
You can hand wave around well they are a monopoly or some related argument but the government does not see it that way. Visa and Mastercard for decades have censored adult sites on their network. At the end of the day I suspect they would be happy to take the fees but they are the ones underwriting the risk and there have been cases over the year in the US at least that challenge how extreme you can go with Adult material. Even today there are certain categories that are much harder to get setup for processing.
Edit: to be ultra clear, I would love more competition in this space but at the same time there is no argument around free speech here.
You're confusing the concept of free speech with the First Amendment. Any time a person is prevented from expressing themselves is a violation of their freedom of speech, even if they have no legal right to speak.
But even in the context of the First Amendment, freedom of speech does not only apply to the government. For example, net neutrality laws prevent ISPs, which are generally private companies, from restricting Internet traffic on free speech grounds.
To the extent that it is legal for a payment processor to censor speech, the only reasonable conclusion is that the law is wrong and must be amended. Large corporations are much more similar to governments than they are to private so individuals, and should be treated as such.
You’re incorrect on both legal and factual grounds. The First Amendment applies only to government actors. Private companies, including Mastercard, have no legal obligation to carry or support speech they disagree with. This is settled law (Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck, 2019).
Net neutrality was about common carriers (ISPs) due to their chokepoint role in internet access. Payment processors are not classified as common carriers and are not subject to those rules.
If you want laws changed to regulate them like utilities, that’s a policy argument, not a free speech violation under current law.
The argument from free speech is that government should not be allowed to censor, regardless of the mechanism. Payment processors currently offer that mechanism.
If the government were coercing Mastercard into censorship, that would be a free speech issue. But absent state pressure, a private company choosing not to do business with certain content isn’t censorship in the constitutional sense. That’s just market behavior. If you want to challenge the influence of financial infrastructure on speech, that’s a separate (and valid) policy debate but it’s not a First Amendment violation.
It's a free speech issue if the government _can_ pressure Mastercard and, separately, Mastercard _can_ act as a censor. That government isn't using this ability in this particular instance is no more of a consolation than if there was a law that permitted censorship but was not used for that or enforced in practice.
Severing either of these two links would be enough though.
You’re shifting from a First Amendment claim to a broader “potential for abuse” argument. That’s fine, but let’s be precise.
1. Government pressure only triggers a First Amendment issue when it’s actual, not hypothetical. Courts require clear state action or coercion.
2. Mastercard acting on its own isn’t censorship in the legal sense, it’s a private company making content-moderation decisions. You may not like that power, but it’s not unconstitutional.
If you want structural reforms, like regulating payment networks as common carriers, that’s a policy question, not a current free speech violation.
The amendment is about laws, not execution. As long as we're not interpreting the amendment literally and trying to infer its spirit at all, the equivalent in this case is that the executive branch should not have the power to legally censor people or companies at all, as opposed to merely not using that power.
Not sure what your point is. Mine from the beginning is there is no constitutional issue like free speech here as the government is not coercing Mastercard or Visa. There are a lot of other valid complaints and arguments but free speech is not one.
I'm saying that Mastercard/Visa being able to do this on their own is one half of a free speech issue. It's not a free speech issue of its own, but it creates a free speech issue when combined with them being vulnerable to government pressure.
Imagine that the government instituted a private organization that had the power to cripple any business, with no recourse, and had control over it. The first amendment does not literally prohibit this, yet this would have clearly been a violation of the first amendment in spirit.
Your distinction is correct as far as it goes, but there is a third observation that must also be taken into account, which is that the tidy division of economic, social, and political matters into private and public domains is uninteresting from the perspective of power. An example of this is how gov'ts, constrained by law, cannot legally engage in widespread surveillance, have found what is morally a loophole by involving private companies who are able to do so more freely. Or, for example, the policing of certain ideas on privately-owned social media which have become de facto public forums. It is completely uninteresting to claim that you aren't forced to use these forums or that you can start your own as jejune free market extremists like to claim. A little intellectual maturity will make plainly obvious why that is the case.
Now, I happen to think that, pace Dershowitz, adult content does not fall within the scope of free speech. The entire purpose of free speech is to allow the truth to be to expressed. Free speech takes an attitude of pragmatic permissiveness toward certain varieties of what are objectively bad speech as the price for that to happen. It's a choice that was made in American political history, but even here, the bounds of what is legally permitted under free speech have not remained fixed for various reasons.
Adult content is nowhere in the vicinity of this notion of free speech, and certainly not its moral purposes. There is no right to produce or to view adult content. There is no right to anything that is objectively unethical, and both the production and consumption of such content is unethical. Gov'ts can choose to take a permissive stance toward such activity for prudential reasons (for example, historically, while prostitution was categorically condemned on moral grounds, gov'ts took a permissive attitude in some respects, because they felt that banning it would cause still greater problems), but they have the authority to criminalize it.
So, given that it isn't a free speech issue, I have no problem, in a free speech context, with private companies banning such content from their platforms or from being the subject of transactions passing through their systems.
You have a for profit business that in some areas like adult content walks a line between regulatory oversight, public outcry and the risk to underwriting the business. In this case it was public outcry, there have been instances in the past where different local jurisdictions have come forth. My point is they walk the line between those three areas.
Competition doesn't matter if entities have to simultaneously follow all of the payment processors' rules. It means in order to compete you have to find people willing to give up everything else. Which is an impossible proposition.
It's like if a tier 1 ISP only peered with networks that peer with networks that censor XYZ. Allowing for these kind of agreements leads to censorship and is why net neutrality is important from the government.
FWIW, "tier 1 ISP" is less prestigious than you'd think. Many tier 2's are bigger than many tier 1's. Being a tier 1 is kind of a self-exclusionary, nose-snubbing policy and in some ways it's surprising they manage to hang onto existence at all, though not in all ways.
This typically comes up when someone thinks they're getting better transit service from a tier-1 than a tier-2. They're not. A tier-2 ISP can have better routes, since a tier-1 will refuse to deliver your traffic anywhere that requires them to pay money. Some places are just unreachable from tier-1 ISPs.
Famously, for over a decade Cogent has refused to receive packets from Hurricane Electric without payment because idk profits, and Hurricane Electric has refused to pay them because it's a tier-1-ish, so you just can't talk to Cogent customers if you're an HE customer and vice versa. (I think HE eventually relented by paying a third-party to forward packets to specifically Cogent, even though they have tier-1 status to everywhere else)
You’re confusing constitutional rights with business obligations. The First Amendment restricts government actions, not private companies. Mastercard isn’t violating free speech by refusing to process certain payments. Civil rights laws protect against discrimination in specific categories like race or religion, not content moderation. Unless adult content is a protected class, your argument doesn’t apply.
This problem is upstream of the credit card companies. How far upstream? Not much. It's their investors. Like Bill Ackman [1] and Blackrock. These companies live in a fantasy world where everything can be "Disney-ized" and made family-friendly. They see how negative press campaigns like Collective Shout can damage a brand's image. And their "solution" is to turn the world into a big Disney theme park where there's no sex, drugs, or rock 'n roll. You may not mind that world, hell, you may even WANT that world, but it's completely impractical and these investors are too stupid to realize that their initial success (pressuring Steam to remove incest-themed games) won't translate into long-term success. (I mean what do you expect, they are MBAs and CFAs. They've been trained to see the world as a series of clinical abstract charts, which is why anyone who can apply a sociological filter to the world runs rings around them.)
Why you care about whatever we do with do with digital pixels at our free time ? Gamers trying to save the game they play and Master card have no business banning the games we play on our own private
> Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down, but Valve says payment processors 'specifically cited' a Mastercard rule about damaging the brand
Who in heaven’s name associates a credit card company with the image/ethics of the transactions it’s processing as long as the businesses are legal??
What I think of when I hear Mastercard? A plastic card with numbers on it, connected to my bank account and offering me some added protections/insurance.
I mean, to be a bit of a devil's advocate, its not impossible. Bitcoin sort of has the reputation of being used to buy "shady stuff". Its not unreasonable for MasterCard to not want to be "That card company people buy edgy porn with".
Which is why we need them to be legally required to process all lawful transactions, so that they cannot be singled out for it.
Don't forget the beheading! Mastercard specifically mentions beheadings. I guess Ned Stark shouldn't have complained to every lord of Westeros that King's Landing didn't accept American Express.
It's not targetted by pressure groups at the moment. MasterCard isn't acting out of its own moral convictions here, so don't expect these rules to be enforced wherever they might apply.
...So their quote "we require merchants to have appropriate controls to ensure Mastercard cards cannot be used for unlawful purchases, including illegal adult content." is just a lie?
Because it's a critically acclaimed movie that will draw defenders if it's banned now. If the activists went all in right away they'll lose and they know it
> Mastercard's Rule 5.12.7 relates to "illegal or brand-damaging transactions," and states:
> A Merchant must not submit to its Acquirer, and a Customer must not submit to the Interchange System, any Transaction that is illegal, or in the sole discretion of the Corporation, may damage the goodwill of the Corporation or reflect negatively on the Marks.
I didn't expect they had such clear rules expliciting they can ban any kind of transactions they don't like or would make them look bad, regardless of the legality of it.
I called MasterCard twice and both times they a) guessed that I was calling about content on Steam without ever mentioning Steam b) said that they only restricted "illegal adult content" and have "standards based on rule of law". Said absolutely nothing about protecting the brand. Also couldn't say if said "standards" were actual laws or MasterCard's own (legal) standards.
You don't really have to record the phone call. If anyone in the press wants to hear them saying that they don't block legal content, call them and ask about Steam. They have a ready-made PR response that they will read to you.
Do people think USD being accepted at kink stores gives the USA a reputation risk?
I just don't see the argument that a payment processor being able to process payments legitimately gives them reputation risk. I don't doubt that people write in to MasterCard to claim it does but people write about everything.
While I don't think MC's or Visa's reputation is at all close to being fragile enough to be harmed by use on any Steam game, the idea that these companies are almost like public utilities that shouldn't have a say in their deals is their reputation.
And carrying large amounts of USD cash does have a negative reputation, even to the US government. Nevermind the reputation of cryptocurrency.
I believe the issue is Visa PayPal, and Mastercard are capitualating to interest groups bombarding them with complaints and then celebrating censorship on social media posts. I agree with your sentiment, it's ridiculous.
If there were a law that MC had to be an impartial utility, like a phone or electricity provider, then it wouldn't hurt their reputation. But since there is no such law, they have the choice to deny transactions, which also means they can be blamed (by puritans) for allowing them.
I'm not sure you need MC to be an impartial utility.
IIUC, the problem here is the colluding behavior. Steam can't just "drop" MC and use Visa for the transactions as the banks must abide by MC's rules even when MC isn't the payment processor just to be eligible to be a bank for MC.
Mastercard's rule is that they can ban whatever they want, whenever they want.
> A Merchant must not submit to its Acquirer, and a Customer must not submit to the Interchange System, any Transaction that is illegal, or in the sole discretion of the Corporation, may damage the goodwill of the Corporation or reflect negatively on the Marks.
Create amorphous rules, enforce them as you feel like, then blame others for breaking the rules...
This is due to under-regulation of these oligopolies and lack of non-profit interoperable alternatives. Some things are too important to be left to the fantastical "invisible hand."
If there was a law that mandates that payment processors have to accept all transactions, then there'd be no reason to cite "brand damage" because Mastercard could just point out that they're not in control because of the law, and no other processor could censor that content either.
Unfortunately, laws like EU AML law go the opposite direction, where banks are allowed to close accounts only if they deem them "too risky".. this is not good.
I wonder if Valve could (threaten to) become their own payment processor if this becomes too big of a threat. They are one of the few companies on earth with enough money to attempt it.
If I remember correctly a big part of Valves heavy investment into linux was Microsoft wanting to lock windows down more, and now in 2025 gaming on linux is a viable alternative to windows.
I don't know how that helps. PayPal and stripe are the payment processors, no? Visa and MasterCard are the payment network. Steam can build their own Stripe probably, but are they going to make their own credit card network too? Probably not. They can maybe try taking money directly from your bank though, like Wise. But if you've ever tried it, that looks like such a shit show. Every bank and every country does it a little differently, has its own limits and fees, and the authentication is really ghetto.
What would that change? The assumption here is that payment processors need to comply with MasterCards rules. So would Valve if they would become a payment processor, no?
Dumb question: what if Steam only takes cash or crypto payment for these games, and leave them on the market? Cash is loaded from debit card and can be used for buying any games, while crypto apparently always works for everything. Would they still be on the hook?
IIRC the rule Mastercard cited was so vague that trying to workaround it almost seemed potentially pointless. It was basically a blanket "we think it makes MasterCard look bad so we end our relationship". Anyway, debit cards are still Visa/mastercard so using them as cash has the same problem. I was thinking they could just use Steam gift cards but since those are often themselves purchased in stores or with credit cards it seems to just push the problem a little further away.
I believe Steam did support bitcoin at one point but decided to end usage over because the price fluctuations made it to unpredictable on their end. Maybe the landscape has changed though.
>Steam did support bitcoin at one point but decided to end usage because the price fluctuations made it to unpredictable on their end.
Valve knew that there would be price fluctuations. Everyone knew that, and knew how to deal with it. They just priced the games in dollars, with a conversion to the Bitcoin value at the moment of sale.
But what Valve did NOT expect was that the Bitcoin blockchain would suddenly grow so popular and congested (which was a result of massive publicity from events such as Steam accepting Bitcoin). So suddenly, to Valve's surprise, the average fees to be sure that a payment would soon be processed on the blockchain fluctuated wildly upwards during that period, up to tens of dollars. The Blockchain congestion and high fees were exacerbated by technical and ideological arguments about how the Bitcoin network should function. The "small block" faction won, but Bitcoin quickly became a laughing stock as a method of payment, because second layer solutions to the network congestion weren't ready.
The high fees were a huge problem in themselves for Steam customers, and there were other support issues caused by Steam customer difficulty understanding how to use Bitcoin (and who can blame them?). Customers were angry because they had paid for a game, but their payments were delayed for days unless they paid an indeterminate Blockchain transaction fee which might be more than cost of the game they were trying to buy.
After a few months of that chaos, Steam dropped Bitcoin. So did many other retailers.
Ironic, Bitcoin payments work much better now and fees are lower, but it lost of a lot of goodwill from retailers like Steam during that period, and most of them have not come back.
>Are you sure that Bitcoin payments work much better because the amount of payments has dissipated?
I don't know. On the base layer, payments are all just transactions on the Blockchain, like any other. So it's not easy to see whether a transaction is a payment or an "investor" speculating, or something else. Then there's also other layers, like Lightning.
My guess is the relative percentage of retail Bitcoin payments, compared to speculative transactions, is now lower than 2017, when Steam accepted Bitcoin. I don't know if absolute amount of payments has reduced. Maybe?
You could look at historical charts of average Bitcoin fees[0], which gives you an idea when retail Bitcoin payments are practical, and when the fees are too damn high. Fees often got above $4, sometimes much higher, in 2024 for example, which would unacceptable for something like buying a game from Steam. Though, still, that doesn't show what impact Lighting is having on retail payments.
It's not about gaining a way to handle transactions without MasterCard. It's about losing MasterCard (or any other third party intermediary that follows their rules), and all of the accompanying customers who are accustomed to paying online with a credit card instead of going to a corner store and buying a Steam Card using cash.
It would take a lot of effort for Mastercard/Visa to stop physical retailers from selling Steam gift cards. Beyond gift cards, there's also systems such as PaySafeCard, which lets you pay with cash at a physical store and spend it online at any merchant who accepts it using a code.
And for crypto they can just accept Monero. Steam accepted Bitcoin years ago, but stopped due to high fees and network congestion. Monero fixes that + makes it private like cash, and has been the de facto cryptocurrency for years now.[1]
This is a better way to think about it: Valve is in a situation where they could maintain two payment regimes on their site: some content can be paid through methods X, Y and Z, while others cannot be paid by credit or debit cards but accept all other methods. That's some programming and payment routing change on their site, but might be within the possible. Valve can do that because they charge separately for each item. If passes or subscriptions, they would need to shift from one to two.
This would be harder - it seems - for something like OnlyFans where payments and censorship are all one soup shared among all content.
That's where it gets disgusting. They don't tolerate that solution, which is a proof that this has nothing to do with brand protection or chargeback rates or anything of sorts.
So either those poor games need to be kicked out, or everyone has to switch to cash/app overnight. The transition process has to be easy enough that the dumbest addict you have seen in worst fast food restaurant place can complete in few clicks. That has proven difficult for many, and sadly the former options are usually taken.
Debit cards still go through MasterCard and/or Visa. They could take crypto, but crypto is far too volatile for the types of transactions Valve wants to be handling.
Besides being able to change prices (whether USD or bitcoin) in real time, Valve is also selling bits and global data center activity. Their prices are very disconnected from other prices to begin with. Not like if they were selling tomatoes at cost plus living wages. Plus or minus 10% from one day to the next is not necessarily relevant on a sale to sale basis.
Volatility isn't an issue for the merchant - prices can be adjusted in real-time based on the cryptocurrency's value at the time of purchase, and if they don't want to be exposed, they can sell it immediately on purchase.
Whether or not Valve would want to encourage people to pay with crypto and expose their customer base to its volatility is another matter.
To be fair, in the case of Steam they legitimately did try. They supported bitcoin purchases for nearly two years before they stopped, citing volatility and processing fees:
I wouldn't call using Bitcoin legitimately trying. Even in 2017 Monero existed, which solves both the fee and transaction time problems, and as an added bonus is way more private.
It was tried, way back when it started, and it didn't work very well. Maybe a modern blockchain can work better, but the transaction volumes of credit cards are orders of magnitudes above the busiest blockchain today.
Why not? I regularly buy products and services online with crypto and it works quite well, usually a better experience than with a credit card.
There are plenty of chains that can confirm transactions in a couple seconds, and if you're concerned with volatility, just use USDC/USDT. There are crypto payment processors that handle all of this and allow payment across a range of chains and handle the volatility so that the merchant doesn't need to worry about anything crypto and just receives fiat.
Can you elaborate? If crypto is the only viable option to pay for something, I would agree due to the low amount of people familar in dealing with crypto. If it is an additional option, what part of it is not working?
Japan lets you make payments for online content at convenience stores.
How it works is you purchase a product online and it gives you a barcode that can be scanned at any major convenience store. You go to the store, scan the code, hand over cash, and the content you bought is instantly unlocked once the payment is confirmed.
I doubt Mullvad has anywhere near the volume of transaction Valve does. And mullvad has plenty of other payment methods, so only a tiny, tiny fraction of their userbase likely pays in mail-in cash.
I don't think Valve could feasibly implement this at their scale - especially if this method was the _only_ way to acquire the games in question.
This realistically doesn’t work that well above anything like a micro scale. It’s also a crime to mail cash across many borders, so it only really works domestically.
Debit cards use the same network. Either way, it's a non-starter from a business perspective, even if they accepted cryptocurrency, majority of the economy does not use it.
Classic passing the buck. "Well WE didn't say they had to take those games down. We just pointed some problematic games and that we might not want to do business with them if they weren't removed. We didn't take them down."
Unfortunately until some regulation is created to solve this problem Visa/Mastercard will continue throwing around their weight at the whims of whoever.
There's something really funny about the adjective "NSFW" being used to describe a video game, as though other video games like the Legend of Zelda are somehow "suitable for work".
The payment processor censorship issue backs up a point I made elsewhere about companies being involved in politics: they shouldn’t be, and shareholders should be screaming with rage that these companies have inserted themselves into these discussions on purpose.
They’re payment processors, for crying out loud. Their entire grift is taking a slice of every transaction processed, ergo, the only restriction they should ever have in processing payments is whether or not the transaction is legal under the law, full stop.
If they don’t like processing payments for pornography or adult content (including games), then don’t be a payment processor. They’re a business, not a person, and therefore their “preferences” regarding content are irrelevant.
It seems like it's difficult to really separate them these days.
You can always come up with something horrific enough that it seems reasonable, even necessary, for platforms to block it, like actual terrorism or child porn.
But then, there's always an activist group out there who really wants to ban something that most people feel is only mildly distasteful but not worth a platform-level ban and will abuse processes to do it.
And there's enough people for each of those cases who have incentive to obscure exactly which category things are actually in. More than enough for it to be hard for any platform to sort it out for sure.
So do we eventually end up with either an actual Government takeover, or everything banned that's more edgy than Mr. Rogers Neighborhood?
If you're interested and have any index funds, you could call shareholder relations for one of these companies and make that argument. "why are you turning down income streams and hurting your own profits" is maybe a position they'd listen to?
Quite a few folks already are - it’s why MasterCard felt the need to issue a statement trying to obfuscate their role in things, meanwhile Visa is doubling down in the UK by trying to push laws banning content with consenting adults wearing “childish clothes”, a category so vague that it’s designed to be abused by the powers in charge.
This is why companies shouldn’t be allowed to engage in politics or lobbying: a handful of for-profit entities are abusing their capture of western finance to push personal agendas regardless of popular opinion or actual legality.
> companies being involved in politics: they shouldn’t be, and shareholders should be screaming with rage that these companies have inserted themselves into these discussions on purpose.
What, might you say, do these companies (among others) have in common? What comes to mind when you see them together?
> If they don’t like processing payments for pornography or adult content (including games)
Pornography and adult content is fine—the real issue is that gaming storefronts refuse to moderate their platforms for child pornography and rape material and would rather kill their entire NSFW catalog, all while painting themselves as the victims.
> If they don’t like processing payments for pornography or adult content (including games), then don’t be a payment processor. They’re a business, not a person, and therefore their “preferences” regarding content are irrelevant.
Businesses are composed of people whose preferences matter. No business should be forced to serve pedophiles and rape fetishists.
I'm pretty sure child pornography is actually illegal in all jurisdictions valve operates in, and they would be charged with real crimes for selling it. Maybe you mean anime characters or something?
And is there any law about roleplaying rape? It's common in romance novels and online videos so I don't see how it could be illegal.
> Some types of pornography (both real and fictitious) are technically illegal in Australia and if classified would be rated RC and therefore banned in Australia. This includes any pornography depicting violent BDSM, incest, paedophilia, zoophilia, certain extreme fetishes (such as golden showers) and/or indicators of youth (such as wearing a school uniform).
Fictitious violent fetishes and BSDM would likely be illegal in Australia.
Fair enough for the Australian market, but I'm not sure why the rest of the world should have to line up with that. Just block it for Australian accounts or such?
And that is what should have been done. Steam and Itch should have blocked content that is illegal in Australia from being seen or sold in Australia.
The problem is that they didn't properly identify which content it is. "Does it involve a school girl outfit giving the indication of youth?" isn't something that they can filter on.
I could see something in the future where when someone puts up phonographic, they can't select all for the countries it can be sold in and instead need to specifically affirm that it is content that is legal in each of the checked countries.
However, Steam and Itch don't currently do that. So when pressure by Collective Shout was moved from Steam and Itch to Mastercard and Visa, Mastercard and Visa almost immediately put pressure on their downstream processors which in turn put pressure Steam and Itch. Since Steam and Itch couldn't filter the "just illegal in Australia stuff needs to be removed from being available in Australia" they appear to have removed all NSFW content until it could be reviewed.
I believe the key thing in this chain is that Visa and Mastercard are very risk adverse. While they do make a lot of money, on a per transaction basis any merchant that is a problem is a very small drop in the bucket compared to the legal consequences they could (and have) face.
The content is legal, and therefore your entire argument is irrelevant, as is your attempt to personify corporations. The whole point of being an adult is understanding that your personal tastes aren’t a mandate on others to comply for your comfort; in other words, if you dislike legal content, your sole recourse is to simply not engage with that content.
There already was a time when Steam managed to free people from need to use funny pieces of plastic in their lifes... They've done that with CDs, they can do it again with Cards.
This is a very persistent rumor. I forget the details but it comes from a customer support email, not some official statement or promise from Gabe, and even that was originally posted on a long gone forum which you can only find quotes of. Even if there was first hand proof of an official statement, I wouldn't expect it to be upheld. Minecraft's website used to have a line from Notch saying he would make it open-source in the future.
Steam DRM is and has been for decades famously easy to crack. Literally look up steam auto cracker and crack all your games in couple minutes. It is also optional by the way. I much rather have weak but popular steam DRM that makes it less likely devs use much stronger and expensive denuvo DRM.
The real loss was in the inability to sell the 90% of titles I no longer care about owning, but that's already true immediately after purchase.
Steam shutting down and taking your library with it really doesn't change much except you lose that nice delivery platform with good integrations (achievements, workshop mods, multiplayer integration, automatic updates) for games you're active in. For the 90% you were never going to touch again it wouldn't be noticeable, outside the annoying reminder you were never able to resell them. The other 10% just reverts back to "pirate it" which is about here on my scale:
"find that legal physical copy to play with" < "pirate it" < "click button on Steam"
All (most?) Steam games have a very simple DRM that is extremely easy to bypass, and you can find examples on github.
However, a lot of games add their own DRM and/or protection scheme that complicates things.
EDIT: technically there are two distinct component: the actual DRM, called steamstub, and the steamwork library, that does not work without steam but it is not considered drm. Both can be easily bypassed/emulated.
I see, but there is Steam DRM there. So, I guess as the other commenter was alluding to, if Steam goes belly up so does your collection, regardless of the dev studio's intention (Or atleast, locked behind a DRM bypass).
I understood this in terms of Live Service games, but did not consider Steam's ability to shut down their own platform and kill my locally installed single player games with it (Again, I'm seeing its possible and seems easy to bypass usually, but the principle of the matter)
I tried to search if it's possible for a dev studio to release a game on Steam that works without it, by which I mean that if I uninstall Steam, the games keep working; I wasn't able to confirm, but it seems to be theoretically possible...
None of the games I have in my library work like that, but online some people suggest that some games work even without Steam, once installed.
Definitely not all games, and for games that do have it cracking it is in most cases as simple as swapping out a Steam .dll (so very easy). It's primarily there as appeasement for devs who would be reluctant to engage with a platform with no copy protection, or in otherwords is mostly theater.
I haven't tried with too many games since the usecase only comes up rarely, but I know that Downwell and UFO 50 work this way off the top of my head. They come with a Steam dll that will try to launch Steam for the sake of getting achievements and such, but if you delete them or just don't have Steam they launch all the same.
What's stopping a large, profitable company like Valve from starting its own payment processor? Surely the technology part of it can't be an impossible hurdle.
> You'd have to onboard hundreds/thousands of banks
It's perhaps a good idea. It's likely that not very many banks and terminal makers and payment processors really matter. It would be a little delicate because the ones that matter would be pressured or at least would feel pressured NOT to participate on threat to their currently main business.
And the project doesn't have to become mainstream probably, just accepted "enough".
A better reason is that it's not really Valve's battle. They have plenty of other business. They don't need to fight this war. A company like OnlyFans, yeah perhaps they do - but they are likely much smaller.
Valve is in a situation that helps: they charge separately for each item. Some that the credit card networks are okay with and some that they are not. So they could support two regimes on their site: some items could only be paid through the Valve new card network (and gift cards and bitcoin), while other items could be paid through all the above plus the legacy credit card networks.
Valve (and/or OnlyFans) then gets paid for trying to enter the very lucrative payment network business. And gets to use these separate charges / two regimes of payments to distribute content that would be too dangerous within the current single payment framework.
Aren't cards last century technology? I'm paying with my phone anyways. Seller can use phone as well. Why does it need to involve incumbent banks and terminal providers at all? If Valve started something like that the banks would bang on its door relentlessly just to not be left out of the loop.
Gaming is the business bigger than movies, music and books combined and Valve is Google of games.
> Gaming is the business bigger than movies, music and books combined and Valve is Google of games.
Valve is not Google of games, the app stores Google and Apple has dwarfs steam sales and the individual game consoles are similar size as the steam store.
> I'm paying with my phone anyways
Right, since the phone ecosystem is large enough to be its own payment processor, unlike steam.
Phone is the platform. You can put any payment system there. In various countries it was figured out in a lot of different ways. Valve with global reach could really compete.
Also Google Play store might have more consumers and or sales but they are of worse quality. It's scummy, it's exploitative. The whole system is propped up by whales decieved by gambling mechanics and deceptive ads. It's nowhere close to real world economy. Valve is much closer. Despite using Play Store since it came to existance I never paid for anything on Google Play because I don't trust it enough to add a single payment method there.
I know how it works because connecting your bank account to your phone can be crappy and fiddly as it goes through Visa/Mastercard. But it works that way just to ride on customers of legacy systems. It doesn't have to work that way if you bring your own customers. It would have to start online of course and eventually move through phones to the real world.
I don't trust Paypal, at all, because its brand is damaged beyond repair, but I would put enough money on Valve account to do all of my online shopping with it if Valve did even just what Paypal does (even without connecting Visa or Mastercard directly).
It seems like you're treating your personal knowledge and preferences as the basis for Valve to take on an entirely new source of revenue and risk. It's a fantasy.
Even if 100% of Valve's user base cared as much as you (they do not), why would Valve take on the massive risk of connecting to its users' bank accounts? Of having to collect on debts? etc.
Why would they need to do that? "Credit" part of credit card is completely irrelevant when it comes to payment systems. It's a trick to milk the customers. Why would Valve lower themselves to that level?
My point is, with crystal clear, pro-consumer reputation Valve could be real alternative to gambling industry of Google Play store, payday loan business of VISA/MasterCard and gym membership style of extortion of other services. And betting on consumer was a recipe for success for Valve so far.
Why would they try? Because it's always good to 10x your revenue.
The backend of electronic payment is a huge mess of microservices, and lots of those services has portions of infra shared with Visa/Mastercard. So whichever alternative service you use is likely vulnerable to the same pressure.
The point is to cut MasterCard and Visa out of the loop entirely. Payment systems in many countries don't have them as intermediary. Payments in China work perfectly well without them. Or in Germany. Even Poland has widely used alternative payment scheme. With future European digital currency a lot of commerce will be done completely without any involvement from Visa and MasterCard.
I don't pay with credit or debit card for steam, I can use Blik, which is paying with my phone or one other payment processor, but I'm not in USA. This is USA problem.
If you believe Steam et al, the payment processors are bowing to the card networks in this. So being a payment processor wouldn’t help. You need to sidestep the networks.
In the US that means either dealing with ACH at scale, which is a challenge, building a new card networks (which is hard) or only using alternative payment methods such as bnpl or crypto.
Each of those will limit your buyers, which as a merchant is a tough business decision.
> In the US that means either dealing with ACH at scale, which is a challenge, building a new card networks (which is hard)
Which is why someone has big interest in keeping it this way as in Europe practically every country solved this issue a long time ago and people do daily shopping completely omitting Visa/Mastercard. They try to fight back without much success.
Europe is not a monolith on this. You see utilization rates going as high as 75% in Europe for credit cards, so in those countries merchants would have similar choices to American merchants. That’s before accounting for debit cards which use the main network rails.
And most of the alternatives are either government controlled and thus subject to different censorship concerns or private (for instance bnpl) and subject to the same.
That is to say people seem to be dancing around there being some fundamental right to transact. Thats not one of the traditional rights and not one that is codified most places (anyplace?).
This entire situation is badly misunderstood all over the Internet. As the article itself states, alternative payment processors that are used primarily for adult content already exist. CC Bill was the example given. And they accept Visa and Mastercard. They're used by websites with plenty of explicit adult content, including simulated rape, incest, and "teen" porn. It isn't Visa and Mastercard forbidding this. In this case, it's Stripe, though it seems likely they're doing it because of pressure from Mastercard, which in turn received pressure targeting these particular platforms from some advocacy group in Australia. But itch.io and Stream could still use CC Bill, and customers would still be able to pay with Visa and Mastercard.
The reason mainstream websites don't use CC Bill and it is used almost exclusively for porn, is because they charge a lot more than Stripe and the more mainstream payment processors do. There isn't really a ban on this kind of material, provided the platform hosting it is willing to use alternative processors, so much as a price increase.
Even with Pornhub and OnlyFans debacles, they never hosted content that can't be found elsewhere on sites that allow you to pay with Visa and Mastercard. The reason those platforms were targeted was never the content itself, but non-compliance with rules that professional studios have always had to abide by requiring they keep copies of government-issued ID of all performers and provide those to any viewer who asks for it, in order to be able to prove they aren't accidentally hosting content with children or otherwise non-consenting performers.
Ultimately, if a website wants to host content with a guy taking a shit on his twin underage daughters, they can do that, and you can pay for it with Visa and Mastercard, as long as they use something like CC Bill for processing and they keep adequate records enabling them to prove the "underage" characters and not actually played by underage performers, and the people involved aren't actually related. Or, maybe more precisely, you can have real twins in a scene together, but you're then limited by byzantine country-by-country laws I have no personal knowledge of regarding what they are and are not allowed to do together that counts as sex.
The Internet is where nuance goes to die, so this all gets distilled down to "Visa and Mastercard don't allow you to buy porn" by the time most people find out about any of it.
I mean they kind of do. Most of the time I would hand wave away any company offering gift cards or credits, but Steam has created an economy / structure that I think warrants mentioning here.
I have sold a few items on Steam because I don't care about cosmetics in games. I'm also lazy and because of that "sat" on items for a while that appreciated. I mention this because Steam credit is very fungible: it can be easily converted.
Steam also makes it very easy to redeem credit, gift, etc.
I believe you can buy Steam cards at most places Xbox cards and similar are sold as well.
Also in the early days of Bitcoin buying and selling of digital Steam assets was one of the most popular things.
I think loot boxes as a whole need to be regulated as they are clearly gambling. I'm not a fan of regulation as a solution to most problems, but when it involves children I think it sets a good framework for safety and if someone wants to start gambling later they are free to do so.
Valve goes one step beyond loot boxes with their marketplace: you get a loot box, pay to open it (basically a slot machine spin), and you get an item in a "game of chance" -- but that item is a "thing of value" that can be sold on Valve's official, first-party marketplace.
Every definition of gambling I've seen includes some variation of "winning a thing of value from a game of chance", and while loot boxes for in-game rewards skirt that (the thing you're getting is typically described in the fine-print as having no monetary value), Valve's user-driven marketplace is setting a real-world value.
Put another way: EA FC's card packs or Genshin Impact's gacha spins are worth nothing outside of those games, but I've sold Counter-Strike skins to pay for a decent chunk of my Steam Deck.
I know that physical Steam gift cards exist but I've quite frankly never seen them anywhere. Nintendo/PlayStation/Xbox cards are pretty ubiquitous though. I recently tried getting a Steam one from a grocery store but they only had the console ones.
The regulatory environment is absolutely insane. The things you'd need to do to interoperate are nightmarish, it's damn close to an impossible hurdle. (I work at a fintech company)
Because in this case it wasn't them, but their intermediary. However, in another case, where there was no intermediary, it would be them, not their intermediary.
If they start their own payment processing company, they will then be subject to the same laws and regulations and the existing processing companies. Who manages the money doesn't matter. Even if you use Crypto, Steam would still remove the games due to the Australian law.
Steam didn't remove the games due to Australian law lol. Where did you get this idea?
Steam games' availability is per-country. They could've removed games for Australian users only. NSFW games are not shown to Chinese and German players on Steam since forever.
This whole thing came about because of the Australian campaign to remove rape games consistent with law. Payment processors could be found liable for processing payments related to illegal activities. Steam anad the payment processors could have made it region specific, but didn't, probably for PR reasons.
Also, Steam Direct didn't update their policy on game content from what I see. Doesn't look like Steam fought back. Seems as though Steam has never supported games with rape, incest, child exploitation, etc.
It’s not even a duopoly, look at the majority shareholders of both Visa and Mastercard, Vanguard and Black-rock in both. So it’s effectively a monopoly.
Vanguard and Blackrock are just asset managers. Public companies are owned by everyone with mutual funds, like pension funds and individual retirement accounts.
Thanks, but ”just asset managers” feels a bit generous, from that same link;
”But large asset managers may help bring issues to the attention of boards.”
Is that the case here, no idea (likely not), but I do find it strange that both Visa and Mastercard refuse to take part of the multi billion dollar industry that is adult content.
I have heard that it’s a volatile market with a lot of cash backs and fraudulent transactions, but they are happy to participate in other such endeavors.
How many more trillion dollar of assets do they need to "manage" before people start realizing that for all intents and purposes the one moving money around has more power and influnce than the one that actually owning it. See ESG score
The problem isn't the lack of laws, it's the lack of enforcement. Biden's FTC gave us a glimpse of what a working antitrust enforcer could look like, and it caused a bunch of influential billionaires to switch political allegiances.
There's no escaping the politics here. You can't enforce antitrust without hitting the billionaire class directly, and those people know how to influence American politics in their favor. Just look at what happened to the "click to cancel" rule post-Trump, something that is unambiguously pro-consumer and exactly the type of thing the FTC should be doing.
The fact that Visa and MasterCard are the primary payment options for OnlyFans, makes this story a mess. Some time ago Visa and MasterCard very vocally banned Pornhub (at least) from using their cards, 100% sure this comes from them.
Ultimately the ban was undone in exchange for onlyfans limiting the type of content available on the platform. So effectively, payment processors dictate which type of sexual activities, performed by consenting adults, are OK to depict and sell. Why? Why do they have that power?
The government historically uses the the financial industry to police crimes and behavior that it does not want to or that it is not expedient to police directly. Clearly they like the outcomes of the payment networks' rules and enforcement decisions and see no need for things to change.
Not exactly. Visa was named as a counterparty in a class action against Mindgeek for monetizing child porn on their website. They lost, and there have been subsequent class actions.
If it was indeed Collective Shout's pressure campaign that led to Valve and itch.io being told by their payment processors to remove games, then this is how it went:
Collective Shout -> Mastercard -> Mastercard's head of brand risk (or equivalent role) -> Mastercard's business partners -> Valve and itch.io
We know it was Mastercard who told the payment processors what to do, as the rule they cited to Valve says "in the sole discretion of the Corporation, may damage the goodwill of the Corporation" -- the Mastercard Corporation used its sole discretion to tell payment processors what to tell Valve and itch.io. The payment processors did not decide this for themselves.
Mob bosses order hits, wise guys carry them out. The mob boss has clean hands.
Keep the pressure on Mastercard.
We need to stop these side-channel attacks on democracy. If a government deems some media lawful, you shouldn't get to de-facto ban it by going after publicity-averse private companies that provide hosting, payment processing, etc. https://protectthestack.org/
I really hope Steam will start to accept Bitcoin (via Lightning possibly) over this. Due to its decentralization, it is censorship free by default. And if Steam accepts Bitcoin, that would be a massive boost for the liquidity aspect of BTC: You could basically sell your BTC to anyone who wants to make a Steam purchase, making it similarly fungible as Amazon gift vouchers.
> making it similarly fungible as Amazon gift vouchers
This isn’t as accurate as you might hope. I can pretty much only buy hobby-related things on Steam but I can buy just about any non-perishable household item on Amazon.
I realize the strong anti cryptocurrency sentiment on HN for reasons unclear to me, but this would be a great time for Steam and itch to accept cryptocurrency.
There are so many middle men involved, it gets confusing. Apparently the payment goes like this:
Game Buyer (Steam) -> Stripe/PayPal -> MasterCard/Visa -> Valve -> Game publisher
That's at least three middle men, and presumably all of them collect fees. I wonder why in the year 2025 there isn't a more direct way to pay for things.
Why are we surprised? A centralized payment system, especially a banking one, is bound to do something like this. Crypto solves this but the average normie is still stupid enough to rely on them
And this is not the first time this happens. The exact same thing happened to PornHub - their premium subscription model got cancelled due to Visa/MC not liking some "questionable" content. Even though PH purged 60% of its content (basically every video uploaded from an unverified account), they are to this day still not accepting CC - probably as they are still banned. Instead they accept Crypto and SEPA payments in the EU.
This makes a strong case for Bitcoin - no matter if you consider it a ponzi scheme, or the BTC price to be overinflated, you will not be able to deny it is truly censorship free.
It's a strong case for, perhaps, Algorand[1], but Bitcoin can no longer play this role properly. Transactions are too difficult and slow and the network is too expensive. And Lightning is not a real solution.
1. Specifically a stablecoin running on the network
Bitcoin (and most other crypto) unintentionally strikes an interesting balance here. Through the ability to trace blockchain transactions and impose KYC laws on exchanges you can in principle figure out who most money belongs to. That puts you in a position where if A wants to send B money you can't prevent that, but you can go after either A or B. That gives you freedom of payment, but after the fact you can still go after people laundering money or financing terrorism
We have privacy focused crypto systems like Monero, but the EU effectively banned them last year through "money laundering" laws, and they're moving to completely ban them within the next few years.
I kind of wonder if there had been misinterpretations as to the results of previous campaigns against Japan.
English in Japan is more of a customer support tool than a language. Proficiency is improving in some places, but on decline at large, below already atrocious status quo. This means the size of English-speaking audiences for actually Japan-centric news is small and not the first priority, not small && more important. Extremely little of whatever happening in Japan appear on mainstream English social media, let alone regular mainstream media.
If that much was not obvious to whoever pulling strings on this ongoing thing, I think there may be a chance that lack of observable responses after their earlier actions led to a misplaced confidence that gaming is a tiny top-down market and consumer resistance is nonexistent.
The responses were significant enough that it elected an equivalent of senate for third term and got former PM Kishida make a hand-wavy assurance on video even just few days before this one. It was almost certainly just a lip service, but also not nothing. How would anyone interpret that as a situation safe to escalate further?
Some other cryptocurrency fixes this, maybe (big maybe). But as long as _Bitcoin_ is seen primarily as an investment opportunity it can't really function as a means of exchange. For the same reason that we expect and need USD to lose value over time, people need to be encouraged to exchange their currency, not sit on it forever.
Something doesn't need to be perfect to be an escape valve.
So for example, when backpage's speech was unlawfully suppressed by the US government via payment processors cutting them off in Operation Chokepoint, they successfully adopted Bitcoin.
... and then Kamala Harris aggressively prosecuted them for 'money laundering' for the evading the payment processor blockade, even though her own internal staff report said they were guilty of no crime and were a treasured asset of law enforcement in the fight against human trafficking ( https://reason.com/2019/08/26/secret-memos-show-the-governme... ). So aggressive was the prosecution that they caused a mistrial by flagrantly disregard of the court's orders, then prosecuted again leading the the suicide of one of the founders following a decade of vicious harassment by the state.
uh ... so maybe not the best example.
Or maybe it is the best example: The root cause in the abuse by payment processors is the US government leaning on them to abuse their subjective discretion to suppress lawful activity that the government is constitutionally prohibited in interfering with. This is both what underlies the schizophrenic response by mastercard, which likes money and would generally just prefer to process everything profitable, and is also why Steam would be taking a huge risk to route around them with alternate payment means.
Before getting all worked up, I would advise people to look at what games exactly were banned, and see if it’s a case of power abuse or simply a case of “we can all agree that rape and incest games are disgusting and have no place in an entertainment web site visited by kids”.
I don’t mean that I agree with the concept of corporate power abuse or the hypothesized source of the pressure. But I’m not spending one second of my life protecting this kind of content, and the fact that it’s being euphemistically called “Adult Content”, a very approximate description, shows that the source of the current outcry _knows_ it’s very bad looks to be defending any of the games that have been confirmed banned by steam.
I don't think most comments here or in the general discourse are protecting the content ?
I'm trying to find a good analogy. Perhaps if someone in your town built a giant meat grinder in their backyard, and as a test run they requested the vilest and most heinous criminals to be sent to them, you'd still see a private entity getting to grind the people they want as a serious issue.
Not wanting to spend a second on that issue, just because of who got sent there, would be quite a position.
> Removing incest games is not a burden to society
It is to those who enjoy playing them.
Are you suggesting that playing a game involving incest is somehow unacceptable, while a game with graphic murder is fine? It's a strange moral line to draw, and despite what you may think, your views are not shared by everyone.
> we can all agree that rape and incest games are disgusting and have no place in an entertainment web site visited by kids
We can then also agree that a game where you beat someone into a bloody pulp with a bat is equally disgusting. Why do we treat rape and murder differently?
I feel like nobody cares really and none of the companies care, but are all worried because of the massive stranglehold 2 players have (and realistically each has almost entire control).
Mastercard don't care you want porn, or games, or whatever. Neither does VISA. They like money. They want money and want people to move their money so they can siphon off some of it for their own pockets. Almost nobody is going to avoid using a bank because their card provider let some other people buy rude games on steam.
The payment processors don't care. They want you to send money through them so they can take their cut.
Steam doesn't care. The people making the games don't care. They all just want to sell stuff.
The only thing that impacts this really is chargebacks, which iiuc are much more common with adult stuff.
But payment processors can't guarantee what mastercard or visa will do, and players like steam (and they're huge, this is not about tiny store issues) can't guarantee what payment processors will do and given the potential downside - blocking all sales - people need to be careful.
While I can see how these situations come up, it's also absolutely insane as an end result because I just want to give *my money* to someone else. I've ended up using crypto before for buying things, not for ideological reasons, but purely because I could buy them and then give them to someone else for the "flagged as risky" goods/services because I couldn't pay for things using my money and my card.
It's not for adult games, but for sexually violent games in Australia. Also, Pornhub already appeased the payment processors when they purged a bunch of content.
For a while my old bank would block all Steam payments on both debit and credit - calling them confirmed that this was their new policy. I swiftly closed the account and moved to a competitor so I could spend my money again.
>The only thing that impacts this really is chargebacks, which iiuc are much more common with adult stuff.
I think this makes no sense, like "we makes less profits from adult stuff because of charge back, so let\s give up on this profits". Anyway this companies did not use this excuse so why do this old excuse is resufecing now if they did not use it.
They usually just charge a higher fee for the riskier category. If a particular vendor has too many charge backs, they could drop them for that. Obviously not the case with Steam.
I didn’t say it was an excuse given here, have you tried reading the whole comment? It’s not very long and shouldn’t be hard to understand. If it is I can help explain it.
We are not on reddit here, have you paid attention?
Now seriously, you brought some old excuse here for some very inteligent reason, explain please? Do spouses will read that the guy bought something from Steam and she will then conclude the dude is playing very adult games? The excuse does not work as far as I can see, so explain your thoughts or explain why you are just pasting random excuses and then act like a redditor
Read the whole comment because that statement is not an excuse, it is simply a nod to how it differs from other payments. The rest of the comment explains why I think the situation arises like this. It really isn’t hard to read so try and if you think your understanding clashes with my explanation of my comment feel free to assume I’m bad at making a point and read it in good faith.
I clearly don’t understand your issue with what I wrote, and won’t with more accusations of being like a redditor.
I will respectfully disagree, I can't see your comment on topic.
you said "The only thing that impacts this really is chargebacks, which iiuc are much more common with adult stuff." and this is something claimed about porn sites but explain how this applies to Steam or GOG, please explain clarly or admit it does not apply.
It’s not about chargebacks. If you can’t understand that from the comment and my followups I’m not able to explain it clearly enough for you and we should end it here, have a nice night.
Lots of outrage at the card companies, but strangely, no outrage at the laws that actually caused this. One is the Australian law to remove that type of content and the other is the US law that says the payment processor can't participate in illegal transactions.
Why would there be outrage at laws when the article we're talking about specifically says this isn't about any laws but instead about a Mastercard rule about damaging their brand?
Also, Steam Direct didn't update their policy on game content from what I see. Doesn't looked like Steam fought back. Seems as though Steam has never supported games with rape, incest, child exploitation, etc.
My guess is that Steam wasn't able to adequately block the games in Austrailia. If people use a VPN to access the content, could Steam still be liable?
They absolutely do have that infrastructure. They implemented every country's content rating system, such as PEGI, ESRB, ... . Games are regionally banned, such as in Germany [1]. Games can also have regionally censored games, typically for violence/gore in Germany [2]. With the strange effect that if you change your account's region, it re-downloads some of the games.
The legal situation with VPNs and traveling between regions is the same as with any internet service.
Your steam account has a record of the country it was created in, and so does your credit card when you use it. You'd have to also get a foreign credit card and create a new steam account to even use a VPN to buy games from another region.
No, it hasn't been the case. The group in question, Collective Shout, has been pressuring Mastercard. Not Mastercard Australia, not Steam Australia: it's a concerted action to take down things they don't want. It's not a one time thing either: sex workers have been under attack by similar extremist catholic bigots. Furries, porn, anything they see as deviant is being attacked. And MC/Visa are happy to help.
Do I mind that MDMA Date With Hitler was taken down ? No, I don't believe it's a massive loss. However, the way it was done, through payment providers threatening to shut off access to the entire payment system because of their rules, is incredibly dangerous to the whole world.
This so much. The problem here is not the content that was blocked, it's the completely unaccountable process that was used to block content worldwide bypassing any legal protection.
Steam Direct didn't update their policy on game content from what I see. Doesn't looked like Steam fought back. Seems as though Steam has never supported games with rape, incest, child exploitation, etc.
So what? Steam simply didn't want to start a fight with its payment providers over some niche content. The problem is that this incident has proven it's possible to ban whatever content you want, globally, by pressuring middle management in Mastercard and Visa.
"Steam simply didn't want to start a fight with its payment providers over some niche content."
Or the content was never supported by Steam, per their policy. You can check Wayback machine for support for my position. Dod you have any evidence of Steam's motive otherwise?
I don't think inferring causality here is far fetched. They were fine with the content before. And we know it because said content was banned in some countries (including Australia) to comply with local regulations, so they clearly knew what the games were about.
Given that fact we have two options: either they decided to change their approach to content moderation and remove games that previously passed all their checks, with these games being coincidentally the same that were requested by Mastercard; or they decided to remove every game requested by Mastercard regardless of Steam's own policies.
Do you have info on the US law? I am curious if it follows the same trend Russia set years ago with requiring them to put a large deposit and if they break the rules they get to keep all the money.
It doesn't go that far. These are part of the Know Your Customer type of law. These have increasingly been pushed as part of anti money laundering onto banks, investments, and processors. If a company is selling illegal things or things that even could potentially be illegal, then they get blacklisted. Similar thing to pot companies.
Marijuana sales, at least in the US, are a whole different can of worms, because marijuana exists as kind of a Schroedinger's illicit substance: its legal at a state level in most US states, while simultaneously illegal at the federal level. Anyone with a multi-state footprint that exists in that transaction chain could be held liable.
And yes, that's a problem that they're dealing with right now. Bellular News : Steam Faces Financial Obliteration: Others Are Already Dead https://youtu.be/AlDkL3DndtM
That said, not all NSFW content is allowed in all jurisdictions. Australia and Japan (for example) have laws about particular content that differs from US laws.
So... Mastercard's statement is very clear:
> Put simply, we allow all lawful purchases on our network.
But their "Rule 5.12.7" is... not so clear:
> A Merchant must not submit to its Acquirer, and a Customer must not submit to the Interchange System, any Transaction that is illegal, or in the sole discretion of the Corporation, may damage the goodwill of the Corporation or reflect negatively on the Marks.
Well, which one is it now? All lawful purchases (pretty clear-cut) or only lawful purchases that will not "reflect negatively" on Mastercard in Mastercard's opinion (vague as hell)?
We need Congress to make a law here in the US that businesses involved in facilitating financial transactions in the United States are considered “common carriers” and must not discriminate against, cancel or disadvantage any customer or legal transaction, without a court order.
We can write language to allow booting people for fraud, hacking, etc if “legal” + “court order” are insufficient.
There's a bill for almost exactly that currently pending in committee: https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/401 If you like the idea, read the text on there and call your senators to support it.
The relevant part is section 5b.
>(b) Prohibition.—No payment card network, including a subsidiary of a payment card network, may, directly or through any agent, processor, or licensed member of the network, by contract, requirement, condition, penalty, or otherwise, prohibit or inhibit the ability of any person who is in compliance with the law, including section 8 of this Act, to obtain access to services or products of the payment card network because of political or reputational risk considerations.
Then the goalposts shift to: “This isn’t for reputational risk, it’s because we consider fraud more likely for this type of industry, and we are within our rights to take a proactive approach to fraud.” And there is no requirement that they disclose the reasons for that decision.
Don’t get me wrong: it’s progress. But it’s far from a panacea.
It would be a hard sell to finger Steam as being at high risk of fraud. Steam has a very generous refund policy, and if you don't consider it generous enough, and chargeback a purchase on your Steam account, they just lock it (and access to all your games) until you pay them.
I don't have insider information about how often Steam gets hit with fraud alleged chargebacks, but I can't imagine it's a significant percentage.
> Don’t get me wrong: it’s progress. But it’s far from a panacea.
Progress in this day and age is great. Progress right now is at least 2 orders of magnitude better than patiently waiting for a panacea.
> Steam has a very generous refund policy
It doesn't.
Can you provide counter examples? I've legitimately never had a refund refused within the terms they outlined.
For fraud related risk they should still be considered a common carriers but may adjust rates for certain types of transactions or businesses, if, in good faith and backed by empirical data, they can demonstrate the monetary risk to the card processor, and that the increased transaction costs are aligned with the level of risk and are not punitive or discriminatory.
The key point here is ”good faith”.
I don’t want to disadvantage their business or make them absorb fraud costs, but I want all excuses off the table.
OTOH Visa and MasterCard testified in front of Congress a couple of months ago that they have >50% profit margins which indicates to me that there is a regulatory failure in antitrust here.
i think that sounds like a perfectly fine compromise - choosing not to provide services that are an especially high risk of fraud should be within their rights.
it just means that they could be forced to defend those decisions in court, which is good and exactly the sort of thing that courts are supposed to decide.
Exactly. If they are misapplying their fraud criteria, companies start suing and winning and Mastercard stops misapplying their criteria.
This sounds great on paper, but what incentive does Valve have fighting for a game listing with only 100 players?
I get the feeling many companies would find it easier to allow payment processors to censor something if the product isn't earning them much anyway.
"That's one of our least popular items we sell so honestly we don't really care..."
Which is within the right for the reseller to decide, but it does nothing for protecting access to a product that's otherwise only available on a select few digital storefronts.
Then it becomes an issue for the game studio, who may not have the funding to fight a case to remain available. And then you have a situation where the game studio has become a victim of a payment processor's conspiracy theory that they're tied to fraud.
The section is not without its own flaws, mainly in 5(c):
> (c) Civil penalty.—Any payment card network that violates subsection (b) shall be assessed a civil penalty by the Comptroller of the Currency of not more than 10 percent of the value of the services or products described in that subsection, not to exceed $10,000 per violation.
I see 2 problems as it is currently written: (1) The penalty's too low, & (2) restricting dispense of the law to only the Comptroller renders it ineffective.
(1) is easily solvable with regards to editing the text alone: raise the limit to 50% & $100k respectively.
(2) is also solvable, by striking out "by the Comptroller of the Currency", or adding in ", or by a federal court, whichever penalty is higher, " at the end of that part.
Careful. That could backfire.
Right now there are things that a significant majority think are terrible and shouldn't exist but aren't a high enough priority to actually make illegal because they are small because most mainstream service providers don't want to serve them.
Take that away an those things might grow enough that they do become a priority for legally banning.
What kinds of things?
I won't trust the Congress. Far left and far right are both pushing for more censorship
Far left not needed. The center left will gladly do it.
what far left are you talking about exactly?
Just pass the law yourself I guess? (imagine a muscly arm emoji here)
The US barely has any genuinely left-wing politicians (Bernie Sanders, AOC, DSA). There are no one who realistically could be called far left in any significant position of governing power.
Even these are not far left, they're just basic liberal left.
Which groups or media that are commonly labeled 'far left' that are calling for nationalizing all land. Or eliminating all inheritances. Or nationalizing all communications and transportation industries. Or nationalizing the Federal Reserve (that one's really gone horseshoe theory, and is a republican plan now).
The only thing 'far left' people want to nationalize is health care, and that's simply the fiscally responsible policy. The thing that is crushing the federal budget is the obscene level of graft occurring in that industry, and the only way out is to nationalize or otherwise burn the existing system to the ground via government policy.
The meaning of words can change over time and across space.
The meaning of left and right in US politics encompasses more topics than the matter of who may legally own things.
Pretending that those referred to as left and right are all the same because the only true scottsman is Karl Marx is silly.
There's a whole bunch of socialism to the right of *!=) Marx and the left of classic liberalism.
Words have meaning, trying to characterise "far left" as some sort of US caricature of Blue haired liberal types is less than useful and only serves right wing outlets.
There is very little left wing discourse in the US.
GP was saying that there are hardly far left politicians, saying that the few that exist are Sanders/AOC/DSA.
I was just pointing out that even these are not actual socialists, they're Democratic Socialists of the stripe you find in the mainstream in a lot of staunchly capitalist European nations. There are definitely zero literal far-left politicians, objectively speaking.
Socialist/social democrat are two related but distinct concepts are confusing for those not versed in political science, but their definitions have certainly not changed: democratic socialists for example don't advocate for communal ownership or central planning. The actual policies put forward by DSA candidates in the US, viewed through a political science analysis, are vanilla liberal. The only thing making them 'far left' is that actual far right monied interests have systematically dragged the Overton Window into a place where "public figure performing the Nazi salute on the capitol steps" is "controversial, in some circles" rather than "immediately career-ending."
The list i provided was of left wing politicians.
There are zero far left wing politicians in the US Congress. The far left is literally anti capitalist marxists.
Yes - the Overton window in the US has shifted so far right that a Nazi salute is more or less mainstream, whereas democratic socialists like Sanders/AOC are now "far left". And judges who dare block Trump's actions are, of course, "radical left lunatics" (https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/federal-judge...).
Center shit, not censorship.
This is a case where left and right can work together for totally different reasons. The left is fighting for rape porn in video games, and the right doesn’t want gun stores definanced. Both win with credit platform neutrality.
How would that work with international money laundering regulations?
Would that apply to Australian courts?
If the regulation is legally binding by an act of Congress, it falls under the legal umbrella.
Same thing in AUS: If there's a AUS law, they have to follow it.
In those cases, what would a law...
provide? It might have prevented Visa and Mastercard from being brought into the PornHub lawsuit... in the US. It wouldn't have protected them from Australian laws weaponized by organizations such as Collective Shout.Yes, the US is not the world police and that’s okay. Let Australians deal with Australian laws and Australian lobbying groups.
... and risk adverse international companies (like Visa and Mastercard) need to follow the laws everywhere despite what various jurisdictions shield them from in those jurisdictions.
No: it’s cheaper for them to follow the minimum common compliance across all countries, but Mastercard-sized firms absolutely can and often do vary compliance per country (gestures at Google, Facebook) when it’s profitable to do so. Mastercard could have simply enforced Australia-specific rules on Itch if they’d wanted to, but they’re anxious about being labeled as smutty due to domestic U.S., and apparently exported Australian, puritanism. The solution is to ensure that cowardice does more lasting harm to their brand than they feel that their strategy prevents — which requires both loud and immediate response, as well as sustained pressure over time.
Mastercard and Visa have rather corse information about the transactions.
They've got the credit card number, the merchant name, the time, and the total amount of the transaction.
They do not have line item level filtering of a transaction. Remember those old carbon paper credit card thingies? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_card_imprinter - that's all that's needed and all they get. Similarly, the credit card terminals where the merchant enters the amount, swipes the card (or reads the chip) and that's it is sufficient.
Mastercard and Visa would only be able to say "that merchant" not "that product." Filtering based on products and if it's legal there needs to be done by the merchant. Mastercard cannot check to see if someone is selling liquor to an underage customer... but if a merchant is doing that, Mastercard may drop that merchant as one of their clients.
If Itch and Valve are unable to enforce Australia specific laws on their own storefront, Mastercard and Visa can only enforce it at the "this merchant isn't allowed to transact with our network."
Mastercard can deny all transactions from Australia-billed cards to one merchant if they wish to. They are absolutely wired up for “Area of Use” internally and have this data available to their transaction approval processes. That they chose not to use it, instead pressuring merchants to remove content disliked by an Australian puritanical fringe group, is the corporate laziness I describe. Why respond with their own effort when they can just externalize the problem onto their customers, etc.
Mastercard does not have that information. Mastercard doesn't do the billing. The bank does the billing.
Mastercard does not know the location where a given card holder is (or for that matter, any demographic information about the card holder). They know where the merchant is, but that's less useful for digital goods.
Per section 7 here — https://www.mastercard.us/content/dam/public/mastercardcom/n... — MasterCard could simply remove Australia from Itch’s Area of Use, at which point they would not be permitted to accepted MasterCard from Australian customers, which the merchant could trivially enforce by country filter on the billing address.
I suspect we’re going to find out that Stripe is unwilling to risk losing Mastercard in Australia and also unwilling to implement passthrough AoU restrictions to their sublicensees, and Mastercard isn’t willing to act against any single customer of Stripe or else they don’t profit from the “not our problem” discount rate they issue Stripe to make it their problem.
If an American company chooses to enter a foreign market and do business there, they should be subject to the laws and customs of said market. The complexity that comes with it is their problem to deal with. I echo the earlier sentiment that the U.S. shouldn't be the world's police (although we do behave like that now).
Nah.. Congress won't. When paypal stopped payments to wiki-leaks Congress was happy as to close their eyes.
> Well, which one is it now?
Obviously the more complicated option with arbitrary criteria
Public announcement are in no way bound by truth, terms of service are, to a degree
PSA is a reputational risk, where ToS is a legal one.
I'm glad the Mastercard-Visa duopoly is finally getting some attention, these companies shouldn't be allowed to exercise the financial control they do. Payment infrastructure is not a free market - you can't just choose to pay via some other processor if they turn you down, they ARE the processors. Therefore, they should be under intense scrutiny when they refuse.
I think the mint should maintain a payment processor, and the post office should maintain an official email address for everyone.
these are basic things we need to exist in society, we should not be at the whims of private organizations.
Is a payment processor operated by the Federal Reserve good enough? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FedNow
Well, it probably would be, except guess who killed it in favor of a crypto scheme? https://www.jitumaster.com/2025/06/us-president-signs-execut...
I agree about the PO though. Social media shouldn't be a for-profit enterprise either.
Is there another source that says what exactly happened in that executive order? I can't find one signed on june 6th that had anything to do with payments.
[0] was from March, and demanded treasury modernization (like paperless and stuff), but didn't really say anything about crypto or FedNow. And FedNow's website mentions nothing about the program being slowed down (just announcements about new things happening in Q3 and a bunch of new signed on banks).
0: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/03/28/2025-05...
I can find nothing about FedNow being replaced or even changed recently. Your source is the only one about this, and it's some no-name crypto junk site nobody's ever heard of.
I think the federal reserve is too close to the status quo to be effective for this. It is owned by the federally chartered banks, the same ones that all have longstanding relationships with the current payment processors.
A government organization like the mint should be in charge of the layer 1 of money transfer. Let the current providers adapt and sell their other services on top of it. It could be crypto, copy the existing systems, or be something new all together. It doesn't even have to be free, they could add in a small transfer tax or whatever. The point is that any person or business should be able to send money to any other, for any reason. At the very least within the country.
The banks have longstanding relationships with payment processors but they aren’t stupid. The duopoly has fat margins that the banks want a cut of, hence earlier initiatives like Zelle.
Ugh, they killed FedNow too? That hadn’t hit my radar. Why a waste.
FedNow has not been diminished through policy, still full speed ahead.
I don't think so?
Here's the EO, I don't see where it kills FedNow, it seems like it just mandates electronic payments and disallows paper checks: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/03/mode...
Heh, while I like the idea of using immediate electronic dispursement over the mail.
I do find the ending of the EO pretty amusing. You're telling the agencies exactly what to do, how is that not impairing their authority?
> Sec. 7. General Provisions. (a) Nothing in this order shall be construed to impair or otherwise affect:
> (i) the authority granted by law to an executive department or agency, or the head thereof; or
That's boilerplate that's been attached on most of all EO's for decades now.
The point of EOs is that they aren't laws and cannot change laws, but they can provide [mandatory] guidance to entities, under the Executive, on how to implement laws. So imagine there's a law that says some agency can ban whatever widgets they want. An EO requiring that they not ban widgets made in Timbuktu would not contravene that law, but provide guidance on how the law will be implemented. By contrast if the law said that the agency must ban any harmful widgets, an EO would not be able to prevent them from banning harmful widgets, even if they happen to be made in Timbuktu.
Thankfully modern EO's are (contrary to intuition) pretty much weak sauce because of this balancing act. See, for contrast the dictatorial mandate that is executive order 6102. [1]
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102
But how does mandatory guidance not impair the authority of an agency?
The agency is no longer allowed to do something against the guidance! Or the Order must not be ordering some action?
Government agencies in the executive branch don't have independent authority. They work for the president, and an EO isn't much different than the email you get from your boss directing you to do work a certain way.
An email from my boss telling me to implement something using rust transpiled to wasm certainly impairs my authority to determine the best approach.
My argument is not the EO has the legality to make a claim; it's that the top half of the EO is at odds with the disclaimer at the end. If you mandate somebody to do something then you're impairing their authority to have chosen not to do something.
Like by definition the EO impairs agencies that were using their authority to issue paper checks to continue doing so. It may be advantageous to stop issuing checks but to claim mandating that they don't doesn't impair their authority is just false.
You're conflating authority, the authorization to do something, with autonomy - the ability to use that authority at your own personal discretion. The law grants a regulatory agency the authority to do something that they would not otherwise be able to do, like nationally ban widgets. But the law does not also inherently grant them to the autonomy to do so entirely at their own discretion. For agencies under the Executive branch, the President is free to direct them to utilize their authority at his discretion.
It's the law that must not be ordering some action. Laws generally provide e.g. regulatory agencies with some degree of discretion on how to apply a given law, like ban a widget. But that discretion can be defined by executive order. By contrast, if a law says an agency must do something, then an EO cannot override that law and direct them not to do that thing.
You can be almost certain these EOs are composed in tandem with LLMs.
And its okay because the federal employees who need to know what these say will just ask their LLM what it says! /s
Every time we have this discussion someone brings up FedNow, and I will repeat the same question I always ask: when I visit the farmer's market this weekend, will anyone there be able to practically accept payment in FedNow? What would that even look like? (FYI the vendors take most cards, Apple/Google Pay, Venmo, paper cash, Square Cash, Apple Cash, etc.)
If the answer is "no for these reasons", then this probably shines a big light on why FedNow is not serving the same use case.
What is preventing any of those mentioned card vendors from integrating with FedNow either directly or via some abstractive layer through another entity? I don't understand why the answer would be 'no for these reasons'.
The retail payment companies I've seen all use the same structure: they provide a retail interface and then handle monetary transfers within their own proprietary network (effectively a centralized database). To interface with the financial system, they provide a mechanism to occasionally wire funds to/from a traditional bank account. If FedNow has any role in these systems, it's just to speed up the occasional funds-wiring process by a few hours. I have yet to see anyone actually directly using FedNow in any meaningful sense for retail payments.
Most likely, what it would look like is they would have a routing and account number posted. You'd go into your bank app and push a payment to those numbers, and they'd say yeah great; not confirm the transaction and everything would probably work out.
Is that satisfying? Not really. Is it possible? Yes.
There are over a thousand different companies affiliated with FedNow, so the answer is going to be "it won't look like FedNow, but you will use some wrapper for it"
I thought FedNow was for settlement between banks, not a consumer-facing service. That would be a "Central Bank Digital Currency": https://www.federalreserve.gov/central-bank-digital-currency...
There were some bills on the subject, Republicans opposed to a CBDC to demonstrate their libertarian credentials:
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/1919...
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/1430...
HR-1919 passed the house, but it's not clear if "they" intend to bring it up for vote in the Senate.
People have submitted comments to the gov for using XRP as a mechanism, but AI tells me that FedNow is not killed or being replaced.
That article is XRP-pumping misinformation. Like almost 100% of content related to Ripple.
This is amazing.
I cannot think of anything worse than an official post office email I have to maintain. Do you not remember how many government sites would simply shut down after business hours because they couldn't figure out how to do on-call? Have you ever used US-treasury direct?
This site would be slow, the code base would be unmaintained, it'd get enormous amounts of spam you have to sort through to get some important tax document, and it would be down all the time. Think the line at the post office but for server up-times.
Similarly if the mint maintained a payment processor then they'd just create a legal monopoly (like the USPS did) and ban new processors. Not only would they be worse than VISA and MasterCard, but they'd make paypal and venmo illegal. Don't forget the USPS bans competitors from being cheaper than itself, and this is exactly what would happen if the Mint had its own payment processor.
Hard disagree on every point. Just because implementations aren't always perfect does not mean you should not have public services.
I know a librarian who spends an inordinate amount of time helping the elderly and tech illiterate members of the public with creating emails, because they're necessary. However, you can't create emails anywhere without a phone number these days - a post office option would fix that.
Email already gets enormous amounts of spam, and the only reason most don't see it is because private service providers like Google expend resources filtering them out. Why would a business not be able to charge for premium filter services on an email they don't host? Not to mention that private email services send you ads.
To be clear, I'm not saying we should shut down Gmail tomorrow, but having a free public email service option would allow many people to use internet infrastructure they don't have. It's an accessibility problem that should be addressed in the public's interest as well as shareholders.
I'm not trying to take away from the thrust of your point. But pragmatically it seems like it could be in the scope of libraries to maintain some $4/mo prepaid SIMs to facilitate people signing up for new online accounts. Win-win for serving both the poor and people who care about privacy.
But what happens when the Gov decides they don't want to fund it anymore? Or the gov decides something shouldn't be funded.. Say truckers on strike, or wiki-leaks? Well then boom we have the same game, just a different player.
that's already happening? are you going to be funding your own vaccine research?
None of what you say is inherent in a public service.
The DMV often gets singled out as an inefficient system that is emblematic of the failure of public option, but I assure you as someone who's had to deal with a privatized version, you're not getting better service and in fact the fees are much more expensive without recourse or oversight.
The answer to a bad system is a good system. Adding a middleman who is only interested in extracting as much money as possible is rarely the improvement the consultants would have you believe.
Washington state has privatized much of the DMV, and it's much better then what I've experienced in other states.
I was under the impression that government sites having "business hours" had as much or more to do with their backends dating from the mainframe era, with nightly batch jobs that take all cpu time or prohibit database writes.
Anyway, I agree that government provided services functioning as you described would be intolerable, but disagree that's somehow inevitable. Rather than expecting government services to be unaccountable monopolies of the "line at the DMV" archetype, what if we expected effective and valuable baseline services of the IRS FreeFile archetype? Or models like unemployment benefits and FDIC insurance, where the government quietly provides citizens an umbrella without limiting access to alternatives?
I strongly resonate with gp's sentiment that when services like email or payment processing become requirements for modern life, ensuring access to them becomes a government prerogative. We're in agreement that it must be a net improvement, not trading one monopoly for another.
My local city runs a water heater rental company. It provides water heaters more or less at cost to residents because we have exceptionally hard water here and they need to be replaced every ten years or so. It's a well run, valuable public program, and its cost is minimal.
The US Digital Service made a number of good web services for the US federal government while it lasted. They didn't close at night.
There are many times where governments do a bad job of things, and times where they do a good job. They're just institutions made of people, but they have no other default orientation. Describing faults in some non-existent service you're just imagining, as though they would obviously happen, is frankly a bizarre thing to do.
May I suggest: consider getting involved in the governance of your world. You could meet the many humans who are already doing so, working to improve it, and learning something. You can actually do that! It might surprise you how much good work is being done.
You might also then be able to help prevent others from implementing your worst dreams, instead of treating them as obvious or foregone conclusions.
Largely opinion here, but the glaring issue with many modern governments is that they don't do. They get some consultants to come in, make some requirements, then shop for a contractor. IMO, governments should do a lot more themselves, should own infrastructure/utilities outright & ongoingly.
Particularly hard in today's climate where so so many people are empowered to say no, or to come in and add their own pet complications/expenses to a project. The meta-governance of staying to mission, to relentlessly caring about value optimization (in the pursuit of public good) is fraught with failure modes. Yet still it feels vastly less dangerous and expensive than shopping the work out, than governments perpetually seeking to do things it itself doesn't know much about & can't do.
We've had decades of nihilism that sees this juncture of difficulty & says: maybe we shouldn't have a government. But some day, I hope, maybe, possibly, we'll redisocver the spirit of makers and doers, and the eternal jibing critically can give way to a some will & make happen.
It's telling that in order to interact in many ways with the IRS online, you have to verify your identity using a private company (ID.me). Identification of citizens and residents has to be on the short list for core competencies of any government, but we outsource even that.
> US-treasury direct
Ok but this one is good. And it works because it’s a tool they need to generate revenue
It's better now, but during the era of the on-screen keyboard it was atrocious.
Further invalidating the original objection that the site would be unmaintained.
I thought they still had the on-screen keyboard? They had it as of 6 months ago at least.
But still, atrocious site. I can't use the back button or it logs you out; logging in is like a 5 step chore, it's unintuitive and looks like it's from 2005. I can only assume it's unsafe and doing simple things like checking your balance take 20 minutes. There will never be an app and I'm sure they will continue to do no innovation on the customer service side.
> looks like it's from 2005
Fantastic. Really fast pages, simple forms, no Js. trendy is not what I want from my government service site.
> There will never be an app
Good. I want more websites and less apps on my phone. That also helps me trust the security more.
I hate this approach so much. Something doesn't work very well, so instead of putting pressure on making it work better, let us abandon it!
Don't get me wrong. There are cases when it makes sense, but only when it is certain that there is no way to make it better, or when making it better would be a waste of resources. And neither is case here.
In my country, we have, what is essentially, a centralized email for communication with authorities. Taxes, permits, trials, it all goes there. There is no spam, you can set it up so that reminders about unread go to your normal email. It's not perfect, but it saves me hours of time I would otherwise have to waste in line.
So try for something like this. Instead of just giving up.
> Don't forget the USPS bans competitors from being cheaper than itself
That’s a disingenuous take. USPS legally cannot be undercut on certain types of postal services but in exchange they must serve EVERY permanent address without price discrimination.
No private company has to do that, nor would any sane profit maximising company want to.
It's also a necessary protection because, for some ass-backward reason, we force the USPS to operate in the black instead of funding it with taxpayer money.
Wouldn't it be better to try to regulate the necessity of needing these services out of existence?
For the sake of reducing complexity in an already very complex world, I'd rather that it be illegal to require an email address to sign up for an account (or, alternatively, make it illegal to require an account for things like making a reservation at a restaurant) then being provided with an email by the USPS.
Doubly so given the interactions that I've had with digital services provided by my country's government and the bad (and in several cases extremely bad) experiences that I've had with them.
To be clear - I don't object to e.g. an address from the USPS complementing my existing email - I just don't want to be forced to use it for anything due to it being given some special properties that normal email providers aren't.
> Wouldn't it be better to try to regulate the necessity of needing these services out of existence?
No because these things are genuinely useful. As much as people lament that we are going cashless, it's very convenient to be able to just carry one card and it's genuinely useful to just give my email as an identifier when registering for stuff.
Regulating their necessity means forcing people to accept cash and then using this as a reason why MasterCard and Visa should be allowed exist. In practice if something is that ingrained into daily interaction, then it should have something like the common carrier rules, set the fee to a static percentage of the transaction and that's it. The current 50% profit margins rent-seeking approach is just inefficient.
I completely agree with a lot of what you said! I'm not against technology in general or think that things like email aren't useful.
I think my argument is harder to make for payment processors, but in the case of email, it is preferable to not need an email address to create an account (even if it's convenient to have the option), and have other identifiers that can be used, like OAuth using an existing account or phone number, for instance.
Or, like I said, even better if you don't even need to create an account to participate in a one-time transaction (instead of a service relationship) with an entity.
The USPS and state DMVs should also collaborate on the novel role of identity management. Right now if you lose your phone, half of your life disappears because Google won't even log you into the email address that contains every "lost my password" redirect without 2FA on a new device. This is a bad scene. We need boring old meatspace ways to establish, re-establish, and federate our identity as a real person. Something that demands that I wait in line, that I show them a utility bill or drivers' license, that I confirm with a retina scan or fingerprint printed out on a sheet of paper that nobody else has access to. Something that is only trackable in one direction, from which you can generate a new identity if one is compromised. This is so close to the functional role of the "Credit card number" that you may as well tack bank transfer verification on there.
The One Digital Identity Service To Rule Them All is always vulnerable to mass hacking. We need to connect it with something slower, something more private, and the interface to that slow identity needs to be something that already has a branch open in the middle of nowhere.
Post office offering emails is an interesting idea if you extend it further in the physical world. As in, using this identifier to deliver correspondence/parcels as well.
pros:
- privacy. Senders have zero idea where you actually are. mapping to physical addresses is performed by the post.
- no need to update addresses in a million accounts when you move, your email points to the new physical address automatically (no idea how that works in other countries, but here you can set automatic forwarding for at most 1.5 years after you move).
cons:
- goods being sent to gmail addresses
Just thinking out loud here, but if the government operated a bank they could apply some common sense to the whole system:
* Allow any legal transaction (so if another payment processor refuses you, you have a backup)
* Allow an account for any legal entity (so no more debanking)
* By setting rates for savings and mortgages, it would provide a soft range for other banks to move within
* The state would only have to guarantee its own bank. If other banks crash and burn it won't take down civilisation
How does that fix censorship concerns? The main issue is that political pressure campaigns has a lever over the entire payment processing sector because of cartel like behaviour. A public service could provide an alternative for sure but it'd have to be done very carefully and independent.
Actual government stuff is way more legally constrained than private sector stuff. It would be trivially to sue for freedom of speech if I was gov.
Public-private partnerships like chartered banks, and outright cartels like Visa MasterCard, are much more fruitful mechanisms for this sort of civil liberties abuse.
What would the post office do with spam? Their existing business model is chiefly predicated on delivering junk mail.
I’m not sure how the federal government would deal with fraud on the payment side, either. The US does not have a strong system of identity.
Junk mail is advertising mail that someone paid to send to you. You what it is not? Illegal. Scams, fraud, and other illegal things get shut down because of postal inspectors. And there is no anonymity. The USPS knows both ends of the transaction.
> the post office should maintain an official email address for everyone.
Assuming this is a good idea, what is my email address going to look like?
Am I going to have to be xx_toast_xx@postalcustomer like at yahoo? or will it be my address ... if so, what about the other three adults who get mail at my address; do I have to change my email address when I move? Will it be my real name, but if so, what about the other hundred people with the same name as me? (Which isn't that bad, I know lots of people with a way larger highlander list) Will it just be my social security number and we can pretend duplicates don't exist?
What qualifies someone to be an everyone for this purpose?
What's the profit in that?
/s
You say /s, but a government issued and USPS operated e-mail service may be very profitable. In the Netherlands we have a government message system where the tax office, local counties, water companies, etc can send you 'official' messages. Thing is though, each message costs €0.25 to send. I think this is ridiculously expensive for a glorified email, but I suppose they have a lot of certifications and audits and the like. I hope, anyway.
Anyway, email itself is broken, but this system works because if it costs money to send a message, it discourages any spambot and/or misuse.
€0.25 is much less than the cost of printing and posting a letter, and presumably this service comes with proof of delivery.
(There's a similar system in Denmark.)
There's no meaningful attention, here. Until it is on the US Gov't radar, this 'attention' is just a collection of upset redditors furiously posting forum messages which will fissile out in a few months, at most.
Besides, it's not like you can boycott Mastercard or VISA.
> "which will fissile out in a few months"
A tangential nitpick: it's fizzle out, from a Middle English etymology meaning "to fart"; not to fission (fissile being an adjectival form), from Latin "to split".
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fizzle#Etymology ("Attested in English since 1525-35. From earlier fysel (“to fart”). Related to fīsa (“to fart”). Compare with Swedish fisa (“to fart (silently)”). See also feist.")
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/feist#Etymology
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fissile#Etymology ("From Latin fissilis.")
I’ve never heard fissile out but I love it for describing a problem that will go away once the full consequences have already been felt.
It's fizzle where I'm from in the UK. To fizzle out is to weakly and pittifully end with no meaningful after effects.
Like after lighting a firework that didn't actually go off.
"It's fizzled out!"
"to fission (fissile being an adjectival form), from Latin 'to split'."
Does this mean "Missile" means "to miss"? 'Cause boy have we been using those things wrong :-)
No, 'missile' means 'something that is sent' or 'suitable for throwing'
The missile needs to know how to miss, because it knows where it is from knowing where it isn’t.
https://youtu.be/bZe5J8SVCYQ
guessing it was autocorrect issue :)
I don't think having this on USgov radar would improve the situation. Since FOSTA/SESTA, and various state level age verification laws, it seems likely that government attention would simply bring a bigger hammer down on games. It's the US anti-money-laundering system that ultimately exerts a lot of financial control, after all.
> it's not like you can boycott Mastercard or VISA
In many countries, if you pay locally, you absolutely can. China's UnionPay, India's UPI, PayNow in Singapore, PromptPay in Thailand, PayPal, Cash App, and more.
And places like Steam take a lot of payment options. Most online services that wanted to have wide international appeal in the 90s and 2000s had to simply because credit cards were rare in many places, and a lot of those services still have a wide array of options
Steam added recently a rule 15th what you should not publish:
15. Content that may violate the rules and standards set forth by Steam’s payment processors and related card networks and banks, or internet network providers. In particular, certain kinds of adult only content.
See discussion here for example: https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/0/6019100814124...
Maybe they could come out with a client named "Steamy" where they post all the nudie games and take all forms of shady, underground, scandalous payment methods, like btc and doge.
The US also has Discover/Capital One and American Express and if you live in some of the nicer parts people still take checks.
Does that actually help? Because it would send a pretty strong message if the payment screen said, "sorry you can only buy this with amex/discover" (click here for why) but that doesn't seem to be how this plays out.
Because making these products for sale at all in the catalog will cause Visa/MC to pull out for other, "approved" offerings.
You need the government to cajole the market to create safe and free inter bank transfer programs. We're not going to do that in the USA -- no one's buddies would get their kickbacks!
Like FedNow that was launched in 2023? https://www.frbservices.org/news/fed360/issues/071625/fednow... https://www.frbservices.org/resources/fees/fednow-2025
Not even close the service offered by, as an example, Pix in Brazil.
Granted, but Pix didn't have to compete against entrenched political interests.
I expect the meta-plot with FedNow is to commoditize the backend network, then allow private companies to compete on top of it (e.g. Zelle on FedNow), then after adoption as the backbone, finally roll out P2P and P2B type support that finally kills off Visa / Mastercard / Amex (as processing networks).
Not sure why you were downvoted. Pix is a fantastic example of how much more efficient p2p payments can be, without relying on the Visa-Mastercard duopoly.
Of course Pix had the backing of the government, so it had a huge initial boost, and didn't have to compete with entrenched players for market share.
Still, the fact is that it's universal, fast, efficient, lower cost for merchants, and less prone to censoring. What's not to like?
In a way it's more convenient than making congress pass laws to define payment providers as common carriers. With Pix, payment companies are free to chose their policies, but now citizens have options. Unfortunately that's not the reality in the US.
> You need the government to cajole the market to create safe and free inter bank transfer programs
We've had that in EU/eurozone for years, SEPA.
That's great to hear, but this is a US-centric complaint discussing US-centric companies.
It is not really US-centric. VISA and Mastercard actions resulted in delisting content in all the markets globally. Steam and Itch.io pulled games from all regions, Manga Library Z was hit in Japan, Patreon and Stripe are pressured globally. Suggesting to boycott VISA and Mastercard if you have an alternative is valid.
In principle, a service like this could be offered in the US as well, without any credit card companies acting as middle men: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FedNow
Germany actually uses their own card system .. or cash. They are very much against visa/mastercard due to their “high commission fees” and “privacy concerns”
Girocard charges a 0,3% fee vs visa/mastercard 3%
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girocard
You're comparing a regional debit network to an overarching network that includes lots of different fee structures. The USA has debit networks (STAR, etc) with similar cost structures too - Germany is not unique in this regard.
My debit card is a VISA.
That's somewhat outdated and Wikipedia even slightly alludes to it with "Some banks are phasing out girocards". "some" in reality is "nearly all". Girocard is practically dead and I don't see it coming back without state intervention. There's a few holdouts in stores here and there that only accept Girocard and no other cards (my vet for example), but it's on the decline there, too.
"Privacy concerns" won't hold out long against relentless pushes for more deregulation of privacy laws for AI/other tech/"the economy"/etc and removal of data access hurdles for police/security services/etc coming from certain political spectrum - whose voters generally don't have high concern for such fundamental rights issues when at the ballot box.
Unfortunately, that's not enough to shake the MasterCard/Visa stranglehold. Even if all of Valve's German customers used Girocard and Steam sold those particular games only in Germany, they would still have to yield to pressure from MC and Visa because losing them would cost them many more of their global customers.
It's not enough to simply have an alternative to the credit cards, that alternative has to be in the pockets of 90% of your user base before you'd be willing to lose the method of transaction they currently rely on.
>Girocard charges a 0,3% fee vs visa/mastercard 3%
AFAIK all credit cards in the EU have similarly low interchange rates because of EU regulation.
0.2%
> Payment service providers shall not offer or request a per transaction interchange fee of more than 0,2 % of the value of the transaction for any debit card transaction.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2015/751/oj/eng
So does Russia, Denmark, Belgium/Netherlands, Iran, China. I’m sure there’re others. I know someone working on unified payment platform for games in Africa. They have dozens of different payment systems instead of the two.
Germany also sold Eurocard to MasterCard.
> Besides, it's not like you can boycott Mastercard or VISA.
Why not? Lots of people, especially in lower income brackets, don't have ANY credit cards at all. I know many. They buy groceries and gas with cash and pay their utilities by ACH or mailing a check. Everything else they need, they buy locally.
What you mean to say is that it's _inconvenient_ for you personally to boycott Visa/Mastercard. Which may be true enough.
Visa and Mastercard run debit networks for majority of banks and credit unions. They get fees there as well.
Even lower income citizens use debit cards more than cash nowadays.
You would need to use different networks like Discover and American Express to effectively boycott them
That depends entirely on who you are paying. Many places reject checks, fail to setup ACH, etc. Those aren't direct competitors anyway: that would be American Express, which is often rejected since their business model is centered on customer bonuses funded through high transaction fees.
I use cash for 90% of my expenses, and I bank with a local credit unions, but this and every other bank and credit union around use visa or mastercard for debit card services and I have to use the card for most online purchases.
Well, we are discussing an online storefront/distribution service for a digital good (with obvious relevance to people here). Are you suggesting that it's merely inconvenient for Valve and its customers to not transact in cash?
> Besides, it's not like you can boycott Mastercard or VISA.
Every single time I have the option to buy an event ticket by SEPA transfer or credit card, which is actually very often, I choose SEPA transfer.
One time I even used Bitcoin.
It does seem to be mostly event tickets that have this option, for some reason. And I'm not talking about the TicketMaster monopoly, either.
You can switch to Amex, but here in Argentina like half of the postnets don't recognize it.
Also there are a few QR networks, some made by the banks like "Modo" and other no-a-bank ones like "MercadoPago" and a few minor ones. Even the guy/gal that sells hot bread on the street accept most of them.
Amex is only available on Steam in the US. I have a basic free Amex card as a backup, but I wouldn't be able to use it for my Steam purchases. Presumably because the processing fees are just that much higher.
Somehow I'm able to use a JCB card though. As far as I'm aware, JCB cards aren't even available here.
> You can switch to Amex, but here in Argentina like half of the postnets don't recognize it.
To this point, it was even a punchline in The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy.
You can, if you switch to using American Express and Discover cards. They’re both closed networks that only take their particular card.
It’s almost trading one for another but it would be an effective way to boycott these companies
Whole heartedly agree. I would also rather the discussion be how can we disrupt the problem rather than a mob mentality to take down Visa (which is never going anywhere anyway).
It is on their radar, but they only care that the whole world pays a US tax via these payment providers. The US does look to kindly on local payment systems.
Honestly I hope this comes under the EU's radar.
EU is already working on an alternative: Wero https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wero_(payment)
Honestly, I'm really critical towards EU, but this is one of the few things that EU does well. When the market is stagnating, it's better than nothing to propose an alternative or some kind of benefits in order to change the market a bit. Like the Roaming in EU.
Regarding the rest, the EU is mining competition with the obsession of regulating everything.
> Regarding the rest, the EU is mining competition with the obsession of regulating everything.
Like with DMA/DSA that force gatekeepers to open up? SEPA that mandates free immediate bank transfers? Caps on credit/debit card transaction fees? The million infrastructure projects? Ensuring that AI can't be used to make life or death decisions if it's decision making can't be explained (which the AI act boils down to)? Ensuring there is competition on e.g. railway operations?
It's such a common refrain that EU is just stifling competition with "regulating everything", but quite oftne EU regulations are actually forcing competition where none was possible before.
I stated quite clearly that not every regulation is bad. But it seems that you want to hear that every decision made by the EU is right. I'm sorry, but I'm not a religious person. And I think self-criticism is a great privilege of democratic (not dictatorial) countries, so let's use it.
> Ensuring that AI can't be used to make life or death decisions if its decision-making can't be explained (which the AI Act boils down to)? Ensuring there is competition on, for example, railway operations?
It's such a naive question that I can't understand how you can take it seriously.
Just because you can explain how you arrived at a specific decision does not mean that failure does not exist. Every machine is fallible. Every human is fallible. Moreover, you cannot determine decision-making made by humans. So how can you trust humans? Why should you trust them?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_by_pilot
I would like to see the data, not the social or individual biases. It's only a matter of "when" AI will prove to be safer than humans at performing task X. I find it absurd to deprive ourselves of such an advantage, supported by data, just because our understanding isn't absolute.
Can we prove the safety or determinism of what we use or do on a daily basis? I doubt. Shouldn't we experiment with physics because our understanding is limited, and we might accidentally create a black hole? I doubt.
Also, I find it such a generic definition... Google Maps implements AI, and accidentally sends you into a ditch. What do you do? Ban AI from Google Maps? What doesn't put people's lives at risk?
I totally understand the skepticism and fear. The risks, etc. But I'll leave it to the fortune tellers to pass judgment before it's even "a thing".
> It's such a common refrain that EU is just stifling competition with "regulating everything", but quite oftne EU regulations are actually forcing competition where none was possible before.
Is killing the car market "forcing the competition"? How?
> I stated quite clearly that not every regulation is bad. But it seems that you want to hear that every decision made by the EU is right. I'm sorry, but I'm not a religious person. And I think self-criticism is a great privilege of democratic (not dictatorial) countries, so let's use it.
But you still said that you think most of the EU's are bad, so I'm opening the discussion with multiple that I consider to be good.
> Just because you can explain how you arrived at a specific decision does not mean that failure does not exist. Every machine is fallible. Every human is fallible. Moreover, you cannot determine decision-making made by humans. So how can you trust humans? Why should you trust them?
Of course not, but being able to explain the decision, and thus prove that it is wrong, and have humans being able to correct it, is good. It means that stuff like United Healthcare Group using algorithms to decide if care can be paid for, with a terrible failure rate, and employees just shrugging "computer said no" cannot happen in the EU. The fact that this kind of things are considered as "EU is killing AI with too much regulation" is really concerning to me.
> Is killing the car market "forcing the competition"? How?
How is the EU killing the car market, exactly?
> But you still said that you think most of the EU's are bad, so I'm opening the discussion with multiple that I consider to be good.
I understand your point, but I see no reason to invest time defending the EU's positive aspects. What's the point?
> Of course not, but being able to explain the decision, and thus prove that it is wrong, and have humans being able to correct it, is good. It means that stuff like United Healthcare Group using algorithms to decide if care can be paid for, with a terrible failure rate, and employees just shrugging "computer said no" cannot happen in the EU. The fact that this kind of things are considered as "EU is killing AI with too much regulation" is really concerning to me.
I don't see why "asking for less regulation" concerns you. The EU seems to listen to people like you, not people like me. I should be the one who's concerned, haha. I'm worried because bureaucracy is a slow-acting cancer. It's a process that's easy to start but incredibly difficult to stop or reverse.
The problem with bureaucracy, regulation, and welfare is that they all come with a price. Increasing costs require a strong, cutting-edge economy to sustain them. Yet, no one seems to be concerned. In the US and China, new technologies are constantly being created, while in Europe, innovation is stagnating. No one seems to care that Europe's wealth is fragile, based mainly on "old" companies or banks.
Of course, no one is against welfare; my concern is its unsustainability. As an Italian (living elsewhere in Europe), I find the situation worrying. The demographic decline is dramatic, and pension and healthcare costs are skyrocketing. In Italy, a worker under 40 often earns less than a retiree. With such a sharp demographic decline, retirees have enormous political power.
Europe is aging, and so is its appetite for innovation and risk. Yet, we keep adding costs upon costs. Even if the goals of initiatives like GDPR, the AI Act, and the Green Deal are "right", we can't deny that they come with a price. This added cost inevitably makes companies less efficient in Europe. This is a simple consequence. Can we truly afford this?
How long can we keep going? The rope will break sooner or later. And why doesn't anyone seem to care?
> How is the EU killing the car market, exactly?
1) https://commission.europa.eu/topics/eu-competitiveness/dragh... 2) "The Draghi report: In-depth analysis and recommendations (Part B)" 3) Page 146
I think this report its quite comprhensive to state what its not going that well in EU.
I dont agree with everything in the document, but i think its a good starting point.
> I don't see why "asking for less regulation" concerns you.
Because the "less regulation" is in response to the EU saying you can't have algorithms making life or death decisions if they can't be explained and can't be escalated to a human. People are literally asking for companies to be able to shrug behind "computer says no" with no recourse. We have the UK Post Office scandal for a closer to home example on why this is a terrible idea. "Less regulation" here would be plainly terrible for everyone.
> No one seems to care that Europe's wealth is fragile, based mainly on "old" companies or banks.
Along with migration, it's probably the two most discussed topics. Funnily for it too, everyone says "nobody cares", yet it's literally among the most discussed things.
> Even if the goals of initiatives like GDPR, the AI Act, and the Green Deal are "right", we can't deny that they come with a price. This added cost inevitably makes companies less efficient in Europe. This is a simple consequence. Can we truly afford this?
I get what you're saying, and there's a point at which I would agree; but I also fully consider that allowing companies to let people die and hide behind "The Algorithm" is something so fundamentally wrong, that we cannot (humanely) afford not to have regulations against it.
> In the US and China, new technologies are constantly being created, while in Europe, innovation is stagnating
Because you're comparing massive economies with lots of capital to burn, vs a loose collection of much smaller countries. There is tons of innovation in various European countries, it's just of different types, and doesn't scale nearly to the same extent. And that is a problem (because, as you said, a lot of the economy is reliant on big old players, which isn't necessarily bad, but is lacking in economic diversification).
> As an Italian (living elsewhere in Europe), I find the situation worrying. The demographic decline is dramatic, and pension and healthcare costs are skyrocketing. In Italy, a worker under 40 often earns less than a retiree. With such a sharp demographic decline, retirees have enormous political power
It's the same in France too, and it is indeed worrying. Public budgets are getting increasingly more complicated to balance.
But, allowing companies to deploy AI to make life or death decisions won't change anything around this. Allowing them to harvest personal data without even knowing what they have won't change anything around this either. Allowing gatekeepers to stifle any possible competition (not having DMA/DSA), same thing.
The biggest changes needed are capital investments to help the tons of startups all over Europe scale; and complex policies to help minimise the demographic collapse. Some of it is natural and nothing can be done about it (if a couple doesn't want kids, no amount of aid is going to change their mind), but for others it's a matter of being unable to afford (more) kids.
> Along with migration, it's probably the two most discussed topics. Funnily for it too, everyone says "nobody cares", yet it's literally among the most discussed things.
Its disscussed here, still nobody is acting. This is a bubble.
> I get what you're saying, and there's a point at which I would agree; but I also fully consider that allowing companies to let people die and hide behind "The Algorithm" is something so fundamentally wrong, that we cannot (humanely) afford not to have regulations against it.
This sentence is fundamentally wrong, no one is dying. And for me, it perfectly sums up the issues we're discussing.
We've reached the point where if there's a risk of something happening, no matter the probability neither the magnitude, something must be done. Even if the solution is totally destructive, inappropriate for the problem, etc. Or even worse, deciding when the problem does not yet exist. Or the technology is still in its early stages. Like AI. This is what you are proposing. This is what I criticize.
Slowing down or stopping everything because MAYBE it's the right thing to do, MAYBE something we don't like might happen. This comes at a cost, especially if you apply this principle to everything around you in small doses. It's poison for productivity and efficiency.
I don't know if you are for or against nuclear power. I am quite pro nuclear power. But everyone knows about the European Pressurized Reactor (EPR) project, it is a failure in terms of costs and bureaucracy. China and South Korea are able to build reactors quickly and at low cost. The same EPR reactors built in China have low costs and short construction times (I am referring to the Taishan Nuclear Power Plant). The problem is exclusively European.
In the name of some ideology, we are destroying our productivity and efficency. Again. Why?
And I know very well that the answer is always the same. Safety. But it's just an excuse to sell you the services of yet another bureaucrat. There are very precise risk analyses that show nuclear reactors to be orders of magnitude safer than all other energy sources. So why this ideological obsession? Safety has nothing to do with it.
No one cares about risk analyses. Because the answer will always be “it's never enough.” But at what cost? Again, no one cares.
And thanks to this choices, in the name of safety, building reactors in Europe is difficult and expensive. But in the meantime, it is perfectly legitimate to build gas or coal-fired power plants.
Europe is full of this kind of hypocrisy.
> Its disscussed here, still nobody is acting
No, it's discussed everywhere, at the EU and the local level. There has been plenty of action at various levels (like in France, under Macron first as minister of the economy and later president; and he's been decried and criticised a lot, but has also gotten a ton of reforms through).
> This sentence is fundamentally wrong, no one is dying. And for me, it perfectly sums up the issues we're discussing.
That's the point though. Literally the main thing the law does is that if the AI can make decision that can result in deaths, there should be a human escalation and its decision making should be explainable. That's it. If that's too much burden, something is wrong.
> Or even worse, deciding when the problem does not yet exist. Or the technology is still in its early stages. Like AI
But the problem already exists, again, cf. United Healthcare Group in the US. We know they're killing people and hiding behind a well known faulty "AI". We don't want that shit in the EU.
> I don't know if you are for or against nuclear power. I am quite pro nuclear power. But everyone knows about the European Pressurized Reactor (EPR) project, it is a failure in terms of costs and bureaucracy
If you're pro nuclear, you should know what the real problems with EPR are. The main are failures at EDF with the quality of their work, due to lack of qualified personnel, like welders. This has been well documented for Flamanville and Hinkley Point, and EDF has even written extensively about all the lessons learned from those disasters that have been incorporated. They even flat out say that Flamanville has allowed them to build industrial capacity and human know how to be able to build the next ones.
Do you have anything to back your claim that somehow bureaucracy is to blame? EDF are a state owned company, but I'm pretty sure that the British wouldn't stop yapping around if EDF were bungling Hinkley Point because of French/EU bureaucracy. There should be at least as much material on it as there are about the quality control issues, right?
> The same EPR reactors built in China have low costs and short construction times (I am referring to the Taishan Nuclear Power Plant). The problem is exclusively European.
Yes, because we stopped building reactors for decades, and nobody is around that knows the intricacies of that. Hence the investment in EPR, to improve on the failures at Flamanville, Hinkley Point, Olkiluoto, and be able to reliably deliver EPR reactors with predictable costs.
I don't even think this is a problem of competition (although more is welcome).
This is just Visa+Mastercard abusing their market position and the EU should come down on them like a ton of bricks. Incur heavy fines or break them up if necessary.
How is "abusing their market position" not a "problem of competition"?
The only reason they have that market position is because there is insufficient competition.
It is a problem of competition.
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-s...
Go to Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Japan, Taiwan and see that there are 20-30 payment systems at every convenience store, electronics store, grocery store, etc... Then go to the US where there's effectively 2. The government claims this is because Visa and Mastercard have prevented competition.
I disagree. The need for regulation in this case stems from a lack of competition.
Regulations are empirical decisions, based on a very limited amount of data, whose implications can be endless. Regulations are a shortcut capable of poisoning the market and competition. Just look at what's been done with energy, automobiles, AI, GDPR, etc. Bureaucrats are not gods; they often make mistakes and don't predict the future. Regulations should be the last resort.
Furthermore, we're talking about a US monopoly here. The goal would be to grab a share of the pie through honest competition, not to enstablish golden collars.
Regulation should facilitate competition, not legitimize the status quo.
"under the radar" means not noticed
Oh the EU will happily pass new laws to screen your entire life when you'd like to buy a game (and to record and store everything you talk about with fellow gamers in case you say something that goes against EU policies).
EU will even arrange a special new bank account for ya outside of Visa Mastercard called CBDC.
No problem. EU is here for ya! /s
What are you even talking about?
1984 took place in the EU. I mean, if Brexit hadn't happened and the EU existed in 1984, of course.
That’s factually untrue. 1984 takes place in Britain (now known as “Airstrip one”) which in the universe of the book is part of Oceania along with Australia, southern Africa and the Americas.
The other two superpowers are Eurasia (which as the name suggests is Europe less the UK and Ireland but with Asia) and Eastasia, which is South-East Asia more or less
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_geography_of_Ninetee...
You can just say it happened in Europe.
> Besides, it's not like you can boycott Mastercard or VISA
Most countries have some kinds of domestic transaction systems, or at least a more local credit card brand. They're also usually instant. It's more or less an US-only situation that people use Visa/Mastercard even for intranational stuff.
Most countries I've been to use Visa as their most common card. Living in a major Asian country and every bank and credit card company offers Visa as their main card as well.
China is kind of an outlier with Union Pay, and while a large number of countries offer their own alternatives, I'd say most are Visa-first. Apparently about 37% of cards around the world are Visa, so that's a huge chunk. JCB is the biggest non-Chinese non-American provider by revenue, and even they're a minor player in their home country.
That is absolutely false. In pretty much any western country, you're forced to use the VISA network, even for debit cards. Take a closer look at your locally branded card, and you'll almost certainly see a VISA log tucked away somewhere.
Depends, in France for instance all the cards are dual "VISA/Mastercard" and "CB ". They will use CB in france and use the partner network in foreign countries.
The EU should certainly look into this though. I don't always like what they do, but a conglomerate of many large markets (countries) means that these shitty fucking companies and scumbag executives get forced to sit up and listen.
You can boycott both but say goodbye to saas purchases and being tracked.
Does the government view it as 2 throats to choke and so the risk is 'worth it' or is it just a condition of gilded age II and corp and political greed and corruption?
Why did we make all those monopoly laws only to completely forget they exist or why we ever made them?
It's mostly just the way things turned out without government intervention.
American Express' card started in 1958, as a pivot of their then already 100-year-old business: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Express#1920s%E2%80%9...
Visa also in 1958 as a Bank of America (and friends) card, which quietly expanded into the mid-60s: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_Inc.#History
Mastercard in the mid-60s from banks who BoA wouldn't invite into the Visa clubhouse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastercard#History
And Discover in the mid-80s because Sears was big enough to be its own financial services firm: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discover_Card#History
This is the kind of problem that Bitcoin was designed to solve.
Isn't Bitcoin impractical for these sorts of transactions (slow, high fees, no privacy, etc)? People always say Bitcoin was designed to solve this sort of thing but whenever I've looked into it it's been fairly impractical for use in most day-to-day transactions.
Bitcoin is so much faster than a credit card transaction that it's not even close. A lightning transaction is near instant, regular bitcoin transfers take in the order of 10 minutes. Credit card transactions take weeks before you get the money, and after that the money can be yoinked back for a multitude of reasons beyond your control as a merchant. The fees are often lower, too. Bitcoiners are for some reason opposed to solving that last issue (no privacy) despite the technology existing in monero. NIH syndrome, I guess.
The real unsolved issue for cryptocurrency is between chair and keyboard. People make mistakes, people are afraid of being robbed. Your average person does not want to be their own bank. You can have a bank or payment processor manage your money for you, but then we're back to the regulated world where Visa and Mastercard can determine what games you're allowed to buy.
I'll have to look at the lightning transactions. My problems with crypto are generally less philosophical (I've known people who ran legal businesses that had trouble getting access to banks so I'm sympathetic to having ways around traditional banks/payment processors) but more practical, the times I've tried it in the past the experience just hasn't been good.
"Credit card transactions take weeks before you get the money" Where is this the case?
The only time I have experienced this being true is refunds, they usually take a bit longer to clear.
When I pay for something online or in person the payment is cleared within seconds, and I get a notification from my back that it has went through.
You will want to look into Lightning which fixes that issue.
Yes. Thankfully 15 years later we do have crypto solutions addressing previous crypto problems
Honestly buying a digital game is perfect. Steam can just give it to you right away, and if the transaction doesn't clear they can just revoke the game later.
That's only addressing one issue with Bitcoin but the issues abound. I don't know all the issues that would happen but even my rudimentary understanding of payments can see that the high transaction costs are a problem when most of the games I buy are less than 5$.
There are ways to design around these glaring issues but Bitcoin is just a worse product for many transactions (and it's not like payment processors are a particularly good product to begin with).
Only in the presence of DRM—an evil I'd prefer to do without when possible.
It might have been but it is very much not. It's non fungible and transparent resulting in coins, wallets and transactions getting easily traced and blacklisted meaning they can be put into a limbo where nobody is willing to accept them anymore burning there value.
The actual solution would be a fungible and private coin like monero where any of that is impossible by design.
Yes, I agree that Monero is likely a better option. I am also a big fan of Nano because of its instant transactions and zero transaction fees. However it has the same privacy problem as Bitcoin. It would be interesting to see a hybrid of Nano and Monero.
Full title that doesn't fit in the HN headline:
"Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down, but Valve says payment processors 'specifically cited' a Mastercard rule about damaging the brand"
(For the people who don't click the link to read the article.)
It was Mastercard's rule, but any one of the companies in the payment network could have brought it up to Valve. The whole system is set up so one transaction has to go through up to 6 different companies, and they all have to abide by each other's rules. The US Internet Preservation Society explained it recently:
>Each of these companies maintains its own terms of service and each of them can block a transaction by themselves. Additionally, intermediary companies that handle card transactions are mutually and individually bound to the terms of every Card Network, so even if you never do business with Discover or American Express, you must still obey their rules if you want to accept Visa or Mastercard. For online businesses, there are no alternatives: you will do exactly what they want, or you will not do business at all.
>If you are banned from processing payments, you will not be informed why or by which point of failure. "Risk management" is considered a trade secret in the industry. You have no right to know, you cannot sue to discover what has happened, and you also have no right to appeal.
https://usips.org/blog/2025/07/fair-access-to-banking/
I'd be interesting to know if Valve is big enough to start their own payment system. Yea, I know it would be hard but their customers have libraries of games in their system and Valve has lots of good will. Valve could also offer discounts ($X off if you use ValvePay). It would take years. They'd have to drop the adult games now, start ValvePay, promote it until the majority of their customers used it. Then put the games back and tell Visa and MC they can eff-off.
Simpler: why can't I buy nsfw games with a regular dumb bank transaction (SEPA €) in my case?
If MasterCard/Visa don't want these transactions, stupid, their loss. But at least let me use a payment method that works & doesn't have these morale restrictions?
Or even a Plausible Deniability system - you can't buy these games with currency, you have to use tokens. Here's a token store where you can buy tokens with your currency.
> was Mastercard's rule, but any one of the companies in the payment network could have brought it up to Valve
Did Mastercard threaten Valve? Or did Valve precomply?
Valve's payment processors told Valve they would withdraw payment processing unless Valve banned specific categories of game from their online store.
The payment processors did not cite any law; Valve selling those games was not illegal. Instead they cited Mastercard's rules, which say that they cannot submit transactions that Mastercard believe might damage Mastercard's goodwill or reflect negatively on its brand. Those rules also say Mastercard has sole discretion as to what it considers breach these rules, and Mastercard gives a list of what it deems unacceptable:
https://www.mastercard.us/content/dam/public/mastercardcom/n...
> 5.12.7 Illegal or Brand-damaging Transactions
> A Merchant must not submit to its Acquirer, and a Customer must not submit to the Interchange System, any Transaction that is illegal, or in the sole discretion of the Corporation, may damage the goodwill of the Corporation or reflect negatively on the Marks.
> The Corporation considers any of the following activities to be in violation of this Rule:
> 2. The sale of a product or service, including an image, which is patently offensive and lacks serious artistic value (such as, by way of example and not limitation, images of nonconsensual sexual behavior, sexual exploitation of a minor, nonconsensual mutilation of a person or body part, and bestiality), or any other material that the Corporation deems unacceptable to sell in connection with a Mark.
The payment processors threatened Valve first. Mastercard doesn't need to threaten Valve or even contact them at all to force its will on them: it just needs to threaten its payment processors, the same outcome is achieved. Valve did not remove games from sale until threatened. If they did not do that, and instead initiated some kind of fightback, they would most likely find themselves completely removed from all payment processors, with no recourse. If you want to call that "precompliance", so be it.
> Valve's payment processors told Valve they would withdraw payment processing unless Valve banned specific categories of game from their online store
Do we have a statement from Valve saying as much?
Click on the article link at the top of this page and find out. Let me quote the article for you:
> In a statement provided to PC Gamer, Valve said that it had tried to work things out with Mastercard directly prior to removing the games, and suggested that Mastercard did have at least an indirect influence on the outcome.
> "Mastercard did not communicate with Valve directly, despite our request to do so," a Valve representative said. "Mastercard communicated with payment processors and their acquiring banks. Payment processors communicated this with Valve, and we replied by outlining Steam’s policy since 2018 of attempting to distribute games that are legal for distribution.
> "Payment processors rejected this, and specifically cited Mastercard’s Rule 5.12.7 and risk to the Mastercard brand."
This text is also consistent with Valve making a determination, checking with payment processors and not being told no. (Versus the payment processors reaching out to Valve first.)
Like yes, there is a problem with Mastercard. But I want to know this isn’t Valve having complied with some activists trying to cover their tracks.
If this is just evil old Valve, why did itch.io - a site founded on openness and the right to sell adult-only games, especially if they cover LGBT themes, tell everyone that their payment processors also want them not to offer adult-only games?
Which is more likely:
1. Porn-hating, sex-hating, LGBT-hating activist group from Australia bombards Mastercard with complaints that Valve and Itch are selling adult games. Mastercard reminds its payment processors not to bring shame on The Mark. Valve's and Itch's payment processors tell them not to sell adult games.
2. Porn-hating, sex-hating, LGBT-hating activist group from Australia bombards Mastercard with complaints that Valve and Itch are selling adult games. Valve and Itch agree with these harpies and remove their revenue streams and support for developers (because they hate revenue and hate supporting their developers; they'd much rather align with moral prudes from Australia in order to lose money and abandon the people who make them that money), then they sneakily pin the blame on Mastercard. Valve and Itch also use telepathy to know Collective Shout's desires, which they agree with, to ban games precisely at the time Collective Shout are calling up Mastercard, in order for it to be Collective Shout -> Valve/Itch rather than Collective Shout -> Mastercard -> Payment processors -> Valve/Itch
> why did itch.io - a site founded on openness and the right to sell adult-only games, especially if they cover LGBT themes, tell everyone that their payment processors also want them not to offer adult-only games?
Thank you, this is the context I was missing.
What is more likely is the processors made the decision themselves and cited Mastercard's rule without interacting with Mastercard.
If Mastercard cared about this stuff then processors like CCBill wouldn't exist. The absurd amount of money that porn brings in on the internet would dry up over night.
This was a decision made by paysafe and paypall and so far they are the only ones not getting the blame pinned on them.
Itch: Our processors told us to do it.
Mastercard: That is correct, we weren't involved.
Half of Hacker News: MASTERCARD AND VISA!!!!!!
The other half: VALVE AND ITCH!!!!!!
Paysafe and Paypall: Lol
> What is more likely is the processors made the decision themselves
If you think that, please explain how the payment processors didn't say anything since Valve started selling adult games in 2018... and only a few days after Collective Shout specifically started targeting MasterCard and Visa (not PayPal or Paysafe)... the payment processors used by Valve cited MasterCard's rules to Valve?
It's also MasterCard that set the rules. Valve can always get another payment processor. They can't get another payment processor that is not beholden to Visa and/or MasterCard.
Mastercard doesn't care.
Payment processors that handle adult material exist but they charge a premium rate. These companies could switch to CCBill as quick as they could code it up. Exactly the same as what OnlyFans did. They would have to explain to their entire customer base across the board why they have to charge more though.
Also, look at https://www.collectiveshout.org/open-letter-to-payment-proce...
They absolutely targeted paysafe and paypall. Paypall was the very first on their list, I wonder why that is. They knew the processor is the weak link.
After 10 years in the POS industry, I can assure you it came from their processor. The only card network I have ever seen take action like this is AMEX and they have have separate processing. Processors involve themselves in their customers' business constantly for risk assessment. Collective action like this is enough to make them ask, "Should we treat this as a video game vendor or as adult industry?" It's that simple to tip the scale.
Also, it doesn't make sense that Itch did it themselves. Why would they throw their vendors under the bus instead of just pulling the titles? Or are we supposed to believe they facilitated collective shout just to pull a couple of low value titles? I can't see any angle here that doesn't border on conspiracy.
> They absolutely targeted paysafe and paypall
OK, I read the link. They targeted Paysafe and PayPal AND VISA AND MASTERCARD AND DISCOVER AND JCB. All of them, in no particular order. Why did you not mention those?
Why are Valve's and Itch's payment processors, instead of citing their own policies, citing MasterCard's policies?
If "MasterCard doesn't care" then section 5.12.7 "Illegal or Brand-damaging Transactions" of MasterCard's rules, that specifically lists out transactions MasterCard prohibit processors from performing, specifically citing the percieved risk to MasterCard's brand... that's a really weird way for MasterCard to say they "don't care" about those exact sorts of transactions, which Valve's payment processors have been facilitating for Valve since 2018... until now, when a media campaign has put them and MasterCard, Visa, Discover and JCB on blast.
If MasterCard "doesn't care", let them show it by completely removing section 5.12.17 of their own rules. They made those rules, and those rules say they care, no matter how much you say they don't.
Ok, I'll assume good faith and answer that. I didn't mention those because you weren't questioning them. I feel that is kind of obvious.
>(not PayPal or Paysafe)...
As to paypal's policy...
https://www.paypal.com/us/cshelp/article/what-is-paypal%E2%8...
>We don't permit PayPal account holders to buy or sell: Sexually oriented digital goods or content delivered through a digital medium. Examples of digital goods include downloadable pictures or videos and website subscriptions.
Yeah it's a good question, why would they cite mastercard instead of their own policy?
It's entirely anecdotal, but in my 10 years of experience dealing with a multitude of processors and payment gateways... that's what processors do. Their very first instinct is to make things someone else's problem. With maybe the exception of First Data, this has held up consistently for me. Of course a lot of our high dollar business was through First Data so who knows what other people's experience is.
You are still completely avoiding the fact that processors that can handle this stuff exist. Sure Mastercard should probably change their rule, but that isn't going to change the situation.
That is why Itch is looking at their options:
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/itchio-are-seeking-out-new-...
So the question is, could both Valve and Itch take on several payment processors, and choose which game on their store goes through which processor? Or would porn-shy processors have blanket rules saying your whole company can't have any porn in the same store, even if it's locked away, even if you use not-us to process payments for it?
And secondly, let's say Valve moves to a porn-friendly processor (Itch has said it's looking for one, not that it's found one). MasterCard clearly has a rule, right there in black and white, saying don't facilitate this particular type of porn. How do you think it will look if for any potential processor, and MasterCard, if Valve switches processor and continues accepting MasterCard payments for games in direct contravention of MasterCards's given rule, while the world's press, and the angry lobby group, is watching?
As far as it goes, collective shout claimed Valve didn't respond to them and that's why they complained to MC visa about it. They even mention how many calls they made to them to get the complaint heard.
So everyone would have to be pretty invested in this show for it to have originated from Valve?
Which means Collective Shout didn't have any legal weight behind their demands.
They're based out of Australia and so have the Australian porn laws behind them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornography_in_Australia#Illeg...
> Some types of pornography (both real and fictitious) are technically illegal in Australia and if classified would be rated RC and therefore banned in Australia. This includes any pornography depicting violent BDSM, incest, paedophilia, zoophilia, certain extreme fetishes (such as golden showers) and/or indicators of youth (such as wearing a school uniform).
https://www.sydneycriminallawyers.com.au/blog/pornography-la...
https://www.kptlegal.com.au/resources/knowledge/pornography-...
Steam already has the ability to block certain countries and regions from buying specific products. IIRC many of the adult games were already banned in the German region for example.
If it was about the laws, at worst Valve could block Australian users from buying adult content and that would be it.
... and if Valve and Itch had blocked content that was illegal in Australia before Collective Shout weaponized the Australian laws, we wouldn't have heard about it beyond it showing up in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_banned_video_games_in_...
From the Valve rules:
1. Everything on your banned list that Steam sells was already banned in Australia (you can tell by looking it up on SteamDB and noticing it has "n/a" for the Australian price e.g. https://steamdb.info/app/2456420/)
2. Collective Shout aren't weaponising Australian laws in this case - those only apply in Australia. At best they could get games banned in Australia by drawing the state censor's attention to them. What Collective Shout did was weaponise American corporations fear of negative publicity by calling them repeatedly and threatening them with negative campaigning, and as a result got games banned in countries they don't live in, over and above the say-so of the people who do live in those countries, and the laws of those countries allowing them to purchase such games.
Of course - they've never invoked a legal justification. What they seem to be leaning on is basically "we can create bad press about you supporting payments for X", promising headlines like "MasterCard is paying for women to be beaten and raped!" or other sensational nonsense.
Mastercard pressured their processors and the processors turned around and talked to Valve about it and cited Mastercard's rules. It wasn't pre-compliance, but there was a proxy that allows Mastercard to deflect responsibility.
An intermediary between Valve and Mastercard likely was the one that brought it up because they have to comply with those rules, or the rules of someone upstream of them that has to and imports them into their own rules, so they have to interpret vague "brand damage" rules and they err to the conservative side because if they run afoul of the rules they could lose access to process Mastercard transactions ~20% of US transactions, which would really mean losing most of their customers not just the 20% of Mastercard flows.
As I understand it, Valve was threatened by a middleman because the middleman precomplied with Mastercard.
Both Valve and Itch use Paysafe and Paypall for processing. I'm glad someone is paying attention.
I feel I've been screaming at a wall for a week now. All this rage and it's all directed at the wrong corporations.
They cite a rule about Mastercard brand damage. If Mastercard didn't specify that such content would result in MC brand damage why would they cite it rather than their own rules?
Some options:
a) they are worried Mastercard might randomly decide it does and punish them
b) it's convenient to be able to blame someone else
c) someone somewhere said something and the rest of the orgs isn't aware or over-interpreted a statement
Vague rules like this are great to dilute responsibility. It can both be true that Mastercard didn't tell the payment processors to force the issue and that the payment processors strongly thought they had to.
There are definitely a lot of links in this chain. Maybe leafo can chime-in and say exactly what happened with Itch.io. But I suspect that someone downstream of Visa/Mastercard anticipated that the payment card companies would not permit the transactions and relayed that back up to the merchants, and they shut it off preemptively.
But it's hard to say. Mastercard is now saying that they never said or did anything. So where did the outrage come from? Someone must have done something.
> But I suspect that someone downstream of Visa/Mastercard anticipated that the payment card companies would not permit the transactions and relayed that back up to the merchants, and they shut it off preemptively.
It sure is tragic that benevolent and majestic Mastercard is having their name thrown into the mud over this. Coincidentally, it sure is convenient that they have a number of middleman scapegoats who can take the blame on their behalf.
All Mastercard has to do is say “We ordered payment processors to let Valve sell their games”. It is sure convenient that they stop at “We didn’t say the opposite.”
FWIW Mastercard are simply lying, as anyone who has ever had to touch adult payment processing will tell you.
There's even a (non-public) list of keyword banned terms.
Indeed, and the keywords are vague and they refuse to rigorously define them. Adult payment processors just run around in the dark until they trip over one of these landmines.
Even the (rare) categories of content that have been legally determined to be non-obscene (e.g., werewolf erotica [1]) can fall under banned keywords (in this case, “bestiality”).
It’s a stupid extralegal system and ought to be destroyed.
[1] https://time.com/archive/7118599/california-prisoner-fights-...
Throughout this our only contacts have been representatives at Stripe and PayPal. They indicated that they got a notice and kicked off their own audit.
As far as I'm aware, the Collective Shout letter caused a "formal card network inquiry" to originate from both Mastercard and Visa. I did not have access to the actual inquiry, but my assumption is that it wasn't "we see this content, take it down" and more like "we saw this letter, look into whats going on before we do our own investigation and fine you"
The US has some clear laws against government controlling speech and, in the abstract, that makes it pretty much impossible to censor games. Various factions - exactly who it is difficult to pin down - have been working hard to set up a system where they can shut things down without ever explicitly instructing anyone to do anything. This appears to be the system engaging by accident because some crazy from Australia accidentally said the right thing to the right people.
So I do actually believe Mastercard when they say this, but holding them accountable anyway is probably for the best. They're likely the single group with the most influence over the regulators.
> "The US has some clear laws against government controlling speech and, in the abstract, that makes it pretty much impossible to censor games."
For background,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Entertainment_Merchan... ("Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association" (2011) ("ruling that video games were protected speech under the First Amendment as other forms of media"))
First Amendment applies to the _government_, not private entities.
I think the larger point here is that the government is suppressing protected speech by using private sector actors as intermediaries.
Is there proof the government actually uses this apparatus?
I don't think there's any government involvement necessary here - Mastercard has some censorship apparatus (which they claim to be necessary for their brand's reputation), and they used it (apparently through pressure from an Australian group) towards video games.
This is really bad but I don't think it makes sense to believe a government was ever involved here. Of course, there should be laws put in place to regulate mastercard into a common infrastructure. They should not be able to deny processing a legal payment because of nebulous "brand reputation" reason.
In this case? Not that I know of, but I'm not following closely.
In general? Absolutely - search 'Operation Chokepoint'.
There's a great summary in the middle of this (very long) article under that header: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/debanking-and-debunki...
There are laws in place to regulate this behavior, but the government has chosen to protect mastercard from enforcement in this instance. That's the smoking gun.
Mastercard could simply refuse service for those games in particular instead of demanding (through proxies) that the games be banned from Steam. There's a clear antitrust violation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point
if we're going to point to this there are much much more problematic instances of this happening, in particular democratic pressure to platforms like twitter and facebook to suppress certain information as "disinformation" even when it later came out to be true (hunter biden laptop)
In age of megacorps, this is a great weakness of this right.
We need to break them up solely based on size - if they’re too big on revenue or profit or market cap or employees, break them up. Or at least huge taxes on the largest companies and lower taxes on small ones. Market cap about 500B? Here’s an additional 25% tax on profits. Above 1T? Make that 50%.
Now read the grandparent comment you're replying to. You're just talking in circles now.
I would argue that entities such as VISA and Mastercard have so much power that they are government-like entities and should be treated as such (i.e. a common carrier).
For certain industries it also applies. Common carriers (e.g. telecoms) and utility companies are also not able to censor or refuse lawful business.
> This appears to be the system engaging by accident because some crazy from Australia accidentally said the right thing to the right people.
This has been happening for years already, this is not an accident caused by a crazy lady from Australia complaining to the right people. She simply took advantage of Mastercard already engaging in censorship and challenged them and their payment processors to take on an even broader interpretation of Mastercard's obscenity rules.
Ehh, mastercard and visa have been playing these kind of games for years. For example hypnosis is a censored term on most porn sites, and most try to take down videos using or referencing marijuana in videos. Not because either of those things are against the law to have in a video, but because payment processors like Visa and Mastercard will blacklist sites that don't of their own volition. Go ahead and go type hypnosis in any major porn site and you will see you get zero results.
Say fuck on TV.
In addition to the sibling comment about safe harbor hours, the FCC regulates not speech but the shared airwaves. Print is irrelevant, and that’s why you can do whatever you want on cable.
Also, the FCC does not directly set standards and instead responds to complaints from the communities in which the broadcast is available. So it’s conceivable that in an environment where nobody cared, you could do this at any time of day.
Didn't know the FCC regulates Youtube. Nevertheless, in a country with no regulations about saying "fuck" on TV, I get beeps on Youtube.
Many stations affiliated with the ABC network did, from 2001 to 2004, in primetime by airing "Saving Private Ryan" unedited for Veterans Day.
Apparently you can do that between 10pm and 6pm on broadcast TV, or on cable TV.
Which is a pretty messed up situation.
I am quite surprised how wrong opinions like yours are. There is no argument of free speech here, they are a private business and as such can decide what they allow and don’t allow on their network. It’s no different than if cloudflare had a click through that said no adult material.
You can hand wave around well they are a monopoly or some related argument but the government does not see it that way. Visa and Mastercard for decades have censored adult sites on their network. At the end of the day I suspect they would be happy to take the fees but they are the ones underwriting the risk and there have been cases over the year in the US at least that challenge how extreme you can go with Adult material. Even today there are certain categories that are much harder to get setup for processing.
Edit: to be ultra clear, I would love more competition in this space but at the same time there is no argument around free speech here.
You're confusing the concept of free speech with the First Amendment. Any time a person is prevented from expressing themselves is a violation of their freedom of speech, even if they have no legal right to speak.
But even in the context of the First Amendment, freedom of speech does not only apply to the government. For example, net neutrality laws prevent ISPs, which are generally private companies, from restricting Internet traffic on free speech grounds.
To the extent that it is legal for a payment processor to censor speech, the only reasonable conclusion is that the law is wrong and must be amended. Large corporations are much more similar to governments than they are to private so individuals, and should be treated as such.
You’re incorrect on both legal and factual grounds. The First Amendment applies only to government actors. Private companies, including Mastercard, have no legal obligation to carry or support speech they disagree with. This is settled law (Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck, 2019).
Net neutrality was about common carriers (ISPs) due to their chokepoint role in internet access. Payment processors are not classified as common carriers and are not subject to those rules.
If you want laws changed to regulate them like utilities, that’s a policy argument, not a free speech violation under current law.
The argument from free speech is that government should not be allowed to censor, regardless of the mechanism. Payment processors currently offer that mechanism.
If the government were coercing Mastercard into censorship, that would be a free speech issue. But absent state pressure, a private company choosing not to do business with certain content isn’t censorship in the constitutional sense. That’s just market behavior. If you want to challenge the influence of financial infrastructure on speech, that’s a separate (and valid) policy debate but it’s not a First Amendment violation.
It's a free speech issue if the government _can_ pressure Mastercard and, separately, Mastercard _can_ act as a censor. That government isn't using this ability in this particular instance is no more of a consolation than if there was a law that permitted censorship but was not used for that or enforced in practice.
Severing either of these two links would be enough though.
You’re shifting from a First Amendment claim to a broader “potential for abuse” argument. That’s fine, but let’s be precise.
1. Government pressure only triggers a First Amendment issue when it’s actual, not hypothetical. Courts require clear state action or coercion.
2. Mastercard acting on its own isn’t censorship in the legal sense, it’s a private company making content-moderation decisions. You may not like that power, but it’s not unconstitutional.
If you want structural reforms, like regulating payment networks as common carriers, that’s a policy question, not a current free speech violation.
The amendment is about laws, not execution. As long as we're not interpreting the amendment literally and trying to infer its spirit at all, the equivalent in this case is that the executive branch should not have the power to legally censor people or companies at all, as opposed to merely not using that power.
Not sure what your point is. Mine from the beginning is there is no constitutional issue like free speech here as the government is not coercing Mastercard or Visa. There are a lot of other valid complaints and arguments but free speech is not one.
I'm saying that Mastercard/Visa being able to do this on their own is one half of a free speech issue. It's not a free speech issue of its own, but it creates a free speech issue when combined with them being vulnerable to government pressure.
Imagine that the government instituted a private organization that had the power to cripple any business, with no recourse, and had control over it. The first amendment does not literally prohibit this, yet this would have clearly been a violation of the first amendment in spirit.
Your distinction is correct as far as it goes, but there is a third observation that must also be taken into account, which is that the tidy division of economic, social, and political matters into private and public domains is uninteresting from the perspective of power. An example of this is how gov'ts, constrained by law, cannot legally engage in widespread surveillance, have found what is morally a loophole by involving private companies who are able to do so more freely. Or, for example, the policing of certain ideas on privately-owned social media which have become de facto public forums. It is completely uninteresting to claim that you aren't forced to use these forums or that you can start your own as jejune free market extremists like to claim. A little intellectual maturity will make plainly obvious why that is the case.
Now, I happen to think that, pace Dershowitz, adult content does not fall within the scope of free speech. The entire purpose of free speech is to allow the truth to be to expressed. Free speech takes an attitude of pragmatic permissiveness toward certain varieties of what are objectively bad speech as the price for that to happen. It's a choice that was made in American political history, but even here, the bounds of what is legally permitted under free speech have not remained fixed for various reasons.
Adult content is nowhere in the vicinity of this notion of free speech, and certainly not its moral purposes. There is no right to produce or to view adult content. There is no right to anything that is objectively unethical, and both the production and consumption of such content is unethical. Gov'ts can choose to take a permissive stance toward such activity for prudential reasons (for example, historically, while prostitution was categorically condemned on moral grounds, gov'ts took a permissive attitude in some respects, because they felt that banning it would cause still greater problems), but they have the authority to criminalize it.
So, given that it isn't a free speech issue, I have no problem, in a free speech context, with private companies banning such content from their platforms or from being the subject of transactions passing through their systems.
What is the government's role here? As far as I can tell the censorship was coordinated and facilitated by private parties.
You have a for profit business that in some areas like adult content walks a line between regulatory oversight, public outcry and the risk to underwriting the business. In this case it was public outcry, there have been instances in the past where different local jurisdictions have come forth. My point is they walk the line between those three areas.
Competition doesn't matter if entities have to simultaneously follow all of the payment processors' rules. It means in order to compete you have to find people willing to give up everything else. Which is an impossible proposition.
It's like if a tier 1 ISP only peered with networks that peer with networks that censor XYZ. Allowing for these kind of agreements leads to censorship and is why net neutrality is important from the government.
FWIW, "tier 1 ISP" is less prestigious than you'd think. Many tier 2's are bigger than many tier 1's. Being a tier 1 is kind of a self-exclusionary, nose-snubbing policy and in some ways it's surprising they manage to hang onto existence at all, though not in all ways.
This typically comes up when someone thinks they're getting better transit service from a tier-1 than a tier-2. They're not. A tier-2 ISP can have better routes, since a tier-1 will refuse to deliver your traffic anywhere that requires them to pay money. Some places are just unreachable from tier-1 ISPs.
Famously, for over a decade Cogent has refused to receive packets from Hurricane Electric without payment because idk profits, and Hurricane Electric has refused to pay them because it's a tier-1-ish, so you just can't talk to Cogent customers if you're an HE customer and vice versa. (I think HE eventually relented by paying a third-party to forward packets to specifically Cogent, even though they have tier-1 status to everywhere else)
What prevents any old ISP from claiming it is tier 1?
Being laughed out of the room?
"There is no argument of free speech here, they are a private business"
Constitutional rights are also civil rights - businesses may not violate them nilly-willy in this specific manner which causes damages to people.
You’re confusing constitutional rights with business obligations. The First Amendment restricts government actions, not private companies. Mastercard isn’t violating free speech by refusing to process certain payments. Civil rights laws protect against discrimination in specific categories like race or religion, not content moderation. Unless adult content is a protected class, your argument doesn’t apply.
This problem is upstream of the credit card companies. How far upstream? Not much. It's their investors. Like Bill Ackman [1] and Blackrock. These companies live in a fantasy world where everything can be "Disney-ized" and made family-friendly. They see how negative press campaigns like Collective Shout can damage a brand's image. And their "solution" is to turn the world into a big Disney theme park where there's no sex, drugs, or rock 'n roll. You may not mind that world, hell, you may even WANT that world, but it's completely impractical and these investors are too stupid to realize that their initial success (pressuring Steam to remove incest-themed games) won't translate into long-term success. (I mean what do you expect, they are MBAs and CFAs. They've been trained to see the world as a series of clinical abstract charts, which is why anyone who can apply a sociological filter to the world runs rings around them.)
[1] - https://archive.ph/zXKuD
Wrong title.
"Mastercard finds out there are a lot of gamers out there, makes an attempt at damage control." would be more appropriate.
Why you care about whatever we do with do with digital pixels at our free time ? Gamers trying to save the game they play and Master card have no business banning the games we play on our own private
> Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down, but Valve says payment processors 'specifically cited' a Mastercard rule about damaging the brand
Who in heaven’s name associates a credit card company with the image/ethics of the transactions it’s processing as long as the businesses are legal??
What I think of when I hear Mastercard? A plastic card with numbers on it, connected to my bank account and offering me some added protections/insurance.
I mean, to be a bit of a devil's advocate, its not impossible. Bitcoin sort of has the reputation of being used to buy "shady stuff". Its not unreasonable for MasterCard to not want to be "That card company people buy edgy porn with".
Which is why we need them to be legally required to process all lawful transactions, so that they cannot be singled out for it.
> Bitcoin sort of has the reputation of being used to buy "shady stuff".
That’s because practically no one gets gas and buys groceries with it.
All the porn of the world wouldn’t be a drop in the sea that is MasterCard.
Heh, ironically we do now, don't we?
By the way:
https://www.amazon.com/Streetcar-Named-Desire-Blu-ray/dp/B07...
Why is Mastercard processing money for this movie that contains a rape scene?
Still waiting for Game of Thrones to be removed from all streaming services for gratuitous sexual depictions and on-screen depictions of rape
Don't forget the beheading! Mastercard specifically mentions beheadings. I guess Ned Stark shouldn't have complained to every lord of Westeros that King's Landing didn't accept American Express.
It's not targetted by pressure groups at the moment. MasterCard isn't acting out of its own moral convictions here, so don't expect these rules to be enforced wherever they might apply.
Oh please. As if Mastercard is beholden to some grass roots movement from Australia.
...So their quote "we require merchants to have appropriate controls to ensure Mastercard cards cannot be used for unlawful purchases, including illegal adult content." is just a lie?
I mean yes, of course they're lying? the article quotes the actual rule here, which is "don't do anything that might make us look bad".
Because it's a critically acclaimed movie that will draw defenders if it's banned now. If the activists went all in right away they'll lose and they know it
Same deal with GTA and GOT
> Mastercard's Rule 5.12.7 relates to "illegal or brand-damaging transactions," and states:
> A Merchant must not submit to its Acquirer, and a Customer must not submit to the Interchange System, any Transaction that is illegal, or in the sole discretion of the Corporation, may damage the goodwill of the Corporation or reflect negatively on the Marks.
I didn't expect they had such clear rules expliciting they can ban any kind of transactions they don't like or would make them look bad, regardless of the legality of it.
I called MasterCard twice and both times they a) guessed that I was calling about content on Steam without ever mentioning Steam b) said that they only restricted "illegal adult content" and have "standards based on rule of law". Said absolutely nothing about protecting the brand. Also couldn't say if said "standards" were actual laws or MasterCard's own (legal) standards.
Good argument to record any calls with them and submit the recordings to the press
You don't really have to record the phone call. If anyone in the press wants to hear them saying that they don't block legal content, call them and ask about Steam. They have a ready-made PR response that they will read to you.
Do people think USD being accepted at kink stores gives the USA a reputation risk?
I just don't see the argument that a payment processor being able to process payments legitimately gives them reputation risk. I don't doubt that people write in to MasterCard to claim it does but people write about everything.
While I don't think MC's or Visa's reputation is at all close to being fragile enough to be harmed by use on any Steam game, the idea that these companies are almost like public utilities that shouldn't have a say in their deals is their reputation.
And carrying large amounts of USD cash does have a negative reputation, even to the US government. Nevermind the reputation of cryptocurrency.
I believe the issue is Visa PayPal, and Mastercard are capitualating to interest groups bombarding them with complaints and then celebrating censorship on social media posts. I agree with your sentiment, it's ridiculous.
If there were a law that MC had to be an impartial utility, like a phone or electricity provider, then it wouldn't hurt their reputation. But since there is no such law, they have the choice to deny transactions, which also means they can be blamed (by puritans) for allowing them.
I'm not sure you need MC to be an impartial utility.
IIUC, the problem here is the colluding behavior. Steam can't just "drop" MC and use Visa for the transactions as the banks must abide by MC's rules even when MC isn't the payment processor just to be eligible to be a bank for MC.
Mastercard's rule is that they can ban whatever they want, whenever they want.
> A Merchant must not submit to its Acquirer, and a Customer must not submit to the Interchange System, any Transaction that is illegal, or in the sole discretion of the Corporation, may damage the goodwill of the Corporation or reflect negatively on the Marks.
Create amorphous rules, enforce them as you feel like, then blame others for breaking the rules...
This is due to under-regulation of these oligopolies and lack of non-profit interoperable alternatives. Some things are too important to be left to the fantastical "invisible hand."
If there was a law that mandates that payment processors have to accept all transactions, then there'd be no reason to cite "brand damage" because Mastercard could just point out that they're not in control because of the law, and no other processor could censor that content either.
Unfortunately, laws like EU AML law go the opposite direction, where banks are allowed to close accounts only if they deem them "too risky".. this is not good.
I wonder if Valve could (threaten to) become their own payment processor if this becomes too big of a threat. They are one of the few companies on earth with enough money to attempt it.
If I remember correctly a big part of Valves heavy investment into linux was Microsoft wanting to lock windows down more, and now in 2025 gaming on linux is a viable alternative to windows.
I don't know how that helps. PayPal and stripe are the payment processors, no? Visa and MasterCard are the payment network. Steam can build their own Stripe probably, but are they going to make their own credit card network too? Probably not. They can maybe try taking money directly from your bank though, like Wise. But if you've ever tried it, that looks like such a shit show. Every bank and every country does it a little differently, has its own limits and fees, and the authentication is really ghetto.
What would that change? The assumption here is that payment processors need to comply with MasterCards rules. So would Valve if they would become a payment processor, no?
It would allow them to negotiate directly with Mastercard, making the deflection in TFA impossible.
Well, you can buy Steam gift cards for cash in underdeveloped markets like Germany. Can’t imagine how else would it work.
You can't buy gift cards in other underdeveloped markets like Japan, Camboja, the US, Mexico, etc?
Dumb question: what if Steam only takes cash or crypto payment for these games, and leave them on the market? Cash is loaded from debit card and can be used for buying any games, while crypto apparently always works for everything. Would they still be on the hook?
IIRC the rule Mastercard cited was so vague that trying to workaround it almost seemed potentially pointless. It was basically a blanket "we think it makes MasterCard look bad so we end our relationship". Anyway, debit cards are still Visa/mastercard so using them as cash has the same problem. I was thinking they could just use Steam gift cards but since those are often themselves purchased in stores or with credit cards it seems to just push the problem a little further away.
I believe Steam did support bitcoin at one point but decided to end usage over because the price fluctuations made it to unpredictable on their end. Maybe the landscape has changed though.
>Steam did support bitcoin at one point but decided to end usage because the price fluctuations made it to unpredictable on their end.
Valve knew that there would be price fluctuations. Everyone knew that, and knew how to deal with it. They just priced the games in dollars, with a conversion to the Bitcoin value at the moment of sale.
But what Valve did NOT expect was that the Bitcoin blockchain would suddenly grow so popular and congested (which was a result of massive publicity from events such as Steam accepting Bitcoin). So suddenly, to Valve's surprise, the average fees to be sure that a payment would soon be processed on the blockchain fluctuated wildly upwards during that period, up to tens of dollars. The Blockchain congestion and high fees were exacerbated by technical and ideological arguments about how the Bitcoin network should function. The "small block" faction won, but Bitcoin quickly became a laughing stock as a method of payment, because second layer solutions to the network congestion weren't ready.
The high fees were a huge problem in themselves for Steam customers, and there were other support issues caused by Steam customer difficulty understanding how to use Bitcoin (and who can blame them?). Customers were angry because they had paid for a game, but their payments were delayed for days unless they paid an indeterminate Blockchain transaction fee which might be more than cost of the game they were trying to buy.
After a few months of that chaos, Steam dropped Bitcoin. So did many other retailers.
Ironic, Bitcoin payments work much better now and fees are lower, but it lost of a lot of goodwill from retailers like Steam during that period, and most of them have not come back.
Are you sure that Bitcoin payments work much better because the amount of payments has dissipated?
>Are you sure that Bitcoin payments work much better because the amount of payments has dissipated?
I don't know. On the base layer, payments are all just transactions on the Blockchain, like any other. So it's not easy to see whether a transaction is a payment or an "investor" speculating, or something else. Then there's also other layers, like Lightning.
My guess is the relative percentage of retail Bitcoin payments, compared to speculative transactions, is now lower than 2017, when Steam accepted Bitcoin. I don't know if absolute amount of payments has reduced. Maybe?
You could look at historical charts of average Bitcoin fees[0], which gives you an idea when retail Bitcoin payments are practical, and when the fees are too damn high. Fees often got above $4, sometimes much higher, in 2024 for example, which would unacceptable for something like buying a game from Steam. Though, still, that doesn't show what impact Lighting is having on retail payments.
[0] https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees...
bitcoin lightning has been the solution for it
That bitcoin decision was a long time ago. Long enough that it can be reversed. Other sites take bitcoin and manage it.
It's not about gaining a way to handle transactions without MasterCard. It's about losing MasterCard (or any other third party intermediary that follows their rules), and all of the accompanying customers who are accustomed to paying online with a credit card instead of going to a corner store and buying a Steam Card using cash.
It would take a lot of effort for Mastercard/Visa to stop physical retailers from selling Steam gift cards. Beyond gift cards, there's also systems such as PaySafeCard, which lets you pay with cash at a physical store and spend it online at any merchant who accepts it using a code.
And for crypto they can just accept Monero. Steam accepted Bitcoin years ago, but stopped due to high fees and network congestion. Monero fixes that + makes it private like cash, and has been the de facto cryptocurrency for years now.[1]
[1] Random example https://xcancel.com/NanoGPTcom/status/1951300996329537625#m
What about just using checking account numbers like with your utility bills?
This is a better way to think about it: Valve is in a situation where they could maintain two payment regimes on their site: some content can be paid through methods X, Y and Z, while others cannot be paid by credit or debit cards but accept all other methods. That's some programming and payment routing change on their site, but might be within the possible. Valve can do that because they charge separately for each item. If passes or subscriptions, they would need to shift from one to two.
This would be harder - it seems - for something like OnlyFans where payments and censorship are all one soup shared among all content.
That's where it gets disgusting. They don't tolerate that solution, which is a proof that this has nothing to do with brand protection or chargeback rates or anything of sorts.
So either those poor games need to be kicked out, or everyone has to switch to cash/app overnight. The transition process has to be easy enough that the dumbest addict you have seen in worst fast food restaurant place can complete in few clicks. That has proven difficult for many, and sadly the former options are usually taken.
Debit cards still go through MasterCard and/or Visa. They could take crypto, but crypto is far too volatile for the types of transactions Valve wants to be handling.
Besides being able to change prices (whether USD or bitcoin) in real time, Valve is also selling bits and global data center activity. Their prices are very disconnected from other prices to begin with. Not like if they were selling tomatoes at cost plus living wages. Plus or minus 10% from one day to the next is not necessarily relevant on a sale to sale basis.
Volatility isn't an issue for the merchant - prices can be adjusted in real-time based on the cryptocurrency's value at the time of purchase, and if they don't want to be exposed, they can sell it immediately on purchase.
Whether or not Valve would want to encourage people to pay with crypto and expose their customer base to its volatility is another matter.
In a world where people need both fiat and crypto, the volatility of crypto precludes returns.
What they mean is that you top up your Steam credit and rest is between you and Steam.
Yes, but also the crypto option has been tried and absolutely doesn’t work.
It really hasn't. Everything has been tried with crypto, except actually buying things with it.
To be fair, in the case of Steam they legitimately did try. They supported bitcoin purchases for nearly two years before they stopped, citing volatility and processing fees:
https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail...
I wouldn't call using Bitcoin legitimately trying. Even in 2017 Monero existed, which solves both the fee and transaction time problems, and as an added bonus is way more private.
It was tried, way back when it started, and it didn't work very well. Maybe a modern blockchain can work better, but the transaction volumes of credit cards are orders of magnitudes above the busiest blockchain today.
This is literally wrong. It's even googleable.
Why not? I regularly buy products and services online with crypto and it works quite well, usually a better experience than with a credit card.
There are plenty of chains that can confirm transactions in a couple seconds, and if you're concerned with volatility, just use USDC/USDT. There are crypto payment processors that handle all of this and allow payment across a range of chains and handle the volatility so that the merchant doesn't need to worry about anything crypto and just receives fiat.
I think I trust Stripe and Steam, probably two of the biggest money movers online by volume, to know when something doesn't work over just you.
Can you elaborate? If crypto is the only viable option to pay for something, I would agree due to the low amount of people familar in dealing with crypto. If it is an additional option, what part of it is not working?
https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail...
Well that was before Lightning was invented - that elimnates the high fees.
how do you "take cash" over the Internet?
Japan lets you make payments for online content at convenience stores.
How it works is you purchase a product online and it gives you a barcode that can be scanned at any major convenience store. You go to the store, scan the code, hand over cash, and the content you bought is instantly unlocked once the payment is confirmed.
Steam sells physical gift cards. You can buy them at convenience stores, Walmart, etc. you can pay cash for them.
those stores would absolutely stop carrying the gift cards if customers could not pay with visa/mastercard for them.
I would say monero but it is actually superior because there is no serial number tracking.
Mullvad VPN takes cash, you post it to them.
I doubt Mullvad has anywhere near the volume of transaction Valve does. And mullvad has plenty of other payment methods, so only a tiny, tiny fraction of their userbase likely pays in mail-in cash.
I don't think Valve could feasibly implement this at their scale - especially if this method was the _only_ way to acquire the games in question.
This realistically doesn’t work that well above anything like a micro scale. It’s also a crime to mail cash across many borders, so it only really works domestically.
What about a system of agents who locally take cash then bulk transfer to Steam? Like some kind of middleman: a processor, if you will, of payments.
Cash handling isn't really the problem with this suggestion
The closest thing is via an instant bank transfer, like the new FedNow protocol in the US.
Debit cards use the same network. Either way, it's a non-starter from a business perspective, even if they accepted cryptocurrency, majority of the economy does not use it.
Classic passing the buck. "Well WE didn't say they had to take those games down. We just pointed some problematic games and that we might not want to do business with them if they weren't removed. We didn't take them down."
Unfortunately until some regulation is created to solve this problem Visa/Mastercard will continue throwing around their weight at the whims of whoever.
There's something really funny about the adjective "NSFW" being used to describe a video game, as though other video games like the Legend of Zelda are somehow "suitable for work".
The payment processor censorship issue backs up a point I made elsewhere about companies being involved in politics: they shouldn’t be, and shareholders should be screaming with rage that these companies have inserted themselves into these discussions on purpose.
They’re payment processors, for crying out loud. Their entire grift is taking a slice of every transaction processed, ergo, the only restriction they should ever have in processing payments is whether or not the transaction is legal under the law, full stop.
If they don’t like processing payments for pornography or adult content (including games), then don’t be a payment processor. They’re a business, not a person, and therefore their “preferences” regarding content are irrelevant.
It seems like it's difficult to really separate them these days.
You can always come up with something horrific enough that it seems reasonable, even necessary, for platforms to block it, like actual terrorism or child porn.
But then, there's always an activist group out there who really wants to ban something that most people feel is only mildly distasteful but not worth a platform-level ban and will abuse processes to do it.
And there's enough people for each of those cases who have incentive to obscure exactly which category things are actually in. More than enough for it to be hard for any platform to sort it out for sure.
So do we eventually end up with either an actual Government takeover, or everything banned that's more edgy than Mr. Rogers Neighborhood?
If you're interested and have any index funds, you could call shareholder relations for one of these companies and make that argument. "why are you turning down income streams and hurting your own profits" is maybe a position they'd listen to?
Quite a few folks already are - it’s why MasterCard felt the need to issue a statement trying to obfuscate their role in things, meanwhile Visa is doubling down in the UK by trying to push laws banning content with consenting adults wearing “childish clothes”, a category so vague that it’s designed to be abused by the powers in charge.
This is why companies shouldn’t be allowed to engage in politics or lobbying: a handful of for-profit entities are abusing their capture of western finance to push personal agendas regardless of popular opinion or actual legality.
> companies being involved in politics: they shouldn’t be, and shareholders should be screaming with rage that these companies have inserted themselves into these discussions on purpose.
What, might you say, do these companies (among others) have in common? What comes to mind when you see them together?
* IBM
* Volkswagen
* Hugo Boss
* Bayer (IG Farben)
> If they don’t like processing payments for pornography or adult content (including games)
Pornography and adult content is fine—the real issue is that gaming storefronts refuse to moderate their platforms for child pornography and rape material and would rather kill their entire NSFW catalog, all while painting themselves as the victims.
> If they don’t like processing payments for pornography or adult content (including games), then don’t be a payment processor. They’re a business, not a person, and therefore their “preferences” regarding content are irrelevant.
Businesses are composed of people whose preferences matter. No business should be forced to serve pedophiles and rape fetishists.
I'm pretty sure child pornography is actually illegal in all jurisdictions valve operates in, and they would be charged with real crimes for selling it. Maybe you mean anime characters or something?
And is there any law about roleplaying rape? It's common in romance novels and online videos so I don't see how it could be illegal.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castillo_v._Texas
Lest we forget.
Sure in the end people rallied to him but it sure must have sucked.
But yeah. Texas.
2002? Wild. I would have thought that kind of obscenity law died in the 80s...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornography_in_Australia#Illeg...
> Some types of pornography (both real and fictitious) are technically illegal in Australia and if classified would be rated RC and therefore banned in Australia. This includes any pornography depicting violent BDSM, incest, paedophilia, zoophilia, certain extreme fetishes (such as golden showers) and/or indicators of youth (such as wearing a school uniform).
Fictitious violent fetishes and BSDM would likely be illegal in Australia.
Fair enough for the Australian market, but I'm not sure why the rest of the world should have to line up with that. Just block it for Australian accounts or such?
And that is what should have been done. Steam and Itch should have blocked content that is illegal in Australia from being seen or sold in Australia.
The problem is that they didn't properly identify which content it is. "Does it involve a school girl outfit giving the indication of youth?" isn't something that they can filter on.
I could see something in the future where when someone puts up phonographic, they can't select all for the countries it can be sold in and instead need to specifically affirm that it is content that is legal in each of the checked countries.
However, Steam and Itch don't currently do that. So when pressure by Collective Shout was moved from Steam and Itch to Mastercard and Visa, Mastercard and Visa almost immediately put pressure on their downstream processors which in turn put pressure Steam and Itch. Since Steam and Itch couldn't filter the "just illegal in Australia stuff needs to be removed from being available in Australia" they appear to have removed all NSFW content until it could be reviewed.
I believe the key thing in this chain is that Visa and Mastercard are very risk adverse. While they do make a lot of money, on a per transaction basis any merchant that is a problem is a very small drop in the bucket compared to the legal consequences they could (and have) face.
The content is legal, and therefore your entire argument is irrelevant, as is your attempt to personify corporations. The whole point of being an adult is understanding that your personal tastes aren’t a mandate on others to comply for your comfort; in other words, if you dislike legal content, your sole recourse is to simply not engage with that content.
Go proselytize elsewhere.
> The content is legal
It's not. Look up the PROTECT Act of 2003. It's sad that we live in a world where payment processors of all things have to do the government's job.
You dislike MasterCard's and Visa's actually legal actions, your sole recourse is simply not to engage with them. Best of luck!
There already was a time when Steam managed to free people from need to use funny pieces of plastic in their lifes... They've done that with CDs, they can do it again with Cards.
Yeah, that was when Steam freed the users from actually owning any game and instead gave the users limited licenses for using games.
I am looking forward to the day when they shutdown and everybody realizes this.
Steam has famously gone on record that they will provide a DRM removal patch for everything they’re legally allowed to, if/when they go under.
If they don’t do this and it’s all just lip service, then it makes a strong argument for ethical piracy at that time.
This is a very persistent rumor. I forget the details but it comes from a customer support email, not some official statement or promise from Gabe, and even that was originally posted on a long gone forum which you can only find quotes of. Even if there was first hand proof of an official statement, I wouldn't expect it to be upheld. Minecraft's website used to have a line from Notch saying he would make it open-source in the future.
Steam DRM is and has been for decades famously easy to crack. Literally look up steam auto cracker and crack all your games in couple minutes. It is also optional by the way. I much rather have weak but popular steam DRM that makes it less likely devs use much stronger and expensive denuvo DRM.
The real loss was in the inability to sell the 90% of titles I no longer care about owning, but that's already true immediately after purchase.
Steam shutting down and taking your library with it really doesn't change much except you lose that nice delivery platform with good integrations (achievements, workshop mods, multiplayer integration, automatic updates) for games you're active in. For the 90% you were never going to touch again it wouldn't be noticeable, outside the annoying reminder you were never able to resell them. The other 10% just reverts back to "pirate it" which is about here on my scale:
"find that legal physical copy to play with" < "pirate it" < "click button on Steam"
Can't I still just run the .exe of the game? Or DRM nightmares?
All (most?) Steam games have a very simple DRM that is extremely easy to bypass, and you can find examples on github.
However, a lot of games add their own DRM and/or protection scheme that complicates things.
EDIT: technically there are two distinct component: the actual DRM, called steamstub, and the steamwork library, that does not work without steam but it is not considered drm. Both can be easily bypassed/emulated.
I see, but there is Steam DRM there. So, I guess as the other commenter was alluding to, if Steam goes belly up so does your collection, regardless of the dev studio's intention (Or atleast, locked behind a DRM bypass).
I understood this in terms of Live Service games, but did not consider Steam's ability to shut down their own platform and kill my locally installed single player games with it (Again, I'm seeing its possible and seems easy to bypass usually, but the principle of the matter)
I tried to search if it's possible for a dev studio to release a game on Steam that works without it, by which I mean that if I uninstall Steam, the games keep working; I wasn't able to confirm, but it seems to be theoretically possible...
None of the games I have in my library work like that, but online some people suggest that some games work even without Steam, once installed.
Your point, however, still stands.
Definitely not all games, and for games that do have it cracking it is in most cases as simple as swapping out a Steam .dll (so very easy). It's primarily there as appeasement for devs who would be reluctant to engage with a platform with no copy protection, or in otherwords is mostly theater.
Do you know of any games downloaded from Steam that work even once Steam is removed? I tried to search a bit, but I couldn't find any.
I would like to test it for myself to confirm it.
I haven't tried with too many games since the usecase only comes up rarely, but I know that Downwell and UFO 50 work this way off the top of my head. They come with a Steam dll that will try to launch Steam for the sake of getting achievements and such, but if you delete them or just don't have Steam they launch all the same.
Google turns up this Steam curator that lists games that run without Steam and are DRM-free out of the box, though it seems far from comprehensive: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/38523697-DRM-FREE-GAM...
The PC Gaming Wiki has a couple of better lists it looks like: https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_big_list_of_DRM-free_g... and https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/List_of_DRM-free_games_on_...
What's stopping a large, profitable company like Valve from starting its own payment processor? Surely the technology part of it can't be an impossible hurdle.
Adoption.
You'd have to onboard hundreds/thousands of banks and terminal providers so they accept/give out your card.
I excpect the underlying technical stuff isn't that hard compared to getting people and companies to actually use it.
> You'd have to onboard hundreds/thousands of banks
It's perhaps a good idea. It's likely that not very many banks and terminal makers and payment processors really matter. It would be a little delicate because the ones that matter would be pressured or at least would feel pressured NOT to participate on threat to their currently main business.
And the project doesn't have to become mainstream probably, just accepted "enough".
A better reason is that it's not really Valve's battle. They have plenty of other business. They don't need to fight this war. A company like OnlyFans, yeah perhaps they do - but they are likely much smaller.
Valve is in a situation that helps: they charge separately for each item. Some that the credit card networks are okay with and some that they are not. So they could support two regimes on their site: some items could only be paid through the Valve new card network (and gift cards and bitcoin), while other items could be paid through all the above plus the legacy credit card networks.
Valve (and/or OnlyFans) then gets paid for trying to enter the very lucrative payment network business. And gets to use these separate charges / two regimes of payments to distribute content that would be too dangerous within the current single payment framework.
Aren't cards last century technology? I'm paying with my phone anyways. Seller can use phone as well. Why does it need to involve incumbent banks and terminal providers at all? If Valve started something like that the banks would bang on its door relentlessly just to not be left out of the loop.
Gaming is the business bigger than movies, music and books combined and Valve is Google of games.
> Gaming is the business bigger than movies, music and books combined and Valve is Google of games.
Valve is not Google of games, the app stores Google and Apple has dwarfs steam sales and the individual game consoles are similar size as the steam store.
> I'm paying with my phone anyways
Right, since the phone ecosystem is large enough to be its own payment processor, unlike steam.
Phone is the platform. You can put any payment system there. In various countries it was figured out in a lot of different ways. Valve with global reach could really compete.
Also Google Play store might have more consumers and or sales but they are of worse quality. It's scummy, it's exploitative. The whole system is propped up by whales decieved by gambling mechanics and deceptive ads. It's nowhere close to real world economy. Valve is much closer. Despite using Play Store since it came to existance I never paid for anything on Google Play because I don't trust it enough to add a single payment method there.
You should maybe look up how paying with your phone works.
And what in your mind is the thing banks will be begging Steam to be let in on? This reads like payment processing fan fiction.
I know how it works because connecting your bank account to your phone can be crappy and fiddly as it goes through Visa/Mastercard. But it works that way just to ride on customers of legacy systems. It doesn't have to work that way if you bring your own customers. It would have to start online of course and eventually move through phones to the real world.
I don't trust Paypal, at all, because its brand is damaged beyond repair, but I would put enough money on Valve account to do all of my online shopping with it if Valve did even just what Paypal does (even without connecting Visa or Mastercard directly).
It seems like you're treating your personal knowledge and preferences as the basis for Valve to take on an entirely new source of revenue and risk. It's a fantasy.
Even if 100% of Valve's user base cared as much as you (they do not), why would Valve take on the massive risk of connecting to its users' bank accounts? Of having to collect on debts? etc.
> It's a fantasy.
Of course.
> Of having to collect on debts?
Why would they need to do that? "Credit" part of credit card is completely irrelevant when it comes to payment systems. It's a trick to milk the customers. Why would Valve lower themselves to that level?
My point is, with crystal clear, pro-consumer reputation Valve could be real alternative to gambling industry of Google Play store, payday loan business of VISA/MasterCard and gym membership style of extortion of other services. And betting on consumer was a recipe for success for Valve so far.
Why would they try? Because it's always good to 10x your revenue.
The backend of electronic payment is a huge mess of microservices, and lots of those services has portions of infra shared with Visa/Mastercard. So whichever alternative service you use is likely vulnerable to the same pressure.
The point is to cut MasterCard and Visa out of the loop entirely. Payment systems in many countries don't have them as intermediary. Payments in China work perfectly well without them. Or in Germany. Even Poland has widely used alternative payment scheme. With future European digital currency a lot of commerce will be done completely without any involvement from Visa and MasterCard.
> Aren't cards last century technology?
I don't pay with credit or debit card for steam, I can use Blik, which is paying with my phone or one other payment processor, but I'm not in USA. This is USA problem.
My point exactly. Valve could easily introduce something like Blik globally.
You mean Valve, the company that has been intentionally keeping itself lean to the point they only have 300 employees?
(Visa employee count: 30,000+)
If you believe Steam et al, the payment processors are bowing to the card networks in this. So being a payment processor wouldn’t help. You need to sidestep the networks.
In the US that means either dealing with ACH at scale, which is a challenge, building a new card networks (which is hard) or only using alternative payment methods such as bnpl or crypto.
Each of those will limit your buyers, which as a merchant is a tough business decision.
> In the US that means either dealing with ACH at scale, which is a challenge, building a new card networks (which is hard)
Which is why someone has big interest in keeping it this way as in Europe practically every country solved this issue a long time ago and people do daily shopping completely omitting Visa/Mastercard. They try to fight back without much success.
Europe is not a monolith on this. You see utilization rates going as high as 75% in Europe for credit cards, so in those countries merchants would have similar choices to American merchants. That’s before accounting for debit cards which use the main network rails.
And most of the alternatives are either government controlled and thus subject to different censorship concerns or private (for instance bnpl) and subject to the same.
That is to say people seem to be dancing around there being some fundamental right to transact. Thats not one of the traditional rights and not one that is codified most places (anyplace?).
This entire situation is badly misunderstood all over the Internet. As the article itself states, alternative payment processors that are used primarily for adult content already exist. CC Bill was the example given. And they accept Visa and Mastercard. They're used by websites with plenty of explicit adult content, including simulated rape, incest, and "teen" porn. It isn't Visa and Mastercard forbidding this. In this case, it's Stripe, though it seems likely they're doing it because of pressure from Mastercard, which in turn received pressure targeting these particular platforms from some advocacy group in Australia. But itch.io and Stream could still use CC Bill, and customers would still be able to pay with Visa and Mastercard.
The reason mainstream websites don't use CC Bill and it is used almost exclusively for porn, is because they charge a lot more than Stripe and the more mainstream payment processors do. There isn't really a ban on this kind of material, provided the platform hosting it is willing to use alternative processors, so much as a price increase.
Even with Pornhub and OnlyFans debacles, they never hosted content that can't be found elsewhere on sites that allow you to pay with Visa and Mastercard. The reason those platforms were targeted was never the content itself, but non-compliance with rules that professional studios have always had to abide by requiring they keep copies of government-issued ID of all performers and provide those to any viewer who asks for it, in order to be able to prove they aren't accidentally hosting content with children or otherwise non-consenting performers.
Ultimately, if a website wants to host content with a guy taking a shit on his twin underage daughters, they can do that, and you can pay for it with Visa and Mastercard, as long as they use something like CC Bill for processing and they keep adequate records enabling them to prove the "underage" characters and not actually played by underage performers, and the people involved aren't actually related. Or, maybe more precisely, you can have real twins in a scene together, but you're then limited by byzantine country-by-country laws I have no personal knowledge of regarding what they are and are not allowed to do together that counts as sex.
The Internet is where nuance goes to die, so this all gets distilled down to "Visa and Mastercard don't allow you to buy porn" by the time most people find out about any of it.
I mean they kind of do. Most of the time I would hand wave away any company offering gift cards or credits, but Steam has created an economy / structure that I think warrants mentioning here.
I have sold a few items on Steam because I don't care about cosmetics in games. I'm also lazy and because of that "sat" on items for a while that appreciated. I mention this because Steam credit is very fungible: it can be easily converted.
Steam also makes it very easy to redeem credit, gift, etc.
I believe you can buy Steam cards at most places Xbox cards and similar are sold as well.
Also in the early days of Bitcoin buying and selling of digital Steam assets was one of the most popular things.
On the other hand, I'm absolutely amazed some US states hasn't yet gone after Valve for running an unlicensed casino with no age verification.
I think loot boxes as a whole need to be regulated as they are clearly gambling. I'm not a fan of regulation as a solution to most problems, but when it involves children I think it sets a good framework for safety and if someone wants to start gambling later they are free to do so.
Valve goes one step beyond loot boxes with their marketplace: you get a loot box, pay to open it (basically a slot machine spin), and you get an item in a "game of chance" -- but that item is a "thing of value" that can be sold on Valve's official, first-party marketplace.
Every definition of gambling I've seen includes some variation of "winning a thing of value from a game of chance", and while loot boxes for in-game rewards skirt that (the thing you're getting is typically described in the fine-print as having no monetary value), Valve's user-driven marketplace is setting a real-world value.
Put another way: EA FC's card packs or Genshin Impact's gacha spins are worth nothing outside of those games, but I've sold Counter-Strike skins to pay for a decent chunk of my Steam Deck.
I know that physical Steam gift cards exist but I've quite frankly never seen them anywhere. Nintendo/PlayStation/Xbox cards are pretty ubiquitous though. I recently tried getting a Steam one from a grocery store but they only had the console ones.
I've definitely seen them. A quick search shows them available at BestBuy and Walmart at least.
I'm not American so I've never stepped inside a BestBuy and Walmart. The last place I checked was a Lidl, where they only had the console ones.
It's basically impossible from a regulatory perspective.
Paypal exists because it broke the law, was prosecuted, and the outcome of the prosecution fined them heavily but also grandfathered their existence.
Anyone who wants to make a new payment processor likely has to take a risk of going to prison.
The regulatory environment is absolutely insane. The things you'd need to do to interoperate are nightmarish, it's damn close to an impossible hurdle. (I work at a fintech company)
How would that help? Then MasterCard would drop them directly.
Well in this case MasterCard is claiming it wasn't them, but their intermediary.
Because in this case it wasn't them, but their intermediary. However, in another case, where there was no intermediary, it would be them, not their intermediary.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nYJaDnGNQGiaCBSB5/accountabi...
Sure but also in this case MasterCard are clearly full of shit.
If they start their own payment processing company, they will then be subject to the same laws and regulations and the existing processing companies. Who manages the money doesn't matter. Even if you use Crypto, Steam would still remove the games due to the Australian law.
Steam didn't remove the games due to Australian law lol. Where did you get this idea?
Steam games' availability is per-country. They could've removed games for Australian users only. NSFW games are not shown to Chinese and German players on Steam since forever.
"lol"
This whole thing came about because of the Australian campaign to remove rape games consistent with law. Payment processors could be found liable for processing payments related to illegal activities. Steam anad the payment processors could have made it region specific, but didn't, probably for PR reasons.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_banned_video_games_i...
Also, Steam Direct didn't update their policy on game content from what I see. Doesn't look like Steam fought back. Seems as though Steam has never supported games with rape, incest, child exploitation, etc.
Anti-monopoly laws are good, but how about some harsh anti-duopoly laws?
Could also hit the iOS-Android bird with the same stone!
Existing "antimonopoly" laws already cover unfair competition, market manipulation, etc. regardless of the number of entities.
It’s not even a duopoly, look at the majority shareholders of both Visa and Mastercard, Vanguard and Black-rock in both. So it’s effectively a monopoly.
Vanguard and Blackrock are just asset managers. Public companies are owned by everyone with mutual funds, like pension funds and individual retirement accounts.
https://factcheck.afp.com/doc.afp.com.34N76K4
Thanks, but ”just asset managers” feels a bit generous, from that same link; ”But large asset managers may help bring issues to the attention of boards.” Is that the case here, no idea (likely not), but I do find it strange that both Visa and Mastercard refuse to take part of the multi billion dollar industry that is adult content. I have heard that it’s a volatile market with a lot of cash backs and fraudulent transactions, but they are happy to participate in other such endeavors.
How many more trillion dollar of assets do they need to "manage" before people start realizing that for all intents and purposes the one moving money around has more power and influnce than the one that actually owning it. See ESG score
The problem isn't the lack of laws, it's the lack of enforcement. Biden's FTC gave us a glimpse of what a working antitrust enforcer could look like, and it caused a bunch of influential billionaires to switch political allegiances.
There's no escaping the politics here. You can't enforce antitrust without hitting the billionaire class directly, and those people know how to influence American politics in their favor. Just look at what happened to the "click to cancel" rule post-Trump, something that is unambiguously pro-consumer and exactly the type of thing the FTC should be doing.
A classic tale. Finger pointing between merchants, card providers and banks. All of them: it was someone else!
In this story, Itch and Valve are 10x more trustworthy than the card processors.
The fact that Visa and MasterCard are the primary payment options for OnlyFans, makes this story a mess. Some time ago Visa and MasterCard very vocally banned Pornhub (at least) from using their cards, 100% sure this comes from them.
You mean like this?
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/aug/19/onlyfans-to-...
Ultimately the ban was undone in exchange for onlyfans limiting the type of content available on the platform. So effectively, payment processors dictate which type of sexual activities, performed by consenting adults, are OK to depict and sell. Why? Why do they have that power?
The government historically uses the the financial industry to police crimes and behavior that it does not want to or that it is not expedient to police directly. Clearly they like the outcomes of the payment networks' rules and enforcement decisions and see no need for things to change.
> Visa and MasterCard very vocally banned Pornhub
Not exactly. Visa was named as a counterparty in a class action against Mindgeek for monetizing child porn on their website. They lost, and there have been subsequent class actions.
> Some time ago Visa and MasterCard very vocally banned Pornhub (at least) from using their cards, 100% sure this comes from them.
That was because the government was prosecuting Pornhub for breaking the law (rape with real people, unlike these games).
Oh 100% agree there. It's who they have to deal with who are the problem.
That also suggests they do not want to out exactly who pushed them to this, whether it was external or internal.
But it seems fairly straightforward who it is.
If it was indeed Collective Shout's pressure campaign that led to Valve and itch.io being told by their payment processors to remove games, then this is how it went:
We know it was Mastercard who told the payment processors what to do, as the rule they cited to Valve says "in the sole discretion of the Corporation, may damage the goodwill of the Corporation" -- the Mastercard Corporation used its sole discretion to tell payment processors what to tell Valve and itch.io. The payment processors did not decide this for themselves.Mob bosses order hits, wise guys carry them out. The mob boss has clean hands.
Keep the pressure on Mastercard.
We need to stop these side-channel attacks on democracy. If a government deems some media lawful, you shouldn't get to de-facto ban it by going after publicity-averse private companies that provide hosting, payment processing, etc. https://protectthestack.org/
Related. Others?
Clarifying recent headlines on gaming content - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44760843 - Aug 2025 (24 comments)
Visa and Mastercard are getting overwhelmed by gamer fury over censorship - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44713414 - July 2025 (586 comments)
Steam, Itch.io are pulling ‘porn’ games. Critics say it's a slippery slope - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44685011 - July 2025 (890 comments)
Against the censorship of adult content by payment processors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44679406 - July 2025 (250 comments)
Games: No sex, please. we're credit card companies - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44675697 - July 2025 (52 comments)
Itch.io: Update on NSFW Content - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44667667 - July 2025 (323 comments)
Australian anti-porn group claims responsibility for Steams new censorship rules - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44636369 - July 2025 (162 comments)
Valve confirms credit card companies pressured it to delist certain adult games - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44606184 - July 2025 (905 comments)
I really hope Steam will start to accept Bitcoin (via Lightning possibly) over this. Due to its decentralization, it is censorship free by default. And if Steam accepts Bitcoin, that would be a massive boost for the liquidity aspect of BTC: You could basically sell your BTC to anyone who wants to make a Steam purchase, making it similarly fungible as Amazon gift vouchers.
Didn't Steam previously accept Bitcoin and then stop as no-one was using that option?
I learned that they did, but this was in 2017 before Lightning was a thing.
> making it similarly fungible as Amazon gift vouchers
This isn’t as accurate as you might hope. I can pretty much only buy hobby-related things on Steam but I can buy just about any non-perishable household item on Amazon.
Not sure about bitcoin, but maybe a stable coin would be interesting.
I realize the strong anti cryptocurrency sentiment on HN for reasons unclear to me, but this would be a great time for Steam and itch to accept cryptocurrency.
As a internet user on the business side of things, words cannot describe my hatred for payment card companies(ie. visa and mastercard).
There are so many middle men involved, it gets confusing. Apparently the payment goes like this:
Game Buyer (Steam) -> Stripe/PayPal -> MasterCard/Visa -> Valve -> Game publisher
That's at least three middle men, and presumably all of them collect fees. I wonder why in the year 2025 there isn't a more direct way to pay for things.
Why are we surprised? A centralized payment system, especially a banking one, is bound to do something like this. Crypto solves this but the average normie is still stupid enough to rely on them
If only we had some kind of decentralized internet money system.
And this is not the first time this happens. The exact same thing happened to PornHub - their premium subscription model got cancelled due to Visa/MC not liking some "questionable" content. Even though PH purged 60% of its content (basically every video uploaded from an unverified account), they are to this day still not accepting CC - probably as they are still banned. Instead they accept Crypto and SEPA payments in the EU.
This makes a strong case for Bitcoin - no matter if you consider it a ponzi scheme, or the BTC price to be overinflated, you will not be able to deny it is truly censorship free.
It's a strong case for, perhaps, Algorand[1], but Bitcoin can no longer play this role properly. Transactions are too difficult and slow and the network is too expensive. And Lightning is not a real solution.
1. Specifically a stablecoin running on the network
Stablecoins are not decentral and would suffer the exact same censorability as Visa/MC. That does not improve the situation.
Why is Lightning not a solution, care to elaborate?
It's basically unused and difficult for even motivated users to set up. If it was going to work, it would have been successful by now.
Or a legally protected right to transact, ideally with cash-equivalent anonymity. I’d take either one.
Both require repealing AML/CFT laws. But maybe that's the way and we should focus on the underlying crime instead..
Bitcoin (and most other crypto) unintentionally strikes an interesting balance here. Through the ability to trace blockchain transactions and impose KYC laws on exchanges you can in principle figure out who most money belongs to. That puts you in a position where if A wants to send B money you can't prevent that, but you can go after either A or B. That gives you freedom of payment, but after the fact you can still go after people laundering money or financing terrorism
Until the bank closes your account because it's deemed "high risk" and they're absolutely allowed to do that without explanations.
I'm feeling a little maximalist about this: How about both?
The digital euro will be released in the coming years. It allows for digital offline transfers.
We have privacy focused crypto systems like Monero, but the EU effectively banned them last year through "money laundering" laws, and they're moving to completely ban them within the next few years.
https://www.bitcoinsensus.com/news/altcoins/eu-to-restrict-m...
One that is anti-consumer when compared to the CC system.
Some discussion on source 3 days ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44760843
I wonder if valve could just become a bank or create its own credit card without these rules.
Yes, Mastercard didn't pressure valve and itch.io. They had an intermediary do it for them.
I kind of wonder if there had been misinterpretations as to the results of previous campaigns against Japan.
English in Japan is more of a customer support tool than a language. Proficiency is improving in some places, but on decline at large, below already atrocious status quo. This means the size of English-speaking audiences for actually Japan-centric news is small and not the first priority, not small && more important. Extremely little of whatever happening in Japan appear on mainstream English social media, let alone regular mainstream media.
If that much was not obvious to whoever pulling strings on this ongoing thing, I think there may be a chance that lack of observable responses after their earlier actions led to a misplaced confidence that gaming is a tiny top-down market and consumer resistance is nonexistent.
The responses were significant enough that it elected an equivalent of senate for third term and got former PM Kishida make a hand-wavy assurance on video even just few days before this one. It was almost certainly just a lip service, but also not nothing. How would anyone interpret that as a situation safe to escalate further?
MC/Visa wield a great deal of market power, which is bad because they become directly controllable entities.
I can't believe I am about to say this: Bitcoin fixes this.
Some other cryptocurrency fixes this, maybe (big maybe). But as long as _Bitcoin_ is seen primarily as an investment opportunity it can't really function as a means of exchange. For the same reason that we expect and need USD to lose value over time, people need to be encouraged to exchange their currency, not sit on it forever.
Something doesn't need to be perfect to be an escape valve.
So for example, when backpage's speech was unlawfully suppressed by the US government via payment processors cutting them off in Operation Chokepoint, they successfully adopted Bitcoin.
... and then Kamala Harris aggressively prosecuted them for 'money laundering' for the evading the payment processor blockade, even though her own internal staff report said they were guilty of no crime and were a treasured asset of law enforcement in the fight against human trafficking ( https://reason.com/2019/08/26/secret-memos-show-the-governme... ). So aggressive was the prosecution that they caused a mistrial by flagrantly disregard of the court's orders, then prosecuted again leading the the suicide of one of the founders following a decade of vicious harassment by the state.
uh ... so maybe not the best example.
Or maybe it is the best example: The root cause in the abuse by payment processors is the US government leaning on them to abuse their subjective discretion to suppress lawful activity that the government is constitutionally prohibited in interfering with. This is both what underlies the schizophrenic response by mastercard, which likes money and would generally just prefer to process everything profitable, and is also why Steam would be taking a huge risk to route around them with alternate payment means.
"you'll own nothing and be happy"
Before getting all worked up, I would advise people to look at what games exactly were banned, and see if it’s a case of power abuse or simply a case of “we can all agree that rape and incest games are disgusting and have no place in an entertainment web site visited by kids”.
You should bark at Steam if you want more curation.
What people are pissed at is a card payment network abused for moral regulation.
Furthermore, there's no public list of exactly which games were removed.
Not sure what side this argument serves
I don’t mean that I agree with the concept of corporate power abuse or the hypothesized source of the pressure. But I’m not spending one second of my life protecting this kind of content, and the fact that it’s being euphemistically called “Adult Content”, a very approximate description, shows that the source of the current outcry _knows_ it’s very bad looks to be defending any of the games that have been confirmed banned by steam.
I don't think most comments here or in the general discourse are protecting the content ?
I'm trying to find a good analogy. Perhaps if someone in your town built a giant meat grinder in their backyard, and as a test run they requested the vilest and most heinous criminals to be sent to them, you'd still see a private entity getting to grind the people they want as a serious issue.
Not wanting to spend a second on that issue, just because of who got sent there, would be quite a position.
I get your point, don’t agree with it but thanks for sharing your perspective
Unless there is actual real-word harm to someone (which is hard to imagine happening from a video game), no, I don't agree with you.
What your kids are exposed to is your responsibility. Don't burden the rest of society because you can't be bothered to set your own boundaries.
Removing incest games is not a burden to society
> Removing incest games is not a burden to society
It is to those who enjoy playing them.
Are you suggesting that playing a game involving incest is somehow unacceptable, while a game with graphic murder is fine? It's a strange moral line to draw, and despite what you may think, your views are not shared by everyone.
Yes it’s exactly what I’m saying
It doesn't matter because it is up to Steam what products they list to sell, not to MC/Visa.
If I had a business, I wouldn’t touch that kind of media with a ten foot pole. Why should these be forced to provide their service?
We should ban GTA for promoting all sorts of crime including murder and have no place in an entertainment web site visited by kids.
Your point being? We can’t treat different content differently? Do you not agree this is insane content?
> we can all agree that rape and incest games are disgusting and have no place in an entertainment web site visited by kids
We can then also agree that a game where you beat someone into a bloody pulp with a bat is equally disgusting. Why do we treat rape and murder differently?
So you disagree that these games are disgusting?
I feel like nobody cares really and none of the companies care, but are all worried because of the massive stranglehold 2 players have (and realistically each has almost entire control).
Mastercard don't care you want porn, or games, or whatever. Neither does VISA. They like money. They want money and want people to move their money so they can siphon off some of it for their own pockets. Almost nobody is going to avoid using a bank because their card provider let some other people buy rude games on steam.
The payment processors don't care. They want you to send money through them so they can take their cut.
Steam doesn't care. The people making the games don't care. They all just want to sell stuff.
The only thing that impacts this really is chargebacks, which iiuc are much more common with adult stuff.
But payment processors can't guarantee what mastercard or visa will do, and players like steam (and they're huge, this is not about tiny store issues) can't guarantee what payment processors will do and given the potential downside - blocking all sales - people need to be careful.
While I can see how these situations come up, it's also absolutely insane as an end result because I just want to give *my money* to someone else. I've ended up using crypto before for buying things, not for ideological reasons, but purely because I could buy them and then give them to someone else for the "flagged as risky" goods/services because I couldn't pay for things using my money and my card.
This has nothing to do with charge backs and everything to do with the Australian and US laws.
What laws are stopping Mastercard taking money for adult games but not onlyfans or pornhub?
It's not for adult games, but for sexually violent games in Australia. Also, Pornhub already appeased the payment processors when they purged a bunch of content.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_banned_video_games_i...
For a while my old bank would block all Steam payments on both debit and credit - calling them confirmed that this was their new policy. I swiftly closed the account and moved to a competitor so I could spend my money again.
>The only thing that impacts this really is chargebacks, which iiuc are much more common with adult stuff.
I think this makes no sense, like "we makes less profits from adult stuff because of charge back, so let\s give up on this profits". Anyway this companies did not use this excuse so why do this old excuse is resufecing now if they did not use it.
They usually just charge a higher fee for the riskier category. If a particular vendor has too many charge backs, they could drop them for that. Obviously not the case with Steam.
I didn’t say it was an excuse given here, have you tried reading the whole comment? It’s not very long and shouldn’t be hard to understand. If it is I can help explain it.
We are not on reddit here, have you paid attention?
Now seriously, you brought some old excuse here for some very inteligent reason, explain please? Do spouses will read that the guy bought something from Steam and she will then conclude the dude is playing very adult games? The excuse does not work as far as I can see, so explain your thoughts or explain why you are just pasting random excuses and then act like a redditor
Read the whole comment because that statement is not an excuse, it is simply a nod to how it differs from other payments. The rest of the comment explains why I think the situation arises like this. It really isn’t hard to read so try and if you think your understanding clashes with my explanation of my comment feel free to assume I’m bad at making a point and read it in good faith.
I clearly don’t understand your issue with what I wrote, and won’t with more accusations of being like a redditor.
I will respectfully disagree, I can't see your comment on topic. you said "The only thing that impacts this really is chargebacks, which iiuc are much more common with adult stuff." and this is something claimed about porn sites but explain how this applies to Steam or GOG, please explain clarly or admit it does not apply.
It’s not about chargebacks. If you can’t understand that from the comment and my followups I’m not able to explain it clearly enough for you and we should end it here, have a nice night.
Lots of outrage at the card companies, but strangely, no outrage at the laws that actually caused this. One is the Australian law to remove that type of content and the other is the US law that says the payment processor can't participate in illegal transactions.
Why would there be outrage at laws when the article we're talking about specifically says this isn't about any laws but instead about a Mastercard rule about damaging their brand?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_banned_video_games_i...
Also, Steam Direct didn't update their policy on game content from what I see. Doesn't looked like Steam fought back. Seems as though Steam has never supported games with rape, incest, child exploitation, etc.
As opposed to a hypothetical scenario where it is legal to participate in illegal transactions?
Then they would just get removed in Australia, not worldwide.
My guess is that Steam wasn't able to adequately block the games in Austrailia. If people use a VPN to access the content, could Steam still be liable?
They absolutely do have that infrastructure. They implemented every country's content rating system, such as PEGI, ESRB, ... . Games are regionally banned, such as in Germany [1]. Games can also have regionally censored games, typically for violence/gore in Germany [2]. With the strange effect that if you change your account's region, it re-downloads some of the games.
The legal situation with VPNs and traveling between regions is the same as with any internet service.
[1] https://steamcommunity.com/groups/foruncut/discussions/17/41... [2] https://steamcommunity.com/groups/foruncut/discussions/17/39...
Steam already blocks games sufficiently for Australian law in some cases about ratings and drug use, as it does in many territories.
Your steam account has a record of the country it was created in, and so does your credit card when you use it. You'd have to also get a foreign credit card and create a new steam account to even use a VPN to buy games from another region.
No, it hasn't been the case. The group in question, Collective Shout, has been pressuring Mastercard. Not Mastercard Australia, not Steam Australia: it's a concerted action to take down things they don't want. It's not a one time thing either: sex workers have been under attack by similar extremist catholic bigots. Furries, porn, anything they see as deviant is being attacked. And MC/Visa are happy to help.
Do I mind that MDMA Date With Hitler was taken down ? No, I don't believe it's a massive loss. However, the way it was done, through payment providers threatening to shut off access to the entire payment system because of their rules, is incredibly dangerous to the whole world.
This so much. The problem here is not the content that was blocked, it's the completely unaccountable process that was used to block content worldwide bypassing any legal protection.
Steam Direct didn't update their policy on game content from what I see. Doesn't looked like Steam fought back. Seems as though Steam has never supported games with rape, incest, child exploitation, etc.
So what? Steam simply didn't want to start a fight with its payment providers over some niche content. The problem is that this incident has proven it's possible to ban whatever content you want, globally, by pressuring middle management in Mastercard and Visa.
"Steam simply didn't want to start a fight with its payment providers over some niche content."
Or the content was never supported by Steam, per their policy. You can check Wayback machine for support for my position. Dod you have any evidence of Steam's motive otherwise?
I don't think inferring causality here is far fetched. They were fine with the content before. And we know it because said content was banned in some countries (including Australia) to comply with local regulations, so they clearly knew what the games were about.
Given that fact we have two options: either they decided to change their approach to content moderation and remove games that previously passed all their checks, with these games being coincidentally the same that were requested by Mastercard; or they decided to remove every game requested by Mastercard regardless of Steam's own policies.
Content which already violated the policies of MasterCard and Visa. All Collective Shout did was bring it to their attention.
No, it's enough that they do basic geoblocking just like streaming and other companies.
Do you have info on the US law? I am curious if it follows the same trend Russia set years ago with requiring them to put a large deposit and if they break the rules they get to keep all the money.
It doesn't go that far. These are part of the Know Your Customer type of law. These have increasingly been pushed as part of anti money laundering onto banks, investments, and processors. If a company is selling illegal things or things that even could potentially be illegal, then they get blacklisted. Similar thing to pot companies.
Marijuana sales, at least in the US, are a whole different can of worms, because marijuana exists as kind of a Schroedinger's illicit substance: its legal at a state level in most US states, while simultaneously illegal at the federal level. Anyone with a multi-state footprint that exists in that transaction chain could be held liable.
And they have threatened payment processors, etc. basically anyone who gets to big.
But it wasn't illegal to put up a NSFW game if sold to a adult.
Were Steam selling it to kids?
How would Steam know?
And yes, that's a problem that they're dealing with right now. Bellular News : Steam Faces Financial Obliteration: Others Are Already Dead https://youtu.be/AlDkL3DndtM
The law being talked about in the video is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Safety_Act_2023 / https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/online-safety-act...
That said, not all NSFW content is allowed in all jurisdictions. Australia and Japan (for example) have laws about particular content that differs from US laws.
It is if it includes things like rape, which supposedly was what was removed.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_banned_video_games_i...