I spent months working on a dating website. Had Stripe configured, spent the whole time testing with it. Published the site, swapped Stripe to production, and boom, account was closed/banned.
According to their own documentation, dating sites are indeed allowed, so long as there's no adult content. The site I built didn't allow adult content. I argued my case, provided the TOS as well as showed that I had features built into the site to prevent that sort of stuff. Still banned. The next step was to go for CCBill, etc. But they all charge a ~$2,000 setup fee. Not happening.
It had so many features built into it, and was by far my favorite project. Sadly, I just unpublished it and it will probably forever sit in my project folder unused.
Why not Square? Why not crypto? I realize HN kinda hates crypto as a group, but it solves your situation here, does it not? I realize it’s another step for users who don’t already have it, but I guess you need to determine whether it would cause enough friction to not get signups.
I create music videos which can be provocative, though not necessarily pornographic, and this kind of thing really bothers me since I've run into similar problems even just with hosting and donations. Thankfully, I don't try to make this anything more than a creative outlet, so I don't have to worry about taking payments, and I'm happy enough that any expenses are at least covered by a few donations. But it concerns me that it is not an option for others who might find themselves in similar gray areas.
Payments are pretty much 'public infrastructure' at this point and should be treated the same as utilities. ie they should be required to provide service for anything legal.
I mean this is just the ultimate form of price discrimination which happens to be legal. My question is why? This industry (payments) is completely driven by financials and occasionally regulations. They have no dog in a moral fight, so this must be about profits to them.
I agree with the premise of this post, but I'd like to see it made by someone else (and not only because this is on a furry blog.)Their argument is also poorly formed and poorly written.
They start by defending their use of furry art and railing against potential backlash from HN. Then spend a lot of words talking about how Collective Shout isn't anti-LGBTQ, but could potentially become anti-LGBTQ, but even if it's not anti-LGBTQ it's bad because it's anti-abortion. None of this is actually pertinent to the argument.
Then they talk about alternatives to Visa /Mastercard, such as crypto, WERO, FedNOW, petitions, blah blah blah. Next we move on to some good-old-fashioned self promotion, talking about how they helped save some library from the evil right wing politicians.
And the article ends without even making one coherent argument, which should be this: two American companies should not be able to dictate the moral standards of censorship for the world. They have too much power and too little oversight. Let's start with that.
> two American companies should not be able to dictate the moral standards of censorship for the world. They have too much power and too little oversight. Let's start with that.
To be fair, it's more than just two companies (and not all of them are US based). It's an ecosystem of companies with two major choke points.
Groups like Collective Shout work because Visa and MasterCard have deeply conservative Terms & Conditions and you can whine to them enough legally that they aren't taking their T&Cs correctly and "must" do a thing.
Visa and MasterCard's T&Cs are heavily conservative not just because they are conservative banking companies, but because they are conservative banking middlemen. A lot of their T&Cs also reflect all the Merchant Banks that these networks rely on to float the liquidity of the networks. Those Merchant Banks want a minimal risk on their high volume of investments in micro-loans. They express that minimal risk desire in strict, conservative T&Cs.
(It's a fun hypocrisy of the US-based Merchant Banks especially to want such minimal risk given they have the ability to use Federal Reserve 0% loans to back their portfolio of payment network loans. They have almost nothing but upside and surprisingly minimal risk naturally from that. But these are business-to-business banks that make their money the lowest risk ways.)
Visa and MasterCard get squeezed at both ends with what the Merchant Banks want and what these groups like Collective Shout want and become the easy chokepoint to attack. If the Merchant Banks backed off some Visa and MasterCard could potentially loosen their T&Cs.
Unfortunately as business-to-business banks, most of the biggest Merchant Banks (which often don't have recognizable consumer brands), several of which are not US-based, have very little interest in hearing from us and I don't see an easy strategy to encourage them to take more risks in the same way that a vocal minority team can encourage Visa and MasterCard to take fewer risks because their T&Cs already say so.
I can still blame Visa and MasterCard for being cowards on these and related subjects and not pushing back against loud complainers and highly conservative Merchant Banks, while also respecting that their position on some of this is between a rock and a hard place, as much "just a middleman" as a controlling character in what is happening.
Much more interesting is why these two companies were able to wield this much power in the first place, and why are they using it to censor this kind of content specifically?
You can't understand anything about the situation without replacing it in the context of the far right reactionary wave hitting our societies. Similarly, simply preventing these two companies of their power would be a temporary solution at best. There is a political will -and enough support for it- to push the puritan agenda.
If you truly care about fighting censorship, you should recognize where it actually comes from and fight the source.
I think the problem you have is they are clearly supporting one side or other which is accurate but I think they have censorship fear. There is no reason why they can't be called pornographic and lose access to payment systems.
I think there is credibility in saying that hiding behind the banner of stopping abuse as thin veneer of enforcing political or religious ideology. An argument is often made in the same vein for outlawing encryption. Clearly we must be against crime so we need to destroy encryption and if you don't destroy encryption you like crime. This type of argumentation is pretty similar to targeting distributors rather than content directly. Its definitely more effective but it seems like you just want to enforce your ideology rather than anything else.
Maybe you don't feel that argument was made after all it was a little bit all over the place but I saw it and there were a lot of links to organizations and achieve links and bills for you to continue research from. I am trying to balance here though because i see both yours's and the others perspective
Somebody has no appreciation for literature and writing. Philistine. Do you shake your fist at The New Yorker and The Atlantic because they don't get to the point fast enough for your poor code-addled engineer brain?
Cryptocurrencies are sufficiently diverse and popular in this day and age that this should be a non-issue at this time. So many sites accept them already. I even advise using Monero to fully shield the user.
Diverse, yes - but I wouldn't call it popular as a means of making regular financial transaction.
I would certainly only use it as last resort. Too slow, too cumbersome, most of the benefits being overstated or misunderstood. Even in this case, while you certainly can't block the transaction from going through, the site still needs a payment provider to manage transactions which someone might pressure into not working with adult sites.
The alternative is writing their own payment solution entirely to avoid having to work with anyone, but that's an entirely different rat's nest with regulatory complications.
They're still miserable from a UX perspective and for those of us in KYC countries? It can be very burdensome to verify ourselves and actually exchange real money for them.
Buying litecoin and sending it to someone else was a huge pain in my butt to put it mildly.
Furries making their own 00s-themed site website for chat/art/games powered by crypto would be the greatest thing. Small bonus if the website is open-source and provides data dumps, big bonus if it’s federated.
It would alleviate censorship concerns. It sounds practical, my understanding is that furries are statistically much more tech-savvy and willing to spend money and effort. Copyright and CSAM are issues that must be addressed, but hopefully small enough to be manageable, since it’s primarily furries (not realistic, not in aggressively copyrighted pop culture). And it seems like something many people would like, at least the nostalgic people in online spaces like HN. If it gets popular enough to extend to other niches I would join and help fund.
DLSite (the closest thing to a Japanese itch.io) was one of the first targets of this push over a year ago. I'm pretty sure they just stopped accepting Visa/Mastercard on the site but set up a weird 'third party' where you could buy 'DLSite points' with your credit card.
They did back in the 2000s, I used to buy stuff online with Edy. The problem was you had to buy a FeliCa USB adapter, or have a Sony Vaio or similar laptop that had a reader embedded. It never took off and people stopped offering it.
But even more IRL merchants are now accepting 交通系 IC cards as payment methods. I can use mine at the arcade and never worry about coins.
Honestly, I think focusing on what is being censored is missing the point. Today it's adult content, which is an easy target. But what about tomorrow? What if they decide your political donation is 'problematic', or the indie news site you subscribe to is 'misinformation'? We're handing a kill switch for legal commerce to a handful of unelected execs.
> Today it's adult content, which is an easy target.
Not even that easy of a target, because the crazy people in America want to call anything that acknowledges the existence of LGBTQ people or how they exist within greater society is "adult content" or "pornographic."
100% agreed and I think many people are missing the forest from the trees on this issue.
This stuff always starts off with "think of the children" and then evolves into something else entirely.
How about when we have a game spewing rhetoric about religion being bad (the Assassin's Creed franchise being one example) - should card processors force steam to remove those too, to continue using their payments infrastructure?
Combine required/trendy KYC.
With trendy reputation score and similar attributes for purchase/sale/trade.
With machine agent automated decision flows.
With pushing everything into digital.
With near mono/duo/tri-opolization of goods/services.
Then, a near invisible control grid is almost complete.
> I’ve seen some comments floating around that suggest that the fix is to jettison Visa and MasterCard in favor of cryptocurrency.
> I think this is fundamentally a losing strategy: It moves the burden and risk of being unbanked onto the developers and publishers rather than the platforms. Yes, it decentralizes (to a point), but each node has less resources to defend themselves in court when the oppressors change their tactics again. I believe it’s better to stand together than fragment.
Honestly I think Visa/MC appreciate being nudged into this situation. Normalization of them as financial gatekeepers gives them a big favor that they can grant to governments by cutting the tap off to orgs/companies/people whenever. Its a direction that is convenient for them and a lot of the heat for the move gets passed on to some Australian non-profit instead of them. Hard for me to square their behavior unless they are quietly quite receptive.
why not bitcoin? because: "Repeat after me: all technical problems of sufficient scope or impact are actually political problems first" - Eleanor Saitta
I don’t care for furries myself but I think so long as it’s legal and doesn’t harm anyone. I don’t care what an adult chooses to spend their own money on.
And neither should payment processors. They have no business being gatekeepers for anyone’s money. My money isn’t and shouldn’t be subject to their shareholders interests.
just use bitcoin. there is literally no downside. it is easier to implement than most payment providers that i know. moreover there are payment provider that work with bitcoin so you do not have to.
Horrible fees, long waiting times, forced centralized exchanges. That’s after they claimed cheap, fast, decentralized. Fk that scam, I’ll stay with regular money.
I think a lot of people are missing the point. Most likely what's happening here is that the issuers (not Visa/MC) see a large number of chargebacks/fraud for adult content sites and have determined that it's much easier if they don't accept transactions from these sites.
No, what's happening is that people like NCOSE and Collective Shout are putting pressure on the processors. They've loudly bragged about it. It's not the first time they've done it. And they've been known to enlist government actors to help with the pressure ("Operation Choke Point").
Every time this issue comes up, a bunch of people crawl out of the woodwork trying to prove how "wise" they are by mouthing this idea about chargebacks. And the processors are happy to keep their heads down and not dispute it, or even encourage it, since they really want the whole issue to just go away.
Chargebacks are not the issue here, and if you haven't paid any attention at all to what's actually going on, you're best advised not to make yourself look like a fool by talking about what you guess might "most likely" be happening.
Most likely what's happening here is that the issuers (not Visa/MC) see a large number of chargebacks/fraud for adult content sites and have determined that it's much easier if they don't accept transactions from these sites.
That's definitely what I would claim if I wanted to take down content I didn't want. Who is going to prove them wrong?
Sure but isn’t allowing those company to pick and choose what industries they service a dangerous precedent? They’ve monopolized the consumer credit markets and as such, can use that weight to dictate competition in consumer markets.
If this were actually true, then they would have gone after ALL NSFW games on Steam - but they very deliberately targeted specific genres that they didn't like.
You think chargebacks are disproportionately higher on NSFW games revolving around non-consensual themes versus other fetishes? Give me a break.
Payment processors have ways of passing some of the chargeback risks onto the stores, and it's not like Steam itself is chargeback central. If you just want free games, pirating them is extremely easy, and trying to abuse chargebacks gets you banned.
Why does "morality" enforcement always devolve into obsession with what other people do with their genitals among consenting parties and completely ignore empathy, welfare of humankind and others, or any of the inconvenient and possibly expensive "Treating people beneath you nicely?". We never see such "moralists" punishing those who do such profoundly immoral things like actively forbidding helping the homeless.
I had never heard the term "jawboning" before. According to Merriam-Webster it is "the use of public appeals (as by a president) to influence the actions especially of business and labor leaders" or "broadly : the use of spoken persuasion".
Regarding TFA: I don't think trading freedoms of one group (the platform users) for those of another (the platform operators) is a good solution. Visa/Mastercard should have the right to refuse service. The solution being explored in the EU makes more sense: facilitate competition so users have more choice of platforms. Or another alternative: can we reduce the power of small but vocal minorities to prevent them from "jawboning" companies?
> Visa/Mastercard should have the right to refuse service.
Given their market dominance, they should absolutely not have any right to refuse service. At that level of scale, they need to be treated like common carriers, who must handle all communications/transactions.
> Visa/Mastercard should have the right to refuse service
Really? If this was any other small to medium business where there were potentially tens, hundreds or even thousands of viable alternate businesses that provide what could be deemed as an equivalent service I might agree, but a global payments duopoly is essentially public infrastructure and should not be able to discriminate based on protected characteristics or personal subjective moral compass.
> Visa/Mastercard should have the right to refuse service.
No. A company beyond certain size functions more akin to a government body providing public service, and should be treated as such. Imagine the only ISP in the area refusing to provide service because fuck you that's why. Or Microsoft banning you from using Windows ever again. Think about it for a second - if Apple made a policy "iPhones cannot be sold to black people" would you say that a private company has all the rights to refuse service?
Clarifying I find the furry art weird, and not pornographic. (Weird is fine btw, normal is the worse insult imho)
I think the biggest issue is the damage that the word "Censorship" has taken in the last few years. If I ran a payment processor, the first thing I would do is try to be as neutral as my moral compass allows. The second thing I would do is intentionally stop processing payments on behalf of anyone I was uncomfortable with on a personal level. I dont support a thing, so I wont give material support to a thing. Thats not censorship. Its not censorship when amazon removes a book, or a publisher takes something out of print. If everything is censorship, including freedom of association, nothing is censorship.
I think the best thing that can be done about this problem is to promote and create alternate payment processors. The second best thing is to help these sites accept crypto payments (yes I know the article hung a lantern on that, but still)
While freedom of association is fine on a personal level and maybe for small businesses, big corporation that are monopolies or oligopolies shouldn't have this freedom. They should be regulated and forced to serve everyone otherwise they have the power to exclude some people completely from such services with no alternative. Due to their power, their decisions affect people as if they are government decisions, yet we don't have a say on it like we do with the government so it's even worse than government censorship yet some people justify it because they are "private companies" as if that means something.
Analogies like this are misleading, IMO. Like if a theater chooses not to show a certain movie that's obviously not censorship, but if the water company effectively prevents the movie from showing by threatening to cut off the theater's water, colloquially the term would certainly apply. And what happened here seems a lot closer to the latter than the former.
> best thing .. to promote and create alternate payment processors
That would only make sense in your analogy, where the shutoff stemmed from the payment processor owner's moral compass. What actually happened here is that an advocacy group hounded the biggest processors into it, so as other processors get big enough, by symmetry the same thing will repeat.
It seems to me that what's needed here is other advocacy groups willing to hound the processors in the other direction.
Broadly speaking I'd usually agree, except that Visa/Mastercard are a two-company oligopoly at this point, with effectively no meaningful competition. Yes, other payment mechanisms exist, but consider how much it limits the viability of an online business to not accept credit cards.
This is fair, as long as you're a small operation, and those you didn't like can go shop elsewhere. Visa + MasterCard are a duopoly controlling the overwhelming majority of the market, and if they ban a seller, there's little else the seller can switch to.
I think a processor like Visa could benefit a lot from the status similar to the "common carrier". Like a telephone network must offer service to anyone, but cannot be held liable for the content of the communication (even if criminals are using it), Visa could accept the requirement to pass payments to any counterparty in exchange for dropping the KYC requirements. Let banks and merchants care about that.
I don't think that the US or EU government would agree to grant such a status though.
If your water company stops delivering water to you because you post furry porn it becomes a problem. The problem is when a company becomes so big that it is a natural monopoly (or effectively part of a cartel), while basically being necessary infrastructure to operate in a modern society.
These payment networks fit that description, and should either be broken apart so that you get the necessary competition, or be regulated so that they have to provide service for legal goods and services in a given jurisdiction.
This is a mis-definition of censorship, similar to what happens to 'propaganda', where you're only considering the censorship that you don't like to be censorship.
whatamidoingyo|7 months ago
According to their own documentation, dating sites are indeed allowed, so long as there's no adult content. The site I built didn't allow adult content. I argued my case, provided the TOS as well as showed that I had features built into the site to prevent that sort of stuff. Still banned. The next step was to go for CCBill, etc. But they all charge a ~$2,000 setup fee. Not happening.
It had so many features built into it, and was by far my favorite project. Sadly, I just unpublished it and it will probably forever sit in my project folder unused.
cedws|7 months ago
jfyi|7 months ago
hellooooooo|7 months ago
unstatusthequo|7 months ago
xfeeefeee|7 months ago
jacknews|7 months ago
tylerflick|7 months ago
jjcob|7 months ago
I talked to a social worker who works with sex workers, and apparently a major problem they have is that local banks refuse them as customers.
Which is ridiculous. Why should a sex worker not be able to open a bank account?
Henchman21|7 months ago
First day in the USA?
And for those that need it: */s*
VegaKH|7 months ago
They start by defending their use of furry art and railing against potential backlash from HN. Then spend a lot of words talking about how Collective Shout isn't anti-LGBTQ, but could potentially become anti-LGBTQ, but even if it's not anti-LGBTQ it's bad because it's anti-abortion. None of this is actually pertinent to the argument.
Then they talk about alternatives to Visa /Mastercard, such as crypto, WERO, FedNOW, petitions, blah blah blah. Next we move on to some good-old-fashioned self promotion, talking about how they helped save some library from the evil right wing politicians.
And the article ends without even making one coherent argument, which should be this: two American companies should not be able to dictate the moral standards of censorship for the world. They have too much power and too little oversight. Let's start with that.
WorldMaker|7 months ago
To be fair, it's more than just two companies (and not all of them are US based). It's an ecosystem of companies with two major choke points.
Groups like Collective Shout work because Visa and MasterCard have deeply conservative Terms & Conditions and you can whine to them enough legally that they aren't taking their T&Cs correctly and "must" do a thing.
Visa and MasterCard's T&Cs are heavily conservative not just because they are conservative banking companies, but because they are conservative banking middlemen. A lot of their T&Cs also reflect all the Merchant Banks that these networks rely on to float the liquidity of the networks. Those Merchant Banks want a minimal risk on their high volume of investments in micro-loans. They express that minimal risk desire in strict, conservative T&Cs.
(It's a fun hypocrisy of the US-based Merchant Banks especially to want such minimal risk given they have the ability to use Federal Reserve 0% loans to back their portfolio of payment network loans. They have almost nothing but upside and surprisingly minimal risk naturally from that. But these are business-to-business banks that make their money the lowest risk ways.)
Visa and MasterCard get squeezed at both ends with what the Merchant Banks want and what these groups like Collective Shout want and become the easy chokepoint to attack. If the Merchant Banks backed off some Visa and MasterCard could potentially loosen their T&Cs.
Unfortunately as business-to-business banks, most of the biggest Merchant Banks (which often don't have recognizable consumer brands), several of which are not US-based, have very little interest in hearing from us and I don't see an easy strategy to encourage them to take more risks in the same way that a vocal minority team can encourage Visa and MasterCard to take fewer risks because their T&Cs already say so.
I can still blame Visa and MasterCard for being cowards on these and related subjects and not pushing back against loud complainers and highly conservative Merchant Banks, while also respecting that their position on some of this is between a rock and a hard place, as much "just a middleman" as a controlling character in what is happening.
thrance|7 months ago
You can't understand anything about the situation without replacing it in the context of the far right reactionary wave hitting our societies. Similarly, simply preventing these two companies of their power would be a temporary solution at best. There is a political will -and enough support for it- to push the puritan agenda.
If you truly care about fighting censorship, you should recognize where it actually comes from and fight the source.
xphos|7 months ago
I think there is credibility in saying that hiding behind the banner of stopping abuse as thin veneer of enforcing political or religious ideology. An argument is often made in the same vein for outlawing encryption. Clearly we must be against crime so we need to destroy encryption and if you don't destroy encryption you like crime. This type of argumentation is pretty similar to targeting distributors rather than content directly. Its definitely more effective but it seems like you just want to enforce your ideology rather than anything else.
Maybe you don't feel that argument was made after all it was a little bit all over the place but I saw it and there were a lot of links to organizations and achieve links and bills for you to continue research from. I am trying to balance here though because i see both yours's and the others perspective
Onavo|7 months ago
Der_Einzige|7 months ago
[deleted]
OutOfHere|7 months ago
arghwhat|7 months ago
I would certainly only use it as last resort. Too slow, too cumbersome, most of the benefits being overstated or misunderstood. Even in this case, while you certainly can't block the transaction from going through, the site still needs a payment provider to manage transactions which someone might pressure into not working with adult sites.
The alternative is writing their own payment solution entirely to avoid having to work with anyone, but that's an entirely different rat's nest with regulatory complications.
SkyeCA|7 months ago
Buying litecoin and sending it to someone else was a huge pain in my butt to put it mildly.
armchairhacker|7 months ago
It would alleviate censorship concerns. It sounds practical, my understanding is that furries are statistically much more tech-savvy and willing to spend money and effort. Copyright and CSAM are issues that must be addressed, but hopefully small enough to be manageable, since it’s primarily furries (not realistic, not in aggressively copyrighted pop culture). And it seems like something many people would like, at least the nostalgic people in online spaces like HN. If it gets popular enough to extend to other niches I would join and help fund.
wombat-man|7 months ago
busterarm|7 months ago
_--__--__|7 months ago
ranger_danger|7 months ago
But even more IRL merchants are now accepting 交通系 IC cards as payment methods. I can use mine at the arcade and never worry about coins.
AshamedCaptain|7 months ago
lucyjojo|7 months ago
dedicate|7 months ago
duped|7 months ago
Not even that easy of a target, because the crazy people in America want to call anything that acknowledges the existence of LGBTQ people or how they exist within greater society is "adult content" or "pornographic."
bfg_9k|7 months ago
This stuff always starts off with "think of the children" and then evolves into something else entirely.
How about when we have a game spewing rhetoric about religion being bad (the Assassin's Creed franchise being one example) - should card processors force steam to remove those too, to continue using their payments infrastructure?
throwaway9151|7 months ago
Combine required/trendy KYC. With trendy reputation score and similar attributes for purchase/sale/trade. With machine agent automated decision flows. With pushing everything into digital. With near mono/duo/tri-opolization of goods/services.
Then, a near invisible control grid is almost complete.
But that's the goal on the face of it.
Let's use it for good, all.
trallnag|7 months ago
linotype|7 months ago
altairprime|7 months ago
> I’ve seen some comments floating around that suggest that the fix is to jettison Visa and MasterCard in favor of cryptocurrency.
> I think this is fundamentally a losing strategy: It moves the burden and risk of being unbanked onto the developers and publishers rather than the platforms. Yes, it decentralizes (to a point), but each node has less resources to defend themselves in court when the oppressors change their tactics again. I believe it’s better to stand together than fragment.
CaptainFever|7 months ago
recursivecaveat|7 months ago
xg15|7 months ago
tomhow|7 months ago
gs2gs06|7 months ago
boopmaster|7 months ago
found this useful resource to clap back
pluto_modadic|7 months ago
yiffinhell72525|7 months ago
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draw_down|7 months ago
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throwpoaster|7 months ago
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Jzush|7 months ago
And neither should payment processors. They have no business being gatekeepers for anyone’s money. My money isn’t and shouldn’t be subject to their shareholders interests.
nicman23|7 months ago
justonceokay|7 months ago
Der_Einzige|7 months ago
busterarm|7 months ago
thrance|7 months ago
potbelly83|7 months ago
Hizonner|7 months ago
Every time this issue comes up, a bunch of people crawl out of the woodwork trying to prove how "wise" they are by mouthing this idea about chargebacks. And the processors are happy to keep their heads down and not dispute it, or even encourage it, since they really want the whole issue to just go away.
Chargebacks are not the issue here, and if you haven't paid any attention at all to what's actually going on, you're best advised not to make yourself look like a fool by talking about what you guess might "most likely" be happening.
Goronmon|7 months ago
That's definitely what I would claim if I wanted to take down content I didn't want. Who is going to prove them wrong?
chrisoverzero|7 months ago
iknowSFR|7 months ago
marcosdumay|7 months ago
Besides it not being a valid reason at all, they are not even trying to claim chargeback costs.
vunderba|7 months ago
You think chargebacks are disproportionately higher on NSFW games revolving around non-consensual themes versus other fetishes? Give me a break.
ACCount36|7 months ago
Payment processors have ways of passing some of the chargeback risks onto the stores, and it's not like Steam itself is chargeback central. If you just want free games, pirating them is extremely easy, and trying to abuse chargebacks gets you banned.
throwpoaster|7 months ago
“You can just start your own payment processor.”
bavent|7 months ago
Nasrudith|7 months ago
nicman23|7 months ago
willprice89|7 months ago
Regarding TFA: I don't think trading freedoms of one group (the platform users) for those of another (the platform operators) is a good solution. Visa/Mastercard should have the right to refuse service. The solution being explored in the EU makes more sense: facilitate competition so users have more choice of platforms. Or another alternative: can we reduce the power of small but vocal minorities to prevent them from "jawboning" companies?
jjav|7 months ago
Given their market dominance, they should absolutely not have any right to refuse service. At that level of scale, they need to be treated like common carriers, who must handle all communications/transactions.
cwillu|7 months ago
sunrunner|7 months ago
Really? If this was any other small to medium business where there were potentially tens, hundreds or even thousands of viable alternate businesses that provide what could be deemed as an equivalent service I might agree, but a global payments duopoly is essentially public infrastructure and should not be able to discriminate based on protected characteristics or personal subjective moral compass.
anal_reactor|7 months ago
No. A company beyond certain size functions more akin to a government body providing public service, and should be treated as such. Imagine the only ISP in the area refusing to provide service because fuck you that's why. Or Microsoft banning you from using Windows ever again. Think about it for a second - if Apple made a policy "iPhones cannot be sold to black people" would you say that a private company has all the rights to refuse service?
protocolture|7 months ago
I think the biggest issue is the damage that the word "Censorship" has taken in the last few years. If I ran a payment processor, the first thing I would do is try to be as neutral as my moral compass allows. The second thing I would do is intentionally stop processing payments on behalf of anyone I was uncomfortable with on a personal level. I dont support a thing, so I wont give material support to a thing. Thats not censorship. Its not censorship when amazon removes a book, or a publisher takes something out of print. If everything is censorship, including freedom of association, nothing is censorship.
I think the best thing that can be done about this problem is to promote and create alternate payment processors. The second best thing is to help these sites accept crypto payments (yes I know the article hung a lantern on that, but still)
cmitsakis|7 months ago
fenomas|7 months ago
Analogies like this are misleading, IMO. Like if a theater chooses not to show a certain movie that's obviously not censorship, but if the water company effectively prevents the movie from showing by threatening to cut off the theater's water, colloquially the term would certainly apply. And what happened here seems a lot closer to the latter than the former.
> best thing .. to promote and create alternate payment processors
That would only make sense in your analogy, where the shutoff stemmed from the payment processor owner's moral compass. What actually happened here is that an advocacy group hounded the biggest processors into it, so as other processors get big enough, by symmetry the same thing will repeat.
It seems to me that what's needed here is other advocacy groups willing to hound the processors in the other direction.
JoshTriplett|7 months ago
bluefirebrand|7 months ago
Corporations do not have a "personal level"
nine_k|7 months ago
I think a processor like Visa could benefit a lot from the status similar to the "common carrier". Like a telephone network must offer service to anyone, but cannot be held liable for the content of the communication (even if criminals are using it), Visa could accept the requirement to pass payments to any counterparty in exchange for dropping the KYC requirements. Let banks and merchants care about that.
I don't think that the US or EU government would agree to grant such a status though.
hnuser123456|7 months ago
_Algernon_|7 months ago
These payment networks fit that description, and should either be broken apart so that you get the necessary competition, or be regulated so that they have to provide service for legal goods and services in a given jurisdiction.
windward|7 months ago