I read a long interview about porn regulation and the star-chamber-esque process whereby visa and mastercard determine what porn is allowed.
Fundamentally, it's a failure of government. The people / companies involved made it really clear that they don't want to be making the rules. But governments haven't, so they're the last ones left standing because someone must determine what is permissible.
Alternatively, the failure of government here is not in their failure to regulate porn but in their failure to regulate Visa and Mastercard properly and thus deprive the payment processors of the opportunity or excuse to run "star-chamber-esque" processes. If non-cash payment rails are now a necessity to run a business, then access to them has to be a right. The payment processors need to be required to allow every business to accept money through their service, for the same fee as any other business is charged. Otherwise payment rails become a de-facto government in that they gain the power to license or prohibit businesses at their caprice.
An argument I tend to hear is risk management, since the adult industries deal with a higher level of fraud. (And shameful refunds, perhaps somewhat understandably.) I think what we are likely reacting to is a legitimate desire to curb this sort of fraud that has evolved, over time, into a moral panic because inconveniently legal vices correlate strongly with that fraud.
The solution cannot be to turn Visa/Mastercard into the morality police. Or any payment processor, really. That is not their job, and they are ill equipped to perform it. Hard agree that access to payment processing should be based on legality of the sale and nothing else. If Visa/Mastercard want to then *measure* a business's overall fraud level as it happens in reality, and then adjust their rates accordingly, they can still do that in a fair manner. In other words, the riskier businesses deal with higher fees or something, but we aren't trying to define whether furry art is somehow porn or some other nonsense in the crossfire. Separate the streams please.
The fraud argument doesn’t hold water. Adult sites pay higher transaction fees, and it would be bizarre for a moral outrage campaign to be aimed at ensuring profitability for private companies.
There's an (iirc) several hundred page long document, available only to merchant banks, detailing in excruciating detail what is allowed. It's not a fraud thing; that's controlled by rates. It's a few banks want to deal with the hassle and the audit requirements to work with porn producers. Because the banks themselves must audit per visa/mastercard's requirements.
Outside of US there are lots of payment processors that do not touch Visa/MC rails. And in US one can use ACH/Zelle. Nothing stops a business from avoiding Visa/MC. But that may reduce their customer pool, due to increased checkout friction.
I guess you mean users would need to manually send money to the company's E-mail/Phone on Zelle right? Then it's up to the merchant to know if the payment has been received.
Cause I don't think there is any kind of way to buy things with Zelle and possibly it would be a TOS issue.
The reason the government has failed here is religion.
Politicians don't want to wade into porn regulation because saying anything other than "we will outright ban it" will be construed as condoning something a large population chunk sees as immoral in all circumstances. And, obviously, an outright ban will upset the other large set of the population who has no moral qualms with porn.
Prostitution has exactly the same problem. Legislation that regulates sex work would be seen as condoning sex work. So instead, it's outright banned, which pushes sex work into a black market which endangers the sex workers and their patrons.
This is why all politicians pretend to be "good Christians" because of the undue power of group(s) of unreasonable people who share similar beliefs of magical thinking.
No, it has a lot to do with religion. In places like Australia and Singapore it's explicitly the religious right that's pushing back on things like gay rights and, yes, porn.
The UK is an oddball. I think "the online safety act" probably originated from more religiously minded people, but the angle was pretty strongly "Think of the children!".
I can definitely say that the UK is pretty non-religious in general.
For the US, though, it's absolutely a religion thing.
>The people / companies involved made it really clear that they don't want to be making the rules
They may not want to make the rules, but they do want the rules. They just don't want the blame. Otherwise they would just, not have the rules around who they'll work with. They would just work with anyone and tell anyone that complains about it to complain to the government, that it's company policy to work with any legal company.
DNS doesn't stop to check if you're okay to have a name. Water company and electric don't refuse to hook up your building because they don't like your business.
They have chosen to become content arbitrators. It was not foist upon them.
We don't need a new law for this. We need to enforce monopoly law.
We just had a demonstration that the two biggest payment processors, together controlling the vast majority of credit card payments, made the same policy change at the same time and in the process completely suppressed many people's businesses.
Treat them as an anti-consumer oligopoly and regulate accordingly.
Maybe in 2029 we can dream of proper trust busting. Probably sooner given current events. But this administration definitely isn't the one to deal with this.
Legislators are more often chipping away common carrier protections on communications with various age and id laws than they are extending common carrier type protections into other areas. The fact that it seems to be happening around the globe makes me think its a coordinated campaign.
it's definitely the result of lobbying; i've experienced it firsthand in a former job. a private dark fiber provider successfully sued the county to prevent expansion of a previously-laid tax-funded municipal fiber project on anticompetitive grounds - he used every trick in the book including lobbying and it worked. and that was just one asshole who didn't want to compete with a small public project. scale that up to ILEC levels with billions in revenue and a revolving door economy and... yeah, i don't see this sort of thing playing out in the peoples' favor any time soon.
The other side of this is the US Government imposes strict requirements around KYC and AML/CTF. Banks have effectively been deputised by the US government to enforce and regulate payments.
A bank can't merely process any transaction that comes its way. You need to know who the parties are, you need to check they aren't on a prohibited list, or in a prohibited country/region. You need to know the purpose of the transaction (to pick up money laundering, or drug/terrorism financing).
Sort of. Any company is free to boycott goods or services it doesn't approve of, however consumers also are free to boycott payment processors by paying with crypto made through ACH or wire transfers, or some other P2P payment method. I really think that credit card processors as predatory loan enablers and oligopolies need to be abolished and replaced by nonprofit credit unions with an electronic payment system that is universal, low cost, and non-discriminatory.
The problem is those other options aren't very common and crypto is pretty useless as a payment method these days due to slow processing and high value fluctuations. Wore transfer is also slow.
It's indeed ridiculous that you need to get a loan just to be able to pay with your own money. At least here in Europe most "credit cards" are actually debit cards. Because we really frown on loans (the best credit rating is for the person who has never even needed to take out a loan)
> ...and crypto is pretty useless as a payment method these days due to slow processing and high value fluctuations.
That is not true. For example using USDT on Polygon is cheap (~0.00 USD fee), fast (a few seconds) and not volatile (because its value is tied to USD). There are other options too, with a slightly different set of tradeoffs.
The main problems of crypto are actually scams and illiteracy of the masses on how to use it. The situation is IMHO improving on both counts, but slowly.
Governments have not promissed they won't go after them for things that are 'near the line' but it isn't clear over. So they must stay far away as they have money.
Ideally, they should be able disallow whatever they want, and give up that business if they don't want it.
What they can't do is create a monopoly situation and continue to be that selective---because there is no other game in town, due to their own actions.
They already have a monopoly situation, so either they must be forced to allow all transactions or they must be forced to allow those that will to use their networks.
Tell ya what. When the postal service runs a card network to compete with them, that charges lower interest, and doesn't monetize by selling transaction sets, then we can talk about CC companies being able to be picky about transactions. Til then? Nah...
While this is ideaologically motivated, there are business reasons to not want to deal with porn. Porn has traditionally had disproportionately high charge-back rates, and it does waver on legal lines in several regions, even for US laws. It's a large cost center that I'm sure the business side won't miss dealing with.
>But governments haven't, so they're the last ones left standing because someone must determine what is permissible.
That is somewhat intentional. Governments haven't, usually because they believe they will lose in court (at least in the US), but they still want restrictions so there is pressure put on payment processors to make the determination. That way, it is a private entity doing the banning and not the government. Or at least that is the appearance.
Governments have made a variety of rules on what acceptable for their individual country. The issue is that some groups don't like that governments (often, governments other than their own) aren't as restrictive as they want.
Like here, the driving group is Australian. Similar groups have been quite successful in getting the Australian government to ban the sale of video games with content they find objectionable, but is very arguably non-pornographic, like Hunter × Hunter: Nen × Impact. To the point that they're far more restrictive than Nintendo.
>Fundamentally, it's a failure of government. The people / companies involved made it really clear that they don't want to be making the rules. But governments haven't, so they're the last ones left standing because someone must determine what is permissible.
Politicians fallacy. Something must be done, this is something, therefore we must do it. It completely glazes over the fact that it's an equally valid course of action to not do something.
My understanding is that for banks, governments regulators don’t want to make rules either, so sometimes they just require banks to have rules that achieve certain goals.
Fundamentally, it's a failure of government. The people / companies involved made it really clear that they don't want to be making the rules. But governments haven't, so they're the last ones left standing because someone must determine what is permissible.