[cm2187]

I don’t care that much about Patreon censoring the right, because there are many alternatives to take payments online. There are none however to visa/mastercard. It’s a cartel, where the choice is not even made by a customer (it is made by your bank who won’t even ask you), and there is no real alternative. I am pro-free markets but when that happens, I am actually in favor of regulations hitting these two hard, rather than going after google.

[r3bl]

> I don’t care that much about Patreon censoring the right, because there are many alternatives to take payments online. There are none however to visa/mastercard.

This is where you're wrong. If a payment processor doesn't like someone, they'll just threaten a platform after platform wherever you pop up. Block whoever we don't like or you won't be able to process payments.

Case in point: Sargon of Akkad. I'm not going to take any stand in this controversy because I don't know the backstory, however as soon as he switched from Patreon to SubscribeStar, PayPal went after SubscribeStar. I'm assuming they've said no when asked to block Sargon, because you can no longer cash out via PayPal. It wasn't Patreon that was after him, it was PayPal.

[cm2187]

Yeah but paypal is just an intermediary. You can use Stripe or pretty much any bank.

If visa/mastercard tells you they will block payments to that website because they don't like your ideas, that's the end of it.