[instagraham]

That they do, but perhaps the relevant context is that while porn is globally unregulatable, but the one entity that has proven its ability to regulate it (or at least exercise some control over it) have been payment processors like Visa and Mastercard.

FT had a fantastic podcast on the porn industry and the guy behind Mindgeek. Like many stories about multinational entities, you constantly hear the usual refrains - noone can regulate this, the entities keep changing their name and face, there is no accountability, etc. But when Visa and Mastercard threaten to pull their payments, the companies have to listen.

Visa and mastercard are the de facto regulators of porn today, and mostly do so to prevent nonconsentual and extreme fetish stuff from being displayed on mainstream platform.

From what I gathered from the podcast, they're not super keen on being the regulator - but it's a dirty job and somebody has to do it.

[crooked-v]

They don't care about the content, they care about the correlation with customers who have an exceptional rate of chargebacks or other payment avoidance on legitimate purchases.

Cryptocurrency and the like may offer a way out of that problem by allowing direct purchases, but only for companies willing to deal with the support burden of making everything nonrefundable.

[instagraham]

I don't think this is the case - because then we'd see them pull card services for porn websites altogether. This clearly didn't happen, nor was it the intention. They never did anything that would reduce revenue.

Instead, it was more a case of regulation to avoid looking like their services were financing illegal or illicit content.

[HeatrayEnjoyer]

Finance is also an extremely socially conservative industry. There are very recessive attitudes behind closed doors.

[stevenicr]

And also the recessive policies come out in the open in front of the world from people like the ones who created "operation chokepoint", who are perhaps not help us as being super 'socially conservative'.

Your choice of entertainment, information and tools is under attack from all sides when they can get away with it.

[fragmede]

cryptocurrency doesn't offer credit card chargebacks, but why can't you refund customers by sending them the same amount of crypto back from where it came from? I've gotten merchants to give me refunds to a different credit card before.

[fire_lake]

Chargebacks are done by the customer and card agency, not the merchant.

[stevenicr]

There have been some instances where they have been 'about the content'-

The statements about chargebacks and porn were certainly true around 20 years ago, but that became less and less over time.