[protocolture]

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)

[cmitsakis]

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.

[protocolture]

>big corporation that are monopolies or oligopolies

Monopolies and Duopolies suck even with regulation. If you want a state owned payment processor, pursue that goal. But you will end up in the same place, with reactionary leaders using the service to ban things that the voters disagree with, which sometimes will be porn in all likelihood.

>"private companies" as if that means something.

A private company can be competed with. You can legally pay these websites just not via those 2 most popular options. If something is actually censored, the state will use violence to prevent you accessing it. Theres a video kicking around the internet of NSW cops snatching a VHS tape from the hands of people trying to run a small banned film festival. Thats definitionally censorship. I know you want to take the anger people have at censorship, and transfer it away from the government to people you dont like, but its simply not censorship.

> Due to their power, their decisions affect people as if they are government decisions

The inertia of people who wont change their purchasing decisions to avoid those to options is the issue. Not their choice not to process payments.

[eastbound]

What philosophical argument would you make for or against excommunication in the Middle Age?

[goda90]

There's a good reason religious tolerance was an outcome of the Enlightenment.

[pixl97]

That religion and government have no place with each other.

[phyzix5761]

Why do we have this idea that big corporations are these giant scary entities disconnected from real people? Majority shareholders for Visa are the retirement accounts of regular people and retail investors. We want the public to dictate the actions of what other regular people do with their money without taking on any financial risk for those policies.

[ben_w]

Allow me to explain by analogy:

  Why do we have this idea that non-democratic centrally-planned governments are these giant scary entities disconnected from real people? Majority stakeholders for state insurance, state healthcare, state pensions, state police, etc. are regular people. People calling for "democracy" want the public collectively to dictate the actions of what other regular people do with their money etc., but when you ask people in democracies if the electorate should take the *blame* when they pick a stupid government, they always say no and look at you appalled as if you'd suggest eating doggie biscuits.

To put it another way, why should society collectively make our pensions 1% better when the trade-off that entire categories of legal work, that our democracies have decided should remain legal, are made impossible to perform by the choices of a handful of private businesses that are big enough to set rules without being accountable to the democracies they operate within?

[Eddy_Viscosity2]

> Why do we have this idea that big corporations are these giant scary entities disconnected from real people?

Because they are. The corporate structure as well as the internal and external systems in our political/legal/economic systems are designed specifically to make corporations work as economic engines where risk, responsibility, and liability are distributed and diluted to the point it they pretty much evaporate. This means that corporations can do things like commit full on crimes, without any real person going to jail. Why? Because they are disconnected from real people by design.

[RankingMember]

I think this is a core reason behind the amount of public elation seen when the United Healthcare CEO was killed: people were happy to see an example of the piercing of a corporate structure carefully constructed to shield leadership from personal responsibility for its decisions.

[fenomas]

> Its not censorship when amazon removes a book

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.

[DocTomoe]

In a perfect world, Visa/Mastercard would turn around to the advocacy groups and say "Alright, obviously you are not happy with our service level, so we do not force you to be our customers. In fact, we just cancelled all the cards of your members. Have a nice day."

It would even make sense financially, because porn sure brings in more dough in processing fees than Kristian Karen who pays for her Starbucks Latte with plastic.

As long as being unreasonable does carry no risk people will continue to be unreasonable.

[pas]

how would a group hound the processors in the other direction?

also, how are these "puritan" groups doing the hounding? I mean, are they threatening some kind of legal action? based on old (or not so old) obscenity laws?

could the against hounding group do the same? on what legal basis? or is it enough to do the usual "securities fraud" angle?

maybe what matters is how much money the hounding group credibly has to spend on lawyers?

[armada651]

> also, how are these "puritan" groups doing the hounding? I mean, are they threatening some kind of legal action? based on old (or not so old) obscenity laws?

They're not suing them in civil court, they're threatening to use the court of public perception against them. If they allow these payments the activism groups will set up a campaign titled something like "Visa facilitates incest and child abuse!" and "Mastercard allows you to see women getting beaten".

This is a very effective strategy because there's nothing more important to these companies than a squeaky clean brand image. And what they perceive as damaging to their brand image is entirely subjective and just depends on whether an activist group can spin it in a way that looks bad for them.

[fenomas]

Also, it's worth reading the wiki page on the group behind this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melinda_Tankard_Reist#Collecti...

To me it doesn't look like this group is so powerful that they forced the payment processors to do stuff. It looks more like, this group campaigns tirelessly, year in, year out, against all kinds of miscellaneous stuff they dislike, and every so often they get a W somewhere because they're more persistent than groups pushing in the other direction.

[pixl97]

The defender needs to win every battle, the attacker only needs to win one.

[JoshTriplett]

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.

[TZubiri]

There's a gajillion currencies, banking systems, wallets, crypto, amex.

Widen your category definition and you'll see it.

[JoshTriplett]

I say again:

> consider how much it limits the viability of an online business to not accept credit cards

For the vast majority of online businesses, accepting exclusively crypto, or exclusively bank payments, would result in much less business. Orders of magnitude less business. They are not viable alternatives for the vast majority of purposes.

[cesarb]

> For the vast majority of online businesses, accepting exclusively crypto, or exclusively bank payments, would result in much less business. Orders of magnitude less business.

I would add a qualifier to your statement: for the vast majority of global online businesses. An online business serving a single country could make use of country-specific payment systems, which are often very popular. If a Brazil-only online business accepted only payments through PIX and boleto bancário, that could result in less business, but not orders of magnitude less business.

[JoshTriplett]

Sure; that was exactly the kind of case that previously led me to edit my comment to add the "for the vast majority" qualifier. Similarly, bank payments are popular in European countries because there are convenient wrappers around them, if you're only selling to certain countries.

Along the same lines, I qualified it as "online businesses" because there are still some brick-and-mortar businesses that require cash. It's still limiting your business, but less so, especially if you're in a context where people expect many businesses to be that way (e.g. a farmer's market).

But for online businesses that aren't country-specific, which I'd argue is the vast majority of online businesses? You accept credit cards or you get a lot less business. (And the next-most-popular option, PayPal, does even more of this kind of thing than Visa and MasterCard do, and much more capriciously.)

[svachalek]

I don't think the debate people are having is about Brazil.

[its-summertime]

And how many are viable alternatives?

[bluefirebrand]

> The second thing I would do is intentionally stop processing payments on behalf of anyone I was uncomfortable with on a personal level

Corporations do not have a "personal level"

[protocolture]

They do lol. They are run by humans.

[nine_k]

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.

[hnuser123456]

It's censorship because literally a censor activist group engaged in a campaign to push these processors to do this.

[_Algernon_]

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.

[windward]

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.