[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.