[sunrunner]

> Visa/Mastercard should have the right to refuse service

Really? If this was any other small to medium business where there were potentially tens, hundreds or even thousands of viable alternate businesses that provide what could be deemed as an equivalent service I might agree, but a global payments duopoly is essentially public infrastructure and should not be able to discriminate based on protected characteristics or personal subjective moral compass.

[willprice89]

I agree with your assessment of the current situation. But I think the solution is to break up the duopoly, either by leveling the playing field or creating government-run alternatives, rather than force the duopoly to do certain things.

[brookst]

This is the “instead of providing school lunches, eliminate poverty” argument.

I am fully supportive of fostering competition. But until the market actualky changes, monopilies / duopolies should be regulated to prevent this abuse of power.

Rejecting a simple tactical solution in favor of a future systemic overhaul is classic perfect vs good.

[hx8]

Calling for the creation of a government run alternative isn't arguing against School Lunches. It's the exact opposite.

[charlieyu1]

There is still an alternative, plain paper cash, and is run by the government. Won't trust most governments these days to do it though

[busterarm]

Governments put up infinite hurdles to creating new payment processors. There actually used to be more of them before the industry consolidated. Also Discover just got bought and American Express is getting their ass kicked by the big two.

People have been trying and failing to create new payment processing companies since at least the 90s. The richest men in the world, even (Musk).

Governments prefer the current status quo.

[phyzix5761]

As public infrastructure shouldn't the public take on the burden of funding and operation risk? Or are we saying we should force others to do what we want with their money?

[bfg_9k]

I think you'll find that's already the case. MC/VISA would have an implicit underwriting by the US govt should they ever be in extreme strife. We've already seen this happen before, the UK govt bailed out RBS, largely because of things like being responsible for 1/3 of all transactions that happened in Europe at the time.

Various airlines were also bailed out over the COVID period. So I'd say that it already exists, except the public sees no benefit.

[phyzix5761]

I agree that governments shouldn't provide bailouts without receiving equity for that compensation. The idea that any company is too big to fail undermines the smaller competitors who are making better decisions and have a strategic advantage in surviving economic challenges.

[bfg_9k]

Absolutely. But on the flip side I can also recognise that frankly, governments are terrible at running things. I think a Singapore style model is best - a giant holding company like Temasek that is wholly government funded and owned, but companies owned by the holding company are still beholden to the free market forces, are the best way to go for things like payment processors, airlines, utilities, etc.

[phyzix5761]

As long as the public gets to benefit from the profits these companies make just like any other shareholder. It could be a nice solution to the deficit problem.

[sunrunner]

I guess I was using the phrase to broadly mean a service that's intended to be available for use by the general public and with the service itself providing a means to an end without 'public ownership' being part of that (in the same vein as 'public' transport). Not sure if there's a more appropriate term here.

[phyzix5761]

But, effectively, you want to tell other people what to do with their money without taking on any financial risk for those policies. The majority shareholders for Visa are retirement accounts and retail investors. Why does one segment of the public get to tell another segment of the public what to do with their money without putting any skin in the game?

[sunrunner]

> But, effectively, you want to tell other people what to do with their money without taking on any financial risk for those policies.

For this kind of service (again leaning on a classification as 'public infrastructure') I suppose my answer is yes.

> Why does one segment of the public get to tell another segment of the public what to do with their money without putting any skin in the game?

I'm suggesting that regulation prevents them from _disallowing_ access to payments services for things that are not explicitly illegal. In this case I don't see 'Telling X what to do' and 'Telling X that they're NOT allowed to refuse to provide service in these cases' as the same thing, even though they're both essentially 'Mandating that X operate in a certain way'. The difference here being that refusal of service, while still being a choice about how to run, is explicitly a blocking choice for others in certain situations, and not just a choice to, for example, create a new credit product for the market.

> Why does one segment of the public get to tell another segment of the public what to do with their money without putting any skin in the game?

Is this not also just Collective Shout themselves pressuring the payment processors into refusing transactions from a third party for content that they themselves deem inappropriate?

> The majority shareholders for Visa are retirement accounts and retail investors

Is Visa not refusing a legitimate transaction (non-fraudulent, no rollback or refund) going to hurt these investors when part of their investment income comes from usage fees? And if an investor that has concerns about _how_ their investment makes money is that not now a different issue?

Edit: Added last point about shareholders.

[rachofsunshine]

Because we know that not doing so leads to bad outcomes, and in some cases, to outright catastrophe.

A person who was not invested in subprime mortgages in 2006 had no skin in the game - yet the fact that others did invest in subprime mortgages created instabilities that threatened them. Virtually everyone agrees, in retrospect, that something should have been done then. But it wasn't, with precisely the justification you're articulating here. The problem is that that person did in fact have skin in the game, because the outcome had important ramifications for their life even if those ramifications were not in the form of direct financial losses.

Now, sure, your ability to buy furry porn is very different from sparking a global recession. But you're implicitly articulating a very strong claim here, that you cannot regulate economic activity to which you are not a party. That has a clear counterexample well within the memories of most people reading this thread.

------

I think we agree that private individuals should be able to purchase legal content from the people who produce it. Without action here, that will become either impossible or very difficult, to the point of having a major chilling effect. I think we also agree that businesses should generally have the right to conduct business as they see fit, both because it allows the exploration of new ideas and because market economics is a powerful force for increasing productivity.

To me, that says that there is a tension between two irreconcilable rights. On one side, we have the rights of businesses to act in their economic best interest (which is important!). On the other side, we have the rights of individuals to (actually and with reasonable effort) engage in lawful private microeconomic activity. And when you encounter such a tension, you need to consider:

- How important the rights are

- How much of one you get by sacrificing some of the other

In this case, I would consider the ability of individuals to conduct microeconomic activity more important than the ability of corporations to conduct what is effectively a PR campaign (since no one seems to be of the opinion that payment processors are actually taking a loss on people buying porn, they're just caving to political pressure). And I think the restriction of payment processors here is small compared to the potential restriction on private individuals. So to me, the trade-off has a clear winner.

If you disagree with this chain of reasoning, can you explain where?

[phyzix5761]

I'm not seeing where private citizens are prevented from engaging in lawful private microeconomic activity when a privately owned payment processor doesn't want to engage in certain transactions. The private citizen has the option to pay cash, bitcoin, trade goods or services, etc. Are these options as convenient in this day and age as tapping a credit card? No, but that doesn't mean everyone is entitled to convenience in every situation.

Also, how do you reconcile the fact that many US citizens, for religious or other reasons, can't in good conscience endorse certain economic exchanges? A government that is supposed to represent the needs of all citizens would fail if it engaged in facilitating transactions that some portion of its population found immoral or inappropriate. The public has no say in private, legal, transactions but public enforcement on private entities is a different story; akin to endorsement.

The best we can do is ensure that private citizens have the freedom to engage in legal transactions. But if we start forcing private entities to participate in every legal transaction, we risk setting a precedent that could backfire. Especially when a future administration decides to enforce or block transactions based on political or ideological grounds that conflict with our own values.

[rachofsunshine]

> The private citizen has the option to pay cash, bitcoin, trade goods or services, etc...everyone is[n't] entitled to convenience in every situation.

These options aren't small impositions, they're sufficient added overhead that they dwarf the value of the transaction itself. Bitcoin is the only one of them that seems vaguely realistic to me, but most people don't (and shouldn't) keep their own crypto wallets and don't (and can't) get paid in crypto, so that still requires interaction with third-party processors on two levels. It needs one level to convert fiat to crypto and vice-versa and another to conduct the crypto transaction.

Put another way, the sites that are shutting down this content clearly have substantial financial incentive not to do so. If they thought they had a reasonable alternative, don't you think they'd be using it? And if decent-sized companies with financial incentives cannot find an alternative that seems practicable, what makes you think private individuals are reasonably able to do so?

The broader issue here is one of monopoly, and I guess it might be helpful to zoom out here a bit. Do you think a company with market dominance should be able to engage in (otherwise legal) anticompetitive practices to suppress new companies in their domain? If it were up to you whether to have anti-trust law, would you have it?

If yes: isn't this essentially the same problem? These payment processors have a duopoly and are suppressing alternatives who would take these payments (and might outcompete them in the market on that basis).

If not: are you not concerned about a failure-state where monopolies (a) control critical sectors like finance with an unbreakable grip, (b) intertwine that grip with governments who want to circumvent civil liberties protections to suppress private action, and thus (c) become a de facto shadow government whose behavior - by virtue of being nominally private - isn't subject to constitutional protections or court oversight?

[cesarb]

> The private citizen has the option to pay cash, bitcoin, trade goods or services, etc.

As far as I understand, this isn't an option. I'm Brazilian, so I can easily pay with PIX (and I have never used a credit card with Steam, since PIX is just so much more convenient). But Steam isn't allowed to sell me that content; if they try, even if they restrict it only to those who pay with PIX, my understanding is that these two global payment processors will stop working with them. And since unfortunately most of the world doesn't have yet something similar to PIX, that would mean losing access to a lot of people.