[woodrowbarlow]

you are taking it for granted that corporations should largely be given the same civil rights as private citizens, as decided in citizens united v. FEC, but in my view this was one of the worst decisions to ever come out of the supreme court.

[coldpie]

Hmm, maybe, I haven't thought about it much. The angle I'm taking is, as a private citizen I choose not to do business with entities I think are immoral, such as Amazon and Home Depot and Hobby Lobby and Uline and Tesla. If I were a business owner, I would prefer to continue to not to do business with those entities and I'd be pretty pissed if I was forced to by the government. That does seem to agree with your "same rights as private citizens" framing, yes, though I'm not sure I'd go so far as to defend the CU decision. I dunno. Interesting question, I'd welcome your thoughts on this.

[woodrowbarlow]

if we are to limit the conversation to privately-owned companies, you and i are likely philosophically aligned -- because the business has a person as an owner, and that person has rights. but when a business is publicly-traded, and no longer has a person as a sole owner, i believe many of those rights (which never belonged to the business, and always to the person) should evaporate.

[vunderba]

Regulatory capture and regional monopolies aren't going anyway any time soon. Let's throw out another hypothetical.

How would you feel if the only broadband ISP in your area automatically blocked entire swaths of websites from you on the grounds that the ISP felt they were "immoral" (whatever that means)? And yes I know VPNs exist but that is missing the point.

Payment processors are "pipelines" in the same manner as ISPs should be. If the major ones (VISA/MC) block you from doing business, that's putting someone's entire livelihood at risk.

EDIT: For clarification, I agree that antitrust has never been weaker and that we do need better trust-busting. I just think that it is more realistic to focus on legislation around payment processors MC/VISA atm.

[coldpie]

I agree natural monopolies such as ISPs can justify additional regulation. I'm not convinced payment processors are natural monopolies (see sibling thread, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44683153 ).

> I just think that it is more realistic to focus on legislation around payment processors MC/VISA atm.

I think it would be really, really, really hard to pass legislation requiring payment processors to service all customers, especially if you're using porn video games as the champion of your cause. Even if it did pass, I suspect it'd be pretty quickly declared unconstitutional and personally, I think that would be the correct call.

We already have anti-trust laws. We've used them before. "All" we have to do is enforce them.