According to their own documentation, dating sites are indeed allowed, so long as there's no adult content. The site I built didn't allow adult content. I argued my case, provided the TOS as well as showed that I had features built into the site to prevent that sort of stuff. Still banned. The next step was to go for CCBill, etc. But they all charge a ~$2,000 setup fee. Not happening.
It had so many features built into it, and was by far my favorite project. Sadly, I just unpublished it and it will probably forever sit in my project folder unused.
Rules are made on tiktok, twitter, and in the civil court room. It costs lots of money and is almost never worth it.
Which is why only the big dogs get to play these rules. Apple doesnt care if it burns money on a lawsuit that's stupid. That puts YOU at a huge disadvantage.
IMO payment processors are infrastructure, pseudo public. This amounts to free speech restrictions.
- $25.00 - Monthly fee for the merchant account.
- $19.95 - Monthly fee for the Authorize.net payment gateway (API Connection to your website)
- 3.95% - Keyed rate
- $0.25 - per transaction fee
- $1,450 - HIGH-RISK fee
- 10% Rolling reserve
It just seems unfair, as these fees are for "adult content" sites (i.e. nudity, etc.), which is not what I built.
I looked for alternatives, such as PayPal, and Square. They consider dating websites "high-risk", so they would most likely ban the account as well. It just seems like too much of a headache to rewrite the codebase to just have the account banned again.
> Why not crypto?
I thought about this as well. I don't dislike the idea of crypto, but what would users think? It would probably be a huge red flag and look like a scam site.
So, the dating sites that are already in existence are it - they own the market. I'm pretty sure I've read that the execs of Stripe are also invested in Tinder/Bumble*, etc. No wonder it's extremely difficult to compete.
* - not sure if this is actually true.
I talked to a social worker who works with sex workers, and apparently a major problem they have is that local banks refuse them as customers.
Which is ridiculous. Why should a sex worker not be able to open a bank account?
First day in the USA?
And for those that need it: */s*
They start by defending their use of furry art and railing against potential backlash from HN. Then spend a lot of words talking about how Collective Shout isn't anti-LGBTQ, but could potentially become anti-LGBTQ, but even if it's not anti-LGBTQ it's bad because it's anti-abortion. None of this is actually pertinent to the argument.
Then they talk about alternatives to Visa /Mastercard, such as crypto, WERO, FedNOW, petitions, blah blah blah. Next we move on to some good-old-fashioned self promotion, talking about how they helped save some library from the evil right wing politicians.
And the article ends without even making one coherent argument, which should be this: two American companies should not be able to dictate the moral standards of censorship for the world. They have too much power and too little oversight. Let's start with that.
To be fair, it's more than just two companies (and not all of them are US based). It's an ecosystem of companies with two major choke points.
Groups like Collective Shout work because Visa and MasterCard have deeply conservative Terms & Conditions and you can whine to them enough legally that they aren't taking their T&Cs correctly and "must" do a thing.
Visa and MasterCard's T&Cs are heavily conservative not just because they are conservative banking companies, but because they are conservative banking middlemen. A lot of their T&Cs also reflect all the Merchant Banks that these networks rely on to float the liquidity of the networks. Those Merchant Banks want a minimal risk on their high volume of investments in micro-loans. They express that minimal risk desire in strict, conservative T&Cs.
(It's a fun hypocrisy of the US-based Merchant Banks especially to want such minimal risk given they have the ability to use Federal Reserve 0% loans to back their portfolio of payment network loans. They have almost nothing but upside and surprisingly minimal risk naturally from that. But these are business-to-business banks that make their money the lowest risk ways.)
Visa and MasterCard get squeezed at both ends with what the Merchant Banks want and what these groups like Collective Shout want and become the easy chokepoint to attack. If the Merchant Banks backed off some Visa and MasterCard could potentially loosen their T&Cs.
Unfortunately as business-to-business banks, most of the biggest Merchant Banks (which often don't have recognizable consumer brands), several of which are not US-based, have very little interest in hearing from us and I don't see an easy strategy to encourage them to take more risks in the same way that a vocal minority team can encourage Visa and MasterCard to take fewer risks because their T&Cs already say so.
I can still blame Visa and MasterCard for being cowards on these and related subjects and not pushing back against loud complainers and highly conservative Merchant Banks, while also respecting that their position on some of this is between a rock and a hard place, as much "just a middleman" as a controlling character in what is happening.
You can't understand anything about the situation without replacing it in the context of the far right reactionary wave hitting our societies. Similarly, simply preventing these two companies of their power would be a temporary solution at best. There is a political will -and enough support for it- to push the puritan agenda.
If you truly care about fighting censorship, you should recognize where it actually comes from and fight the source.
I think there is credibility in saying that hiding behind the banner of stopping abuse as thin veneer of enforcing political or religious ideology. An argument is often made in the same vein for outlawing encryption. Clearly we must be against crime so we need to destroy encryption and if you don't destroy encryption you like crime. This type of argumentation is pretty similar to targeting distributors rather than content directly. Its definitely more effective but it seems like you just want to enforce your ideology rather than anything else.
Maybe you don't feel that argument was made after all it was a little bit all over the place but I saw it and there were a lot of links to organizations and achieve links and bills for you to continue research from. I am trying to balance here though because i see both yours's and the others perspective
I would certainly only use it as last resort. Too slow, too cumbersome, most of the benefits being overstated or misunderstood. Even in this case, while you certainly can't block the transaction from going through, the site still needs a payment provider to manage transactions which someone might pressure into not working with adult sites.
The alternative is writing their own payment solution entirely to avoid having to work with anyone, but that's an entirely different rat's nest with regulatory complications.
It does not solve the issue discussed here though, as being able to get a money in a intermediate currency from A to B would only be handle a small part of payment processing and operating a business, and does not solve that you're dealing with groups that use any means available to put you out of business due to finding your business immoral according to their beliefs.
Buying litecoin and sending it to someone else was a huge pain in my butt to put it mildly.
I don't want to go over all the issues I had, but to put it simply some were the fault of the service (I had major issues verifying and then reverifying) and some were due to the bank I use and their restrictions.
It would alleviate censorship concerns. It sounds practical, my understanding is that furries are statistically much more tech-savvy and willing to spend money and effort. Copyright and CSAM are issues that must be addressed, but hopefully small enough to be manageable, since it’s primarily furries (not realistic, not in aggressively copyrighted pop culture). And it seems like something many people would like, at least the nostalgic people in online spaces like HN. If it gets popular enough to extend to other niches I would join and help fund.
There are no legal protections, it needs to be fixed at the government level with payment neutrality policies. Steam has hundreds of millions of users and couldn't fight it. Itch had to go nuclear and kill every single NSFW game ever put on their platform, likely affecting millions.
But even more IRL merchants are now accepting 交通系 IC cards as payment methods. I can use mine at the arcade and never worry about coins.
Not even that easy of a target, because the crazy people in America want to call anything that acknowledges the existence of LGBTQ people or how they exist within greater society is "adult content" or "pornographic."
This stuff always starts off with "think of the children" and then evolves into something else entirely.
How about when we have a game spewing rhetoric about religion being bad (the Assassin's Creed franchise being one example) - should card processors force steam to remove those too, to continue using their payments infrastructure?
Combine required/trendy KYC. With trendy reputation score and similar attributes for purchase/sale/trade. With machine agent automated decision flows. With pushing everything into digital. With near mono/duo/tri-opolization of goods/services.
Then, a near invisible control grid is almost complete.
But that's the goal on the face of it.
Let's use it for good, all.
> I’ve seen some comments floating around that suggest that the fix is to jettison Visa and MasterCard in favor of cryptocurrency.
> I think this is fundamentally a losing strategy: It moves the burden and risk of being unbanked onto the developers and publishers rather than the platforms. Yes, it decentralizes (to a point), but each node has less resources to defend themselves in court when the oppressors change their tactics again. I believe it’s better to stand together than fragment.
Seems that the West has just now realized that the payment processors are a threat to adult content and are getting in an uproar. Japanese sites selling adult content have been banned for years at this point, they've moved on to supporting JCB as the only accepted credit card and otherwise accepting site-specific points you buy at convenience stores. I've seen crypto as well by proxy via Bitcash.
Yet this doesn't seem to be the case. Pornhub doesn't say 'payment for interracial porn is available in all countries except Opressionland'.
found this useful resource to clap back
https://phoenix.acinq.co/faq#where-is-my-on-chain-balance
if you want to read about recent bitcoin wallets.
dont forget protection against theft inserts someone else to each transaction
It's estimated that Bitcoin alone uses up as much power as an entire country: https://www.polytechnique-insights.com/en/columns/energy/bit...
And how many people use crypto again?
As for the thievery part: https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com
Every time this issue comes up, a bunch of people crawl out of the woodwork trying to prove how "wise" they are by mouthing this idea about chargebacks. And the processors are happy to keep their heads down and not dispute it, or even encourage it, since they really want the whole issue to just go away.
Chargebacks are not the issue here, and if you haven't paid any attention at all to what's actually going on, you're best advised not to make yourself look like a fool by talking about what you guess might "most likely" be happening.
That's definitely what I would claim if I wanted to take down content I didn't want. Who is going to prove them wrong?
Contrary to popular belief, corporations are composed of humans and do not reliably or mechanically follow only financial incentives. Nor are they always perfect in understanding their actual financial interests. Boycott threats are probably empty, but some people may not want to take the chance, or may have other motivations that cause them to overestimate that risk.
Ideally, you could take your business elsewhere. The problem is providers that handle these industries will expect a premium across all transactions and it would come off badly when customers see that large percentage added to each purchase.
So you have the decision of: your customers pay a premium or you don't carry adult material. If all your business is adult, it's an easy choice. You pay the premium.
This activist organization is pressing them until they are forced to make that decision based on a small amount of their hosted content. This is what I see as likely. Admittedly though, there are not enough details given to say for sure.
Besides it not being a valid reason at all, they are not even trying to claim chargeback costs.
You think chargebacks are disproportionately higher on NSFW games revolving around non-consensual themes versus other fetishes? Give me a break.
Payment processors have ways of passing some of the chargeback risks onto the stores, and it's not like Steam itself is chargeback central. If you just want free games, pirating them is extremely easy, and trying to abuse chargebacks gets you banned.
“You can just start your own payment processor.”
What moral system do you advocate? Laissez-faire?
And what if, tomorrow, the payment processors capitulate with a new morality? They decide women politicians shouldn't be allowed to take donations, for instance?
Sex workers should be better supported and the markets cleansed via strict regulation of the labor and how it's treated, and strong unions.
Payment processors making a shady porn underground using backdoor finances, even more than it already is, will do nothing but make this problem worse.
You advocate for taking ownership over women’s bodies, because clearly you know best apparently?
Lead speaker: Ok, next is medical transition for youth and adults. I'll admit I just don't know much on this topic so I'm reaching out for someone else to take the lead and discuss it.
pause...
Second speaker: Well, I also don't know that much as it's not my field, but I've looked over the proposal and what I can't find are long term studies on the effects. I think because of that we simply don't know...
Third speaker: Hi this is <?> and while this is also not my field I'm an ally and I can tell you what's been presented to us (the AMA governing body) from the APA is what they ave determined as effaceable procedure.
pause...
Lead speaker: So...I suppose we can take a vote to accept the guidelines sent to us from the APA.
pause...
Then they voted to accept it with no more discussion. I'm shortended the exchange, but it is not much more than what I am presenting to you.
Stop and think about that. We use the terms "standards of care" and understand that to mean there is some authoritative, intelligent, well founded judgement from what you and I assume are experts over these topics. That's not what happened by this review board in the AMA. There was no medical discussion, no weighing of prescriptive protocols, no measure of caution, or even of any medical literature regarding the topic. The American Medical Association simply accepted whatever the American Psychological Association told them was the correct medical protocols. What an abject failure.
I also recently watched a clip, a complaint about how women should not be a special case in medicine. This had to do with menopause and the complaint was that women are (to use a colloquial term) gate-kept from hormonal treatments (in this video, testosterone specifically) where as men not only have an established diagnosis of hypogonadism but that through only a 6 month trial, testosterone was approved by the FDA for treatment, but only for men. The complaint was somewhat of a feminist one, an argument for equity. If men could so easily get testosterone for treatment then why can't women, in terms of ""equity". What surprised me was the approval was only based on a 6 month trial. What of the long term exposure? What are the risks? Why approve something with so little data and medical basis? While I empathize with the video's speaker, I saw what I think is a much more problematic issue. When it comes to medicine, there appears to be less scientific truth underlying these decisions.
So, back to your point:
> what other people do with their genitals
While you may perceive some personal or moral assertion, and I acknowledge that is often true, I submit it is also true that others genitals deserve a lot more medical scrutiny than "we don't know, but someone else said this was better". Because, other people's genitals could potentially be my children's genitals and as a parent, or a grandparent, or other family member, who cares more deeply, I expect there is a factual and provably medically necessary response. If that cannot be proven, then there is no rational basis to move forward with medical treatment. The only treatment that makes sense is psychological, given the other supporting data on this topic.
What moral standards do you think should be enforced? Do you think that "models" should have age verification?
Regarding TFA: I don't think trading freedoms of one group (the platform users) for those of another (the platform operators) is a good solution. Visa/Mastercard should have the right to refuse service. The solution being explored in the EU makes more sense: facilitate competition so users have more choice of platforms. Or another alternative: can we reduce the power of small but vocal minorities to prevent them from "jawboning" companies?
Given their market dominance, they should absolutely not have any right to refuse service. At that level of scale, they need to be treated like common carriers, who must handle all communications/transactions.
Hell, I don't even like those games, but it's about the precedent of corporate overreach: if it's all legal, Visa/MasterCard shouldn't be able to decide for me what games I'm allowed to buy, no matter how weird they may be. It's not their job to judge the legal kinks I'm up to in the privacy of my own home.
If the gov doesn't clamp down hard on them, I can only assume the gov is in on this grift of having corporations acting as unofficial censors and freedom of speech moderators for the state under the loophole of "the state didn't mess with your constitutional rights to freedom of expression, but what you did broke the ToS of the payment processors, so now they're free to de-bank you and take away your ability to buy and sell things. Tsk tsk, shouldn't have sent those memes making fun of JD Vance and Trump I guess".
Because it is stating that the government should control private behavior, which bumps into free speech and freedom of association issues. That gets pretty controversial.
There are other solutions to the stated problem:
> Given their market dominance, they should absolutely not have any right to refuse service.
The fix is to address the precondition in that statement: their market dominance. If a single entity is so powerful that it can control entire markets, then the problem is not what it does with that power, but that it has that power in the first place.
The solution to this problem is enforcing our existing anti-trust laws, not passing new laws to compel private behavior. We should not have only one or two entities that control this entire market. That's a sign of a broken market, and that's what must be addressed.
*: Not always the same as Sam Alito's
Likewise, if a casino or betting company (ladbrokes, for example) have customers that win too often, I also think it should be illegal to stop them betting. Fundamentally if you're running a business that is an uneven coin toss (to your favour) and you have customers that are able to make money off you - that's your fault for having a bad business model.
So to answer your question, any size.
Large entrenched companies have leverage small businesses do not, in the same way that a large moon orbits in a way a test particle of infinitesimal mass does not. We already recognize this with respect to monopoly law: you lose your right to do certain things to your competitors precisely when you're large enough that you could reasonably suppress them.
That is essentially what we are talking about here: a duopoly that is actively suppressing competition. My understanding is that the big-two payment processors don't just refuse to process certain payments, they also refuse to work with banks who work with payment processors who will. Assuming that I am correct in that understanding (I might not be, this is not my area of expertise), that would prevent (or at least hinders) someone from just saying "there is a market need here" and forming their own payment processor to fill that need. To me, that seems like a problem for the exact same reasons that monopolies are a problem, and regulating against monopolies is not particularly controversial.
Take for example PG&E, the large gas/electric utility for the northern 2/3rds of California. PG&E is a convicted felon and was sentenced to five years probation, but they remain un-rehabilitated.[0] Under your theory, the "group" with the rights should have been jailed. Instead, a new layer of rights is created out of thin air for the corporation but no meaningful responsibility was ever assigned, unlike individuals.
[0]https://liberationnews.org/pges-rap-sheet-the-criminal-histo...
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.
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.
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.
Various airlines were also bailed out over the COVID period. So I'd say that it already exists, except the public sees no benefit.
No. A company beyond certain size functions more akin to a government body providing public service, and should be treated as such. Imagine the only ISP in the area refusing to provide service because fuck you that's why. Or Microsoft banning you from using Windows ever again. Think about it for a second - if Apple made a policy "iPhones cannot be sold to black people" would you say that a private company has all the rights to refuse service?
What about a small, local ISP? Should they be able to refuse to provide service? At what size can/should the government step in a force companies to do things?
Usually it is agreed that sometimes the infra costs are high, so there cannot be two or more competitors, so they are granted a monopoly in exchange for fulfilling the duty to serve the community.
Ah yes. The invisible magic hand of free market that solves all problems. Except it doesn't. See Uber expanding its service where for a small fee you can avoid dealing with people from undesirable social class. Not exactly the same thing, but still the idea of free market promoting immoral solutions rather than eliminating them.
> At what size can/should the government step in a force companies to do things?
At a size when the society starts depending on your service for daily functioning. When it becomes essential. For example in my country it's an issue that you can't have a business without a bank account but sometimes banks just... refuse to make an account for you and your company won't function.
There was a time when if you served "Negroes" at your soda fountain, you could expect the market to punish you. You'd lose your white customers, who had a lot more money to spend at soda fountains.
It took a whole lot to change over to a world where doing the opposite would lead to market "punishment", and it's not obvious that it wouldn't be damned easy to change back.
Get out of fantasyland and stop worshipping the market. It's not a benevolent god.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Widen your category definition and you'll see it.
> 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.
Corporations do not have a "personal level"
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.
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.