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.
The real solution IMO is even more unpopular: nationalize them. If it's a public service it should be handled by the public sector, such that the entirety of the constitution applies. We might even consider funding it not with payment fees, but tax dollars. Every American has a desire to have reliable instant transactions. So they should all pay.
Effectively, they already are - the 2-3% tax on card processors is a tax. If we nationalize it, we can even lower it, since we'd not longer be burdened by the pursuit of profit.
We collectively agreed long ago that monopolies do not get to enjoy the same freedoms that other companies do.
I think that's generally only the case for natural monopolies, such as power infrastructure, where breaking them up isn't really a feasible solution (ie we don't want 20 different power lines running to each house). I don't think payment processing meets that standard, we could easily break them up and re-introduce competition into the market.
I have IRL facepalmed reading this. This comment gave me the equivalent exposure to 10 hours on X/Twitter. Mate, the reason you now have clean air, safe to eat food and drinking water is BECAUSE OF government compelling private behavior.
With your logic we should have just waited for free market competition to kick in for Cocal-Cola and McDonalds to decide on their own to stop putting arsenic into our food or for Ford and GM to produce engines with lower emissions.
The reason we have government compelling private behavior is that corporate interests are more likely and more easily to collude to fuck over the consumer together for profit, than consumers can do the same in order to intact desired change on the free market.
> With your logic we should have just waited for free market competition to kick in Cocal cola and McDonalds to deiced on their own to stop putting arsenic into our food.
I don't think that's a fair comparison. No one is dying here. I do think the government should step into this market and perform major intervention by breaking up the big two companies into many little ones who can compete. After that, some payment processors may choose to support these business models despite the hit to their stock price (or whatever Visa's dumb argument is for not allowing these games).
I don't know man, jumping into a conversation like this is a great way to get people to NOT listen. I agree with your following point and would add I find these matters more complicated. For example, you wouldn't be typing a comment on this site without the kind of corporate freedom that raised the standard of living for the entire planet resulting in a shared technological advancement. Seems this is always a trade off, how much freedom are you willing to give up for centralized fascist governmental control?
Is this issue always controversial?
Is it controversial that companies aren't allowed to refuse service based on gender or race (in the US at least)?
Those are legal categories known as "protected classes," and yeah, it was and is pretty controversial[1]. I think you'd have a hard time getting purchasers of porn games declared a protected class.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964 ; further reading, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_group
