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Visa and MasterCard Are Trying to Dictate What You Can Watch on Pornhub
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 6y agoFuture news: Visa and MasterCard no longer processing donations to the EFF. I think that this drama is good for everyone except for payment processors. PornHub is forced to self-police more, payment processors are spotlighted for having too much power, and crypto-currencies show their value.
- tssva 6y agoI think the drama has virtually no effect on payment processors nor should it. Unless they are choosing not to do business with someone based upon them being a member of a protected class, they should be free to choose whether or not to engage in business with another entity. If anything this incident highlights that there is now an alternative to the traditional payment processors, cryptocurrency, so the power of the payment processors has actually diminished over time without any government interference. Who comes out of this poorly in my eyes is the EFF which has spent the last 2-3 years wandering so far from their original path that I have stopped what used to be a regular recurring donation to them.
- monoideism 6y agoEFF have indeed diverged from their original mission, which was fundamentally techno-libertarian. The EFF's changes are an excellent demonstrations of Conquest's Second Law of Politics, "any organization not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing will sooner or later become left-wing".
- spoopyskelly 6y agoEFF jumped on this only because "marginalized voices" are getting impacted in their view, not literally everyone that consumes porn. Instead of thinking of the children they think of the sex workers.
- isbjorn16 6y agoThat's okay, you spurred me to donate.
- jjeaff 6y agoI would agree, except if there is any business in america with near monopolist power, it would be visa, amex, mastercard. I disagree with people arguing that companies like Cloudflare should not be allowed to choose their customers. Because there are countless other similar services that can for the most part, do what Cloudflare does. But the 3 big payment processors are an oligopoly and you effectively cannot do business without them. Crypto is a joke when it comes to relative adoption. There are no other options if you plan to run a business today.
- wang_li 6y agoIf Facebook, Google, and Twitter decide you can’t use their platforms to reach your audience, you’re S.O.L. If you can’t take cards, you can at least take cash or check. And pornhub could set up a site selling bitcoin then add a pointer to their premium payment page referring folks to Bob’s Bitcoin Emporium.
- sterlind 6y agoHow long will people be able to keep buying Bitcoin though? There's a lot of hoops already. For instance, Cash App (at least recently) required you to upload a photo ID in order to enable transfers. They make it easy to invest in, but hard to use as a currency. I can imagine the US, at least, moving towards a future where Bitcoin is allowed as a financial instrument, but transferring to a wallet you control requires background checks and waiting periods like firearms. Either due to pressure from governments, credit card processors, or both.
- Mirioron 6y agoYou assume that Visa and MasterCard will just stop there. What if they go after businesses willing to do business with you? They see that blocking you from monetization doesn't work, so they block companies that sell you services from monetization if they continue to sell to you. Or they'll accuse you of money laundering when you switch to bitcoin.
- bawolff 6y agoIts really hard to imagine a website that takes cash or cheque. I suppose its possible. At this point pornhub is big enough, that fb, google and twitter all banning it might honestly be less of a threat to them than their payment processors pulling support. Convincing users to type a dns name into the address bar of a very famous website seems easier than convincing the users to mail a cheque (esp. Internationally where people dont use cheques) or pay bitcoin
- coldtea 6y ago>they should be free to choose whether or not to engage in business with another entity So, if the puritans and the advertisers in the US are against e.g. BDSM or feet fetisism, or whatever, people all around the world should just bend over and take it (pun intended) because the two monopolies in payment processing decided to make businesses offering them unviable? Fuck this (pun intended). Payment processing should be like ISPs: neutral. If something is illegal, they sure can take it out. Anything else, it's not their place, and it's even less the advertisers place to exert undue influence. Payment neutrality is just as important, and as required as net neutrality.
- billylindeman 6y agoVisa/Mastercard should not have this kind of power :\ They've become a SPOF for our supposedly free markets. I hope in response to this more companies adopt cryptocurrencies and help make visa/mastercard obsolete.
- LatteLazy 6y agoI can still use visa/mastercard to buy a gun or booze or cigarettes or fast food for my obese kids though right?
- wang_li 6y agoOnly because of multiple lawsuits and investigations. In 2013 the Obama DOJ kicked ofF Operation Choke Point to deny banking services to businesses that sold guns and ammo as well as a fair number of other types of business.
- madengr 6y agoWell one of them refuses to be used for gun purchases.
- ojnabieoot 6y agoLol no you can’t! I mean except for fast food but it is ridiculous to compare that to a gun (or sexual exploitation). If visa/MasterCard learned that you were using their card to buy drugs and guns for children, they would terminate your account and contact social services.
- spzb 6y agoNot sure what point EFF are trying to make here. They seem to be suggesting that Visa and Mastercard should provide payment services to anyone who wants them, regardless of whether their activities are legal or not. The card processors didn't withdraw their services because of some puritanical dislike of porn but in response to credible accusations that Pornhub was distributing child and non-consensual porn.
- redis_mlc 6y agoBut ... Every online service that lets you upload a file or send an email can be used with any kind of content. Most illegal content in the US is college students communicating with their friends. We don't censure phone makers, where most of those images are made, do we?
- vfclists 6y agoThere is a lot more porn on Youtube and Facebook, but we never heard of Visa and Mastercard cutting of their credit card services to those 2 giants. Pornhub is an easy target especially for those leftist activists and extortionists who make lots of noises in the "respected" media outlets.
- spzb 6y ago> There is a lot more porn on Youtube and Facebook Seems unlikely. I presume you have a source for that assertion. And anyway, as I said, Visa and Mastercard acted in response to allegations of illegal content not just the fact that there was porn > leftist activists and extortionists who make lots of noises in the "respected" media outlets I think that might just be in your head.
- dragonwriter 6y agoFacebook's own internal reviews identified more items of child abuse content that made their way onto Facebook in the last 3 years than PornHub had total items at its peak, by about 5 times. PornHub isn't under attack because of child porn, or non-consensual porn, it's under attack by people who think porn is inherently bad, and who have found that they don't need to convince people to agree with them as long as they can make it seem like their targets are particular venues for content that is uncontroversially bad, which inevitably involves distortion and ignoring mainstream venues that are much more significant channels for the problem they want to pretend to be fighting.
- justaguy88 6y agoNext week: Pornhub starts it's own payment processing network
- redis_mlc 6y agoI've worked in payments, and it's tough. You would need to be a merchant bank (ODFI) to control ACH payment access, and the US govt. doesn't normally grant banking charters any more, as all the YC batches have learned the hard way. So you'd have to buy an existing bank. But Visa and Mastercard still wouldn't process cc payments.
- solarkraft 6y agoI think this is very close to what they're planning to do. Maybe they'll do something with crypto, but more likely they'll give people some in-house currency (PornBucks) that are spendable on the Mindgeek network. Maybe the big 2 processors would be okay with that again (they seem to still have hope), but it'd also be perfectly doable through wire transfers. Heck, if they have the ambition they could expand from there.
- fpalmans 6y agoWouldn't that just move the problem from dealing with visa and mastercard to dealing with the banking sector? Isn't it challenging for, amongst others, adult entertainers, the legal marijuana industry and bitcoin/crypto currency businesses to maintain stable banking relationships?
- OneGuy123 6y agoIt's funny how the majority of people on hacker news were ignoring and laughing about cancel culture and the more right-wing sites getting deplatformed from other payment processors before. But they they come for you... Shortsightedness.
- parsimo2010 6y agoThis illustrates an issue that I’ve noticed for a while (separate from the discussion about porn websites)- we can either have truly free markets everywhere or we can have strong regulation everywhere, but trying to mix both causes conflicts. In a free market, Pornhub could just use a different payment processor. But because of the strict regulation in the financial market, there are very few payment options, and Visa and Mastercard can abuse their oligopoly. To fix this, we can either lower the bar to entry in the financial markets, which would mean that Visa and Mastercard couldn’t be gatekeepers to payments. Or we could force stronger regulations on the financial market and force them to do business with everyone unless given an offer by the government to stop, and probably cap their rates so they can’t abuse their oligopoly with pricing schemes either. What’s funny is that most people would disagree with one of my proposed solutions and agree with the other, depending on who the affected parties are. Blocking payments to a porn website? A lot of people applaud this on a moral stance. Refusing to make a cake for a gay couple? A lot of those same people condemn this action. But they are very similar actions once you take away the emotional pleas. I guess what I’m trying to get at is that we can’t have one solution on day one and then switch to another solution on day two. Trying a mix is how we created these problems. I could expand but I think I’ll leave it here before I get to political. Edit: I guess I should acknowledge that a fully regulated market is inefficient and slow, and that’s part of the reason communism/socialism ended in the collapse of the USSR. A fully deregulated financial market would probably mean some shady payment processors would pop up and take advantage of people. But what we have right now allows a small group of unelected people to make decisions for us by taking advantage of the situation they’ve lobbied for. I guess you have to decide whether you like this status quo or if you want to try an alternative.
- MichaelZuo 6y agoWell the first option is physically impossible, no ‘truly free’ markets can ever exist anywhere, anytime. You can have markets that are almost ‘free’ but never actually ‘truly free’. There are a couple of reasons why though the most fundamental would be entropy generation. There are always frictional losses for even the smallest of transactions, and if all participants have to accommodate for these losses ahead of time, or pay the penalty if not (eventually), then there is in effect path dependency to any possible market behaviour. Really, a global maxima solution of ‘truly free’ anything is unobtainable in the real world. (And even if it was achieved by happenstance, how could we tell it’s the global maxima?) I imagine the actual trade off wouldn’t be the simple one dimensional spectrum either, since the problem space is obviously multi-dimensional, the ideal solution would almost certainly require multi-dimensional optimization.
- ProjectArcturis 6y agoWell, more like Visa and MasterCard are trying to avoid criminal liability for facilitating child porn.
- scott-smith_us 6y ago> ...accused the website of hosting sexual videos of underage and nonconsenting women... So, it sounds like credit card companies' main goal is to not support exploitation of underage and non-consenting women. Pornhub is removing all of their unverified videos because that's the only way both parties can be satisfied that what remains is consenting & legal-age. I think this title is misleading.
- sudeepj 6y agoHmm.. it is like my FileSystem telling me what content I can & cannot store.
- fomine3 6y agoVisa and Mastercard are both in US based, that's another problem out of this case. They censors things in the world by US citizen's ethics.
- herbst 6y agoProstitution payment processing being blocked everywhere because of american ethics is just one example. Even a shop for sex toys has a hard time finding a payment processor these days.
- durnygbur 6y ago> They censors things in the world by US citizen's ethics. They censor things by the landscape created by litigative US citizens who have money. Now why should any EU citizen have anything in common with this?
- Bakary 6y agoMost of the porn is produced according to US sensibilities anyway
- durnygbur 6y agoBeing based in EU and having nothing in common with US, my only option for debit and credit cards are VISA and MasterCard. I'm really tired that they trade my transaction data. I don't think they offer cashback in any of the EU countries - it would make the consumers think why they're receiving money for conducting transactions.
- throwaway777754 6y agoVisa and MasterCard are private companies so they’re not bound by freedom of speech laws. If PornHub doesn’t like it, they can simply start their own credit card processing company. I applaud Visa and MasterCard for shutting down the extremist content hosted by Pornhub (including rape, child rape, degradation of women, incest, and more). They are perpetuating and profiting from human trafficking and sex slavery. If that’s not hate speech, I don’t know what is, and it should be shut down, permanently.
- bitwize 6y ago> If PornHub doesn’t like it, they can simply start their own credit card processing company. 1) Except Federal regulations make it extremely difficult, if not actually impossible, to "simply" do this. 2) If they did, imagine the thinkpieces on Medium, Aeon, Engadget, etc. about how PornHub is setting up a financial darknet for child molesters and the alt-right. There would then be increasing pressure on banks to cut them off. What good is a payment processor, Mr. Anderson... if you are unable to open a bank account? > If that’s not hate speech, I don’t know what is, and it should be shut down, permanently. Except mere hate speech is still legal in the USA; CSEM is not. Howler detected; is this a parody post?
- aksss 6y agoYou said “Dictate”..
- Traster 6y agoI think this article misses the real issue. The issue is that for the entire existence of Pornhub it has been breaking laws and acting totally unethically and this has been an enormously successful strategy. It is nuts that Visa and Mastercard are stepping in and preventing PH from doing illegal things- they shouldn't have to, the CEO should be in jail for the way that company has behaved. Instead we've got this economic system where monetizing content theft, revenge porn and pedofilia has been hugely beneficial. No company has been able to exist in that industry and make a decent profit legally because of the existence of PH. That's where we should be asking questions, not Visa getting cold feet about being complicit in those crimes.
- Bakary 6y agoI wish these insights would also be extended to FAANGs in the minds of lawmakers
- pcr0 6y agoTechnically, one can still buy cryptocurrency using a Visa/MC card and then use that to pay for PornHub. They've made it more inconvenient certainly but I don't see why card companies should be forced to directly do business with anyone.