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My point was that freedom of association doesn’t work if you’re the only game in town. In an ideal situation, Visa and MC would decide that their reputation wa

by parsimo2010 6y ago

My point was that freedom of association doesn’t work if you’re the only game in town. In an ideal situation, Visa and MC would decide that their reputation was at risk, cut off PornHub, and then PornHub would switch to a competing payment network. But because of the high bar to entry (regulations which Visa and MC lobbied for after they gained their dominant position), it is almost impossible to start a new credit card company today. All the startups like Stripe and Privacy sit on a different layer from Visa and MC. Cards from your bank are just Visa and MC with different artwork. Nobody has created a new credit card company in decades. We can let Visa and MC have their freedom of association or we can let them have their protected position in the market, but we can’t have both. It’s not working. But because this case is all “somebody think of the children” then people are letting them get away with it. What about the other instances that the EFF linked to where a porn site wasn’t doing anything illegal? Are you going to have any options when it’s your (healthy and legal, but maybe niche) kink under attack? What about when it’s not even porn, but Visa and MC decide that Discord is used to enable piracy, and cuts off payments? Are you going to support these actions when a popular chat app with many legitimate users is the one affected?

Barrin92 6y ago
I do support regardless of the product in question and I don't think the fact that Visa and Mastercard are huge is the primary issue here. There could be 10 payment facilitators rather than two, when the NYT breaks a major abuse scandal about a platform such as Pornhub they would all jump ship. You see this all the time with these industries, there are countless of advertisers, but almost all of them avoid the porn industry, because nobody wants to be associated with it. It's not a market power issue, that's only tangential in this case. People don't want to be commercially associated with scandal plagued porn sites, any business would lose most customers or suppliers if it acted like this, and I think that's fine. IF you think the American people are too harsh on porn sites then you gotta take it up with them. It's comparable to say, Google throwing Alex Jones of YouTube. Yes, Google is huge, but that's not the reason they're doing it, it's because they're anticipating public backlash which is bad for their business. If there were 10 youtubes, 8-9 of them would have thrown him off too. It's way too simplistic to say that a large company is exercising undue market power every time it makes a decision about who to do business with. That's only true if the size is the actual motivation for that decision, not if they're just responding to consumers.

Barrin92 6y ago

I do support regardless of the product in question and I don't think the fact that Visa and Mastercard are huge is the primary issue here. There could be 10 payment facilitators rather than two, when the NYT breaks a major abuse scandal about a platform such as Pornhub they would all jump ship. You see this all the time with these industries, there are countless of advertisers, but almost all of them avoid the porn industry, because nobody wants to be associated with it. It's not a market power issue, that's only tangential in this case. People don't want to be commercially associated with scandal plagued porn sites, any business would lose most customers or suppliers if it acted like this, and I think that's fine. IF you think the American people are too harsh on porn sites then you gotta take it up with them. It's comparable to say, Google throwing Alex Jones of YouTube. Yes, Google is huge, but that's not the reason they're doing it, it's because they're anticipating public backlash which is bad for their business. If there were 10 youtubes, 8-9 of them would have thrown him off too. It's way too simplistic to say that a large company is exercising undue market power every time it makes a decision about who to do business with. That's only true if the size is the actual motivation for that decision, not if they're just responding to consumers.