7 ms·
This is absolutely ridiculous. What if they decide people can no longer buy dildos or lube or condoms or guns or alcohol or meat on Fridays? There’s no law wi
by l33t2328 5y ago
This is absolutely ridiculous.
What if they decide people can no longer buy dildos or lube or condoms or guns or alcohol or meat on Fridays?
There’s no law with respect to “payment neutrality”??
- emodendroket 5y agoWhy should there be? It seems absurd to MANDATE anyone participate in the sex trade. There are payment processors who specialize in adult content.
- marvin 5y agoAt the mercy of Visa and MasterCard, I would guess. Doesn't OnlyFans work with CCBill, who exclusively work with adult content providers? More info is needed to conclude, but it wouldn't surprise me if their upstream providers made demands.
- bcheung 5y agoI highly doubt they are going through CCBill. They are too expensive at volume. Since they are only charging models 20% I suspect they tried to pretend to not be adult, which they probably weren't in the beginning. But not it is almost all adult and CC processors know that and want their higher cut.
- emodendroket 5y agoThere is this from January, where MasterCard wanted sellers of adult content to have more stringent verification of the age and consent of performers in the wake of the PornHub scandal, which I’ve seen people speculating may be related: https://thehill.com/policy/technology/548279-mastercard-updates-policy-for-adult-content-sellers https://thehill.com/policy/technology/548279-mastercard-upda... These aren’t explicitly linked in the story but it would make sense IMO
- ardit33 5y agomorality is relative.... next stop it is strip clubs, then hooters being banned? Payment processors provide a utility. They should have the right not to process illegal transactions and illegal activities. But as long as the activity is legal, it shouldn't be up to them to police morality. They should be treated like utilities. If we go down this path, the city's water and electric utilities can decide to shut down the new hooters, because it is obscene and against god (according to conservaties), or it uses women and is an oppressor (according to some liberals). Utilities shouldn't be involved in morality policing.
- emodendroket 5y agoThere are a couple practical reasons why they wouldn't want to: high risk of fraud or chargebacks and difficulty keeping on top of content that veers into illegality spring to mind immediately.
- gentleman11 5y agoLike paying for abortions or gay weddings in certain states? Buying cannabis from somebody on the street instead of somebody in a store 6 months later? Promoting unions depending on the decade? Letting “trespassing” black people buy coffee in shops that banned them in the 60s? Making breaking the law impossible is dangerous
- emodendroket 5y agoI'm not 100% sure what you're getting at but most legal dispensaries require you to pay cash.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago> Like paying for abortions or gay weddings in certain states? These do not have the high rates of chargeback that adult content does.
- JohnBooty 5y agoThis is a very legitimate concern -- payment processors could start enforcing that kind of thing based on morality. However, unless something has changed lately, for decades the issue with adult content + online payment processors is not morality related. It's because of the high fraud/chargeback rates associated with online porn transactions. Unless it's SESTA/FOSTA related, but I don't think anything's changed on that front for a while.
- l33t2328 5y agoYou know how US Dollars say “This note is legal tender for all debts” on them? It seems to absurd to allow companies with an oligopoly on most of the transfer of those notes to pick and choose what sectors are appropriate for citizens to interact with financially.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- lallysingh 5y agoThat's not what that means. https://www.quora.com/On-every-US-dollar-bill-the-message-This-note-is-legal-tender-for-all-debts-public-and-private-is-printed-How-is-it-then-legal-for-some-businesses-to-not-accept-cash?share=1 https://www.quora.com/On-every-US-dollar-bill-the-message-Th...
- l33t2328 5y agoThe comment you linked to doesn’t address the point I made. My point was that you can spend your cash wherever you want, in whatever way the seller will accept. My point was not that sellers ought to be forced to accept bags of pennies.
- tylersmith 5y agoThat has nothing at all to do with payment processing.
- thephyber 5y agoThere is no financial neutrality requirement, but perhaps there should be. Also, that quote on the dollar has nothing to do with your argument. You seem to be projecting a layperson’s interpretation of those words instead of the relevant jurisprudence.
- travisjungroth 5y ago> companies with an oligopoly on most of the transfer of those notes This is an important distinction. Credit card payments are not notes. They are not cash. So these companies have very little to do with the transfer of cash. The point of "legal tender" is that if you try to pay off a debt in cash, they can't claim you haven't paid it and take you to court. If you try to pay for your meal in a restaurant with cash and they refuse, you can just walk out and they wouldn't have a legal case (probably. in theory. not legal advice). What's tricky is this has to be a debt, as in past tense. If you try to buy groceries with cash and they refuse, you can walk out but you can't the groceries with you. Participation in the cash market is mandatory on anyone who is owed money. Everything else on top (credit cards, checks) is essentially voluntary. Merchants can take it or leave it, the processors can come or go. If you want to make an argument about the outsized effect that Visa has on the US monetary system, that's totally legitimate. It just has little to do with the concept of "legal tender".
- didgfehfocu 5y agoWhy should it require specialization at all besides that laws pushed by religious conservatives to advance puritan ideals demand it? Don't be a doctor if you aren't willing to help your patient exercise their right to choose and don't be a payment processor if you're not willing to process payments in a neutral fashion. It's rediculous that at a time when equity and #metoo is all the rage that no one is talking about inequity in the law in the form of legal sandbags.
- adrusi 5y agoWe mandate that some companies participate in the sex trade, at least to the extent that payment processors can be considered to be participating. The electrical company is mandated to provide power to Onlyfans' datacenters, so long as they are paying for the service. Also there's basically only four payment processors: Visa, Mastercard, Discover and Amex. None of them specialize in adult business. There are downstream processors along the lines of PayPal and Stripe, and some of them specialize in adult business, but they're entirely beholden to the big four.
- emodendroket 5y agoI think this is different. If the customer is unhappy with the service provided, their dispute has nothing to do with the electrical company, nor are they going to claw back payments to them.
- adrusi 5y agoIf the problem is that customers are contesting payments or other fraud-related issues, the standard remedy is to bump fees, not revoke service.
- hackinthebochs 5y agoWhy should internet providers be mandated to participate in the "sex trade" by allowing immoral bits to flow over their wires?
- ozim 5y agoThat is called democracy and yes there are a lot of things that are not sold. General public agrees that explicit material is bad. Right now we have in Poland shops closed each Sunday - it is annoying for me. Selling alcohol in Norway is heavily restricted and I see more and more restrictions on alcohol sales in Poland. Explicit material is tied a lot to money laundering, there is also a lot of scams tied to it and lots of stolen cards are used to pay for explicit material. It is huge cost for payment providers, all the laws for anti-laundering trump any "payment neutrality". If you want to see naked ladies go to "a place" and risk on your own, pay with cash.
- toomuchtodo 5y agoPayment networks should operate according to laws and regulations, not reputation and public opinion. Would you want your electricity turned off because someone did not like who you were or what you believe? That is a road to tyranny.
- emodendroket 5y agoNo business operates this way.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- kelnos 5y agoGiven that payment processors are an oligopoly, and it's incredibly difficult to build another Visa or MasterCard, they should be regulated as utilities (or at the very least, similarly to telecom providers), and be required to be content-neutral. Just like Comcast can't tell me I can't download porn, Visa shouldn't be able to tell me I can't buy it, either.
- ozim 5y agoSlippery slope argument. So you are going to run naked in the city center because public opinion about this does not match what you want.
- _jal 5y agoRemember this next time people start pushing going cashless. Doing so means that a third party is involved in every transaction you make, and that someone else will always have veto power over your commercial transactions.
- l33t2328 5y agoThat’s an excellent point. Having an electronic alternative to cash would be amazing, but so far there’s nothing close to it with respect to privacy and freedom.
- missingrib 5y agoIs this satire going over my head?
- bcheung 5y agoCrypto will eventually democratize business transactions but it will take some time and it will not be without increased fraud.
- xur17 5y agoWhat type of fraud? It seems to me that it would make it basically impossible to defraud a merchant with a stolen payment method (much like cash). Do you mean merchants defrauding their customers?
- boplicity 5y ago1. Freedom of Speech extends to all parties in a relationship 2. Freedom of speech includes choosing who I work with 3. It makes sense to have certain restrictions on freedom of speech, especially as it relates to clearly harmful discrimination (i.e. racial discrimination, gender discrimination) 4. It does not make sense to restrict freedom of speech in the case of pornography, specifically, whether a company can choose to work with pornographers or not
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]