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It would be great if it was impractical, but I still think it has to be made illegal. I think it is not only "bad" because it's bad for Valve of whoever wants t

by krick 1y ago

It would be great if it was impractical, but I still think it has to be made illegal. I think it is not only "bad" because it's bad for Valve of whoever wants to sell or buy these games, this is "bad" on its own, because it is simply another elaborate form of blackmail. It is as close as it gets to violence without actually beating one up: you are forced to do something not because you are required by law or by nature, but because I want you do that, and I have power over you. This isn't a unique situation in that sense, of course, this pattern appears a lot in life. This one is unique only in that sense that it targets a very narrow bottleneck. If you have power to influence a payment system, and it has legal right to choose to write regulations like that, then you have power over virtually anyone and everyone. Lobbying a policy clause for Mastercard is basically as good (or maybe even better) than lobbying a law. Which, yes, is a problem on its own, but this problem is rather "an unfortunate situation" than a malicious act. Also, on the matter of the latter problem — fixing that is much easier said than done. Cryptocurrencies in a way were an attempt to fix that, but governments around the world do not want this problem to be fixed. And of course they don't. The field is highly regulated, because, as I've said, having control over the payment network is not that very much different from having a physical army to physically beat you up. As an aside, I was especially surprised by: > We see this at work with hosting. Do we, though? It's another topic of course, but I actually share the sentiment that the current trend is the opposite one: good old days of the Free Web are gone, and the reality is that in the days of Gmail (and other major mail providers), Cloudflare (and other major CDNs) the Internet is inherently not a decentralized structure anymore. It takes a few powerful friends to reach an agreement with each other, and everyone else has to follow. So, anyway, what I had in mind was exactly that: > to regulate payment processors like common carriers and require them to serve everyone equally regardless But, as I've said, I don't quite see how to draw the line here. After all, it would be somewhat unfair to payment networks to trip them from making any choices. Both because formally they are just a business, not a commodity (which may actually be the root of the problem, I think), and they should have some right to choose how they want to operate; and also because different customers and products objectively carry different risks. So they have to be able to produce some policies, these policies just have to… to be restricted to what's necessary somehow.

wat10000 1y ago
Hosting is a very different landscape. Cloudflare and AWS and such are enormous and can exert a lot of control. But you can still ignore them and just do your own thing and it works fine. There are plenty of smaller cloud providers you can use instead. You can still colocate your own hardware in a data center. If nobody in your country wants your money, you can host your service in some other country that doesn't care so much about whatever morality is at issue. This demonstrably works. There are plenty of porn sites out there, plenty of pirate sites, plenty of places selling illegal stuff, even Wikileaks is still up. To your last paragraph, I think we can draw the line at "allow any transaction that you reasonably believe is actually authorized by the people who own the accounts." I don't care about being fair to payment networks. If we're going the regulatory route then we've decided that this stuff is critical infrastructure and the needs of the many etc. If individual people at the company don't like handling transaction for porn or whatever, they're free to find a new job. Different risks do make it trickier, but I think we can add some language to allow holding on to money for a certain period before paying it out, or requiring deposits, with some limits on what criteria they can use to make those determinations and how long/large the period/deposit can be.
marcosdumay 1y ago
Unfairness would be something to care about if it was a rich market with several small companies competing in it. It's not something to care about corporate monopolies. No, they should not have the right to choose how they want to operate. All those risks you mention only exist because they choose to keep them around as an excuse to why they are necessary. They refuse to modernize their systems so it works, and they should not be allowed to keep that option. (Honestly, IMO they should just be terminated and replaced by some public service. But if you want to keep them, they shouldn't have that kind of freedom.)
rockskon 1y ago
I don't quite care about if a payment network feels it's fair to them when they can dictate what speech entire nations are allowed to engage in. When it's the speech of the many vs the speech of the few, I'm going to err towards the speech of the many.

by krick 1y ago

wat10000 1y ago

Hosting is a very different landscape. Cloudflare and AWS and such are enormous and can exert a lot of control. But you can still ignore them and just do your own thing and it works fine. There are plenty of smaller cloud providers you can use instead. You can still colocate your own hardware in a data center. If nobody in your country wants your money, you can host your service in some other country that doesn't care so much about whatever morality is at issue. This demonstrably works. There are plenty of porn sites out there, plenty of pirate sites, plenty of places selling illegal stuff, even Wikileaks is still up. To your last paragraph, I think we can draw the line at "allow any transaction that you reasonably believe is actually authorized by the people who own the accounts." I don't care about being fair to payment networks. If we're going the regulatory route then we've decided that this stuff is critical infrastructure and the needs of the many etc. If individual people at the company don't like handling transaction for porn or whatever, they're free to find a new job. Different risks do make it trickier, but I think we can add some language to allow holding on to money for a certain period before paying it out, or requiring deposits, with some limits on what criteria they can use to make those determinations and how long/large the period/deposit can be.

marcosdumay 1y ago

Unfairness would be something to care about if it was a rich market with several small companies competing in it. It's not something to care about corporate monopolies. No, they should not have the right to choose how they want to operate. All those risks you mention only exist because they choose to keep them around as an excuse to why they are necessary. They refuse to modernize their systems so it works, and they should not be allowed to keep that option. (Honestly, IMO they should just be terminated and replaced by some public service. But if you want to keep them, they shouldn't have that kind of freedom.)

rockskon 1y ago

I don't quite care about if a payment network feels it's fair to them when they can dictate what speech entire nations are allowed to engage in. When it's the speech of the many vs the speech of the few, I'm going to err towards the speech of the many.