7 ms·

This is a deeply concerning development, though not an entirely surprising one. While I sympathize with itch.io's position - being caught between their creators

This is a deeply concerning development, though not an entirely surprising one. While I sympathize with itch.io's position - being caught between their creators and their payment processors - the broader implications here are alarming. Payment processors have effectively become unelected censorship boards with the power to strangle entire categories of legal content by threatening to cut off the economic infrastructure that platforms depend on. The fact that a single advocacy campaign can pressure Visa/Mastercard/PayPal into forcing platforms to remove legal adult content should concern anyone who values free expression online. The fundamental issue isn't whether you personally approve of adult games or specific content - it's that a handful of payment companies now wield veto power over what legal content can exist in the digital economy. This represents a massive concentration of censorial authority in the hands of unaccountable corporate entities that face no meaningful democratic oversight. We've seen this pattern repeatedly: PayPal blocking VPN providers over "piracy concerns," Visa suspending payments to adult sites, and now this coordinated pressure campaign. Each time, legal content gets effectively banned not through legislation or courts, but through corporate policy decisions made behind closed doors. By inserting themselves as moral arbiters for the digital economy and free expression on the internet, these processors are creating a very strong case for being designated as common carriers or being subjected to much stricter public utility regulation. When payment infrastructure becomes as essential as electricity or telephone service for participating in the digital economy, treating these companies as neutral utilities rather than editorial boards becomes not just reasonable but necessary.

__loam 1y ago
One of the most concerning parts of this is that these are global companies. Regardless of local laws, these companies still wield enormous power. This is also a sovereignty and self determination issue.
scirob 1y ago
I hate to point out that we have completely free payment options (way too free for most) that could prevent all of this based on b***** technology. But then again maybe itch would get blackmailed even harder by the currently leading payment companies if they were to adopt b***** payments. So only with huge customer demand for free payments could they switch.
- timeon 1y ago
  Or how about actually elected alternative: government regulating these payment providers not to do this? (At least in countries where elections have total cap for donors per party.)
  - tavavex 1y ago
    Both Visa and Mastercard are American companies. What do you think the likelihood is that the US in its current situation regulates them? As for other countries, I'm not even sure they have the leverage when faced with an 'essential' duopoly that everyone already relies on.
    - thewebguyd 1y ago
      > I'm not even sure they have the leverage when faced with an 'essential' duopoly that everyone already relies on. The fact they are so essential should give the nations all the leverage - "Your service has become too important to the function of our nation, so we are nationalizing your company and making it a public service." Time to stop being afraid of doing that - if a private company is THAT important to the continuing functioning of your society, then that company has lost their right to be a private for profit business and needs to be nationalized, at least partially to keep them in check and make sure they are following the laws of the nations they operate in. We, as societies, should have never allowed any corporation to become more powerful than their governments.
- newswasboring 1y ago
  why are you censoring bitcoin?
  - falcor84 1y ago
    Oh, I thought it was a different b-word
    - WithinReason 1y ago
safety1st 1y ago
Hacker News readers should be aware that the Department of Justice has sued Visa for monopolization and other unlawful conduct: https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-visa-monopolizing-debit-markets https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-s... There was also a recent class action lawsuit by business owners against both Visa and Mastercard accusing them of anti-trust violations, that was settled for $5.5B. It's not yet clear how seriously the Trump Administration will take the lawsuit against Visa. There is mounting evidence and sentiment that both of these companies are not just self-appointed censors, they're also criminal entities who use their market power to extort and abuse both their customers and partners. Now more than ever it's important to contact whoever represents you in the government and tell them that a settlement won't cut it and you've had enough of criminal enterprises dictating the future of both United States and world society. There simply aren't any other solutions to organized corrupt power at this scale, it's either hand the world over to a tyranny ruled by this growing form of organized corporate crime, or act through the public institutions that we as the People have endorsed to represent us.
- ethbr1 1y ago
  Taking one look at the FCC, Americans should be more worried about this administration’s willingness to leverage any government power into coerced private industry action favorable to them. ‘That DoJ action? Might go away if you just _____.’
perihelions 1y ago
> "We've seen this pattern repeatedly: PayPal blocking VPN providers over "piracy concerns," Visa suspending payments to adult sites, and now this coordinated pressure campaign." And more: before those, there was also Wikileaks[0,1], SciHub[2], and Tor[3]—among other high-profile acts of authoritarian censorship. There's countless others if you search HN—hard to sort them out for the sheer volume. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1969048 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1969048 ("PayPal Suspends WikiLeaks Account (nytimes.com)" (2010) — 74 comments) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4808975 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4808975 ("EU Scolds Visa et al. For Killing WikiLeaks Donations, Initiates Regulation (falkvinge.net)" (2012) — 61 comments) [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23645305 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23645305 ("Blackballed by PayPal, Sci-Hub switches to Bitcoin (coindesk.com)" (2020) — 290 comments) [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27371787 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27371787 ("PayPal shuts down long-time Tor supporter (eff.org)") (2021) — 185 comments)
surgical_fire 1y ago
> By inserting themselves as moral arbiters for the digital economy and free expression on the internet, these processors are creating a very strong case for being designated as common carriers or being subjected to much stricter public utility regulation. It's maddening that they are not common carriers at this point. In many ways it is very difficult - if not impossible - to operate in the world nowadays without access to payment infrastructure. This should also come as a lesson to all the people that base their rationale in "government icky" moronic arguments. Corporations are all too happy to abuse consumers in the lack of proper regulations. While the government should not get blind faith, there are multiple avenues to scrutinize and question the government. Corporations on the other hand can and will fuck over everyone mercilessly without proper regulations.
- Dracophoenix 1y ago
  > This should also come as a lesson to all the people that base their rationale in "government icky" moronic arguments. Corporations are all too happy to abuse consumers in the lack of proper regulations. While the government should not get blind faith, there are multiple avenues to scrutinize and question the government. Corporations on the other hand can and will fuck over everyone mercilessly without proper regulations. Whoever said governments oppose this development? What makes you they're not ones holding the cards? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Suasion#Jawboning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Suasion#Jawboning
  - surgical_fire 1y ago
    The links you sent have absolutely no relation to the case in point. Your response is just baseless conjecture.
    - LearnYouALisp 1y ago
      How dare gubmint involve itself in auditing predatory lenders and weapons dealers
zoklet-enjoyer 1y ago
This is a perfect use case for crypto/stable coins
- altairprime 1y ago
  If only they weren’t so intent on being untraceable, they could well have served that purpose by now. Sigh.
  - zoklet-enjoyer 1y ago
    Ethereum, Polygon, Base, etc are not untraceable. The only untraceable ones I can think of off the top of my head are Monero and Secret Network.
    - altairprime 1y ago
      I didn’t realize we knew who owned the Satoshi cold wallets! When did they figure that out, and how? What definition of traceable are you using? I meant, to a specific person (miner) who wrote value into the system — which could also include a specific cash register or ATM that traded currency for coin, depending on whether it’s a postpaid or a prepaid Visa/MC that we’re comparing to, I suppose. They only charge a few percent extra overhead to issue relatively anonymous prepaid cards, which people either choose to pay or not, but the coin systems have traditionally been operated without the identifiable, lower-overhead, lower-risk tier of users that could have supported a viable postpaid network competitor. To the best of my understanding — am I wrong here? — all coin systems are exclusively unconcerned with the user’s identity other than their password, so their traceability is close to zero without a criminal investigation and wrench takeovers, which makes it adoption almost wholly unviable. (US folks trying to convert coins to currency without paying taxes may differ, but that’s a relatively new regulatory push and has no particular impact on the majority of worldwide coin users.)
      - dminik 1y ago
        Bitcoin is only pseudonymous. Inside the network everything is public and traceable, but not personally identifiable. Where you lose anonymity is with inflows and outflows to the real world. You may only be able to buy cryptocurrency from a KYC seller. Or your payment can be traced. Or you buy something from an already identified seller. Ironically, a lot of the anonymity of Bitcoin comes from the anonymity of physical cash. If employers started paying out salaries using Bitcoin, it would suddenly be really easy to identify wallets.
JohnBooty 1y ago
By inserting themselves as moral arbiters While this is effectively what is happening, and I agree with everything you said, I would like to add the primary reason why I've always heard that payment processors don't want to deal with adult content. The primary reason is because adult content has a very high percentage of disputed charges. Typically, it's because some person's partner notices some kind of porn on the credit card statement, and the purchaser claims they were "hacked" or something and then disputes the charge. This doesn't necessarily happen a large percentage of the time, but going from e.g. 0.1% disputes (or whatever the industry norm is) to 0.2% really torpedos profit margins. There is also some skittishness about local laws regarding morality. Credit card payments cross a lot of boundaries and various localities have wildly differing laws about adult content and so the payment processors simply don't want to risk it. I guess what I'm saying is: the payment processors seem like the symptom of a larger problem, not the root cause. Source: I've never worked in payment processing, but I used to run an online business with spicy content, and had to navigate this to an extent.
- echelon 1y ago
  > This doesn't necessarily happen a large percentage of the time, but going from e.g. 0.1% disputes (or whatever the industry norm is) to 0.2% really torpedos profit margins. Then you charge an additional fee in exchange for the MCC risk. This is easy. What we're really seeing is moral policing.
  - jfyi 1y ago
    It's not clear to me from the post what level this is happening on. I assume by "payment processor" that they are not talking about Visa et al themselves but their merchant services provider. The alternative to this is to find a merchant services company that specializes in adult industry. Something like https://ccbill.com/ https://ccbill.com/ which is going to end up costing you (or your customers) somewhere around 30% on all payments on your entire platform. It's likely easier to strong arm these providers as they are typically pretty risk averse.
  - JohnBooty 1y ago
    Then you charge an additional fee in exchange for the MCC risk. This is easy. Sure, yeah. There are niche payment processors who specialize in such things. They charge exorbitant rates, like 20-30+%. I suspect that itch.io may consider working with somebody like CCBill to allow payments for adult content, and use a "normal" processor for everything else. That is what I would do, or at least attempt to do. What we're really seeing is moral policing. Effectively, yes. It is a huge problem. But I would hope that anybody bothered by the problem would also want to understand the root causes. It's a little bit more complex than credit card companies being a bunch of prudes who think you shouldn't be playing weirdo dating sims. You have to understand the economics of the payment processing industry, at least in broad strokes. Then you can understand why mainstream processors stay away from adult content. - Profits are obviously large, but margins on any individual transaction are miniscule - Disputes and chargebacks involve humans, which blows away the basic economical model there. The cost of 15 minutes of labor from a human being wipes out the profit on the next zillion transactions - Adult content, while a big business in absolute terms, is a tiny drop in the bucket overall for these companies. They do not want to devote a bunch of resources for something that is, overall, probably like 0.1% or less of their overall revenue
resonious 1y ago
I'm very puzzled as to how these "advocacy campaigns" are able to control all of the payment processors like this. That Collective Shout "open letter" must be the tip of the iceberg.
- bilbo0s 1y ago
  They're not. There's always the other, less visible but more lethal attack front.. the CFO whispering in the board's ear about chargebacks. I think what we need to get a handle on is guys, or gals, telling their spouses, "Oh I have no idea what that charge is doing on our card!?!?!" Of course it's going to be disputed. We need some method of attribution that is definitive. So that people can't go around doing that any longer. Make no mistake, these companies are about money. Morality or no morality, if you take chargebacks reliably back in hand adult content would likely show itself to be more profitable than nearly every other segment of their business. Would there still be a line? Absolutely. But it would be a line that nearly everyone would be in agreement with, and the line would exclude nowhere near the amount of content it does today.
  - ryandrake 1y ago
    I'd love to see this problem solved too, but let's not do it by nerfing people's ability to charge back. Chargeback is pretty much the only tool consumers have to fight a merchant's fraud and abuse against them, and it's already an opaque, flimsy tool. Also, it only exists by the grace of Visa, MasterCard and American Express. I don't think there is any law that compels them to even allow a customer to dispute a charge (although hopefully I'm wrong about that).
  - resonious 1y ago
    Visa/Master collect higher fees from merchants with high chargeback rates, so I'm pretty sure the CFO is still happy. I agree with the fact that they are all about money, but don't see how they lose money on adult content. This still seems very suspicious to me.
    - rchaud 1y ago
imtringued 1y ago
The thing about them being moral arbiters isn't even imagined. They have had plenty of time to figure out a business model that serves these specific markets without cutting them off altogether. Instead, the payment processors are always threatening to cut off all access even to content that does not infringe upon their terms if there is even a single violation by mistake that gets remediated quickly or the payment method is disabled for the high risk content to begin with.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
b8 1y ago
How did OnlyFans overcome this issue? They were pressured by a payment processor to stop allowing NSFW content, but reverse their decision. How did that pan out?
- const_cast 1y ago
  I don't know exactly how they did it, but OF was/is unique in that the adult content is their entire business model. When your company is at risk of being essentially forcefully dissolved, you're gonna be desperate. I was fully expecting them to tell Visa to fuck off and just switch to a different payment processor, because that's more economically viable than complying with Visa. Maybe they threatened Visa with legal action and Visa felt that it was too risky, lest they lose their entire censorship operation. Just speculation.
  - scoofy 1y ago
    I guess the real question to me is why does/would Visa even want a censorship operation? It makes no sense. They're a Fortune 500 company. They don't give a shit about the morality of nudie magazines.
    - rjh29 1y ago
      From what I understand, porn has a higher rate of fraud. It's not about morality at all.
      - Jensson 1y ago
        But that doesn't apply to Steam.
- robotnikman 1y ago
  I'm guessing shady back office deals with the executives took place, or at least I wouldn't be surprised if that was the case. They previously were banned (or maybe it was threatened to be banned) by the payment processors, then suddenly it went away.
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bdcravens 1y ago
This isn't new, payment processors have exercised this kind of control over online content as long as people have been charging for content on the Internet.
ilaksh 1y ago
The solution is advanced cryptocurrency. Obviously. Almost no point in writing any comments on this site that use that word unfortunately.
gloosx 1y ago
This is a great commentary to think about for the people who believe bitcoin is a useless scam
ndkap 1y ago
What I am surprised about the most is why do these payment processors care about these moral issues this much? They are a profit-making entity and money is money -- the more money you process, the more profit you get. What is the downside for allowing NSFW content be bought using their processor? Are the boards/CEOs of these companies puritans? Aren't they handing more credibility to these alternatives like Bitcoin Lightning or Monero with actions like these?

__loam 1y ago

One of the most concerning parts of this is that these are global companies. Regardless of local laws, these companies still wield enormous power. This is also a sovereignty and self determination issue.

scirob 1y ago

I hate to point out that we have completely free payment options (way too free for most) that could prevent all of this based on b***** technology. But then again maybe itch would get blackmailed even harder by the currently leading payment companies if they were to adopt b***** payments. So only with huge customer demand for free payments could they switch.

timeon 1y ago
Or how about actually elected alternative: government regulating these payment providers not to do this? (At least in countries where elections have total cap for donors per party.)
- tavavex 1y ago
  Both Visa and Mastercard are American companies. What do you think the likelihood is that the US in its current situation regulates them? As for other countries, I'm not even sure they have the leverage when faced with an 'essential' duopoly that everyone already relies on.
  - thewebguyd 1y ago
    > I'm not even sure they have the leverage when faced with an 'essential' duopoly that everyone already relies on. The fact they are so essential should give the nations all the leverage - "Your service has become too important to the function of our nation, so we are nationalizing your company and making it a public service." Time to stop being afraid of doing that - if a private company is THAT important to the continuing functioning of your society, then that company has lost their right to be a private for profit business and needs to be nationalized, at least partially to keep them in check and make sure they are following the laws of the nations they operate in. We, as societies, should have never allowed any corporation to become more powerful than their governments.
newswasboring 1y ago
why are you censoring bitcoin?
- falcor84 1y ago
  Oh, I thought it was a different b-word
  - WithinReason 1y ago

safety1st 1y ago

Hacker News readers should be aware that the Department of Justice has sued Visa for monopolization and other unlawful conduct: https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-visa-monopolizing-debit-markets https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-s... There was also a recent class action lawsuit by business owners against both Visa and Mastercard accusing them of anti-trust violations, that was settled for $5.5B. It's not yet clear how seriously the Trump Administration will take the lawsuit against Visa. There is mounting evidence and sentiment that both of these companies are not just self-appointed censors, they're also criminal entities who use their market power to extort and abuse both their customers and partners. Now more than ever it's important to contact whoever represents you in the government and tell them that a settlement won't cut it and you've had enough of criminal enterprises dictating the future of both United States and world society. There simply aren't any other solutions to organized corrupt power at this scale, it's either hand the world over to a tyranny ruled by this growing form of organized corporate crime, or act through the public institutions that we as the People have endorsed to represent us.

ethbr1 1y ago
Taking one look at the FCC, Americans should be more worried about this administration’s willingness to leverage any government power into coerced private industry action favorable to them. ‘That DoJ action? Might go away if you just _____.’

perihelions 1y ago

> "We've seen this pattern repeatedly: PayPal blocking VPN providers over "piracy concerns," Visa suspending payments to adult sites, and now this coordinated pressure campaign." And more: before those, there was also Wikileaks[0,1], SciHub[2], and Tor[3]—among other high-profile acts of authoritarian censorship. There's countless others if you search HN—hard to sort them out for the sheer volume. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1969048 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1969048 ("PayPal Suspends WikiLeaks Account (nytimes.com)" (2010) — 74 comments) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4808975 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4808975 ("EU Scolds Visa et al. For Killing WikiLeaks Donations, Initiates Regulation (falkvinge.net)" (2012) — 61 comments) [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23645305 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23645305 ("Blackballed by PayPal, Sci-Hub switches to Bitcoin (coindesk.com)" (2020) — 290 comments) [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27371787 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27371787 ("PayPal shuts down long-time Tor supporter (eff.org)") (2021) — 185 comments)

surgical_fire 1y ago

> By inserting themselves as moral arbiters for the digital economy and free expression on the internet, these processors are creating a very strong case for being designated as common carriers or being subjected to much stricter public utility regulation. It's maddening that they are not common carriers at this point. In many ways it is very difficult - if not impossible - to operate in the world nowadays without access to payment infrastructure. This should also come as a lesson to all the people that base their rationale in "government icky" moronic arguments. Corporations are all too happy to abuse consumers in the lack of proper regulations. While the government should not get blind faith, there are multiple avenues to scrutinize and question the government. Corporations on the other hand can and will fuck over everyone mercilessly without proper regulations.

Dracophoenix 1y ago
> This should also come as a lesson to all the people that base their rationale in "government icky" moronic arguments. Corporations are all too happy to abuse consumers in the lack of proper regulations. While the government should not get blind faith, there are multiple avenues to scrutinize and question the government. Corporations on the other hand can and will fuck over everyone mercilessly without proper regulations. Whoever said governments oppose this development? What makes you they're not ones holding the cards? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Suasion#Jawboning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Suasion#Jawboning
- surgical_fire 1y ago
  The links you sent have absolutely no relation to the case in point. Your response is just baseless conjecture.
  - LearnYouALisp 1y ago
    How dare gubmint involve itself in auditing predatory lenders and weapons dealers

zoklet-enjoyer 1y ago

This is a perfect use case for crypto/stable coins

altairprime 1y ago
If only they weren’t so intent on being untraceable, they could well have served that purpose by now. Sigh.
- zoklet-enjoyer 1y ago
  Ethereum, Polygon, Base, etc are not untraceable. The only untraceable ones I can think of off the top of my head are Monero and Secret Network.
  - altairprime 1y ago
    I didn’t realize we knew who owned the Satoshi cold wallets! When did they figure that out, and how? What definition of traceable are you using? I meant, to a specific person (miner) who wrote value into the system — which could also include a specific cash register or ATM that traded currency for coin, depending on whether it’s a postpaid or a prepaid Visa/MC that we’re comparing to, I suppose. They only charge a few percent extra overhead to issue relatively anonymous prepaid cards, which people either choose to pay or not, but the coin systems have traditionally been operated without the identifiable, lower-overhead, lower-risk tier of users that could have supported a viable postpaid network competitor. To the best of my understanding — am I wrong here? — all coin systems are exclusively unconcerned with the user’s identity other than their password, so their traceability is close to zero without a criminal investigation and wrench takeovers, which makes it adoption almost wholly unviable. (US folks trying to convert coins to currency without paying taxes may differ, but that’s a relatively new regulatory push and has no particular impact on the majority of worldwide coin users.)
    - dminik 1y ago
      Bitcoin is only pseudonymous. Inside the network everything is public and traceable, but not personally identifiable. Where you lose anonymity is with inflows and outflows to the real world. You may only be able to buy cryptocurrency from a KYC seller. Or your payment can be traced. Or you buy something from an already identified seller. Ironically, a lot of the anonymity of Bitcoin comes from the anonymity of physical cash. If employers started paying out salaries using Bitcoin, it would suddenly be really easy to identify wallets.

JohnBooty 1y ago

By inserting themselves as moral arbiters While this is effectively what is happening, and I agree with everything you said, I would like to add the primary reason why I've always heard that payment processors don't want to deal with adult content. The primary reason is because adult content has a very high percentage of disputed charges. Typically, it's because some person's partner notices some kind of porn on the credit card statement, and the purchaser claims they were "hacked" or something and then disputes the charge. This doesn't necessarily happen a large percentage of the time, but going from e.g. 0.1% disputes (or whatever the industry norm is) to 0.2% really torpedos profit margins. There is also some skittishness about local laws regarding morality. Credit card payments cross a lot of boundaries and various localities have wildly differing laws about adult content and so the payment processors simply don't want to risk it. I guess what I'm saying is: the payment processors seem like the symptom of a larger problem, not the root cause. Source: I've never worked in payment processing, but I used to run an online business with spicy content, and had to navigate this to an extent.

echelon 1y ago
> This doesn't necessarily happen a large percentage of the time, but going from e.g. 0.1% disputes (or whatever the industry norm is) to 0.2% really torpedos profit margins. Then you charge an additional fee in exchange for the MCC risk. This is easy. What we're really seeing is moral policing.
- jfyi 1y ago
  It's not clear to me from the post what level this is happening on. I assume by "payment processor" that they are not talking about Visa et al themselves but their merchant services provider. The alternative to this is to find a merchant services company that specializes in adult industry. Something like https://ccbill.com/ https://ccbill.com/ which is going to end up costing you (or your customers) somewhere around 30% on all payments on your entire platform. It's likely easier to strong arm these providers as they are typically pretty risk averse.
- JohnBooty 1y ago
  Then you charge an additional fee in exchange for the MCC risk. This is easy. Sure, yeah. There are niche payment processors who specialize in such things. They charge exorbitant rates, like 20-30+%. I suspect that itch.io may consider working with somebody like CCBill to allow payments for adult content, and use a "normal" processor for everything else. That is what I would do, or at least attempt to do. What we're really seeing is moral policing. Effectively, yes. It is a huge problem. But I would hope that anybody bothered by the problem would also want to understand the root causes. It's a little bit more complex than credit card companies being a bunch of prudes who think you shouldn't be playing weirdo dating sims. You have to understand the economics of the payment processing industry, at least in broad strokes. Then you can understand why mainstream processors stay away from adult content. - Profits are obviously large, but margins on any individual transaction are miniscule - Disputes and chargebacks involve humans, which blows away the basic economical model there. The cost of 15 minutes of labor from a human being wipes out the profit on the next zillion transactions - Adult content, while a big business in absolute terms, is a tiny drop in the bucket overall for these companies. They do not want to devote a bunch of resources for something that is, overall, probably like 0.1% or less of their overall revenue

resonious 1y ago

I'm very puzzled as to how these "advocacy campaigns" are able to control all of the payment processors like this. That Collective Shout "open letter" must be the tip of the iceberg.

bilbo0s 1y ago
They're not. There's always the other, less visible but more lethal attack front.. the CFO whispering in the board's ear about chargebacks. I think what we need to get a handle on is guys, or gals, telling their spouses, "Oh I have no idea what that charge is doing on our card!?!?!" Of course it's going to be disputed. We need some method of attribution that is definitive. So that people can't go around doing that any longer. Make no mistake, these companies are about money. Morality or no morality, if you take chargebacks reliably back in hand adult content would likely show itself to be more profitable than nearly every other segment of their business. Would there still be a line? Absolutely. But it would be a line that nearly everyone would be in agreement with, and the line would exclude nowhere near the amount of content it does today.
- ryandrake 1y ago
  I'd love to see this problem solved too, but let's not do it by nerfing people's ability to charge back. Chargeback is pretty much the only tool consumers have to fight a merchant's fraud and abuse against them, and it's already an opaque, flimsy tool. Also, it only exists by the grace of Visa, MasterCard and American Express. I don't think there is any law that compels them to even allow a customer to dispute a charge (although hopefully I'm wrong about that).
- resonious 1y ago
  Visa/Master collect higher fees from merchants with high chargeback rates, so I'm pretty sure the CFO is still happy. I agree with the fact that they are all about money, but don't see how they lose money on adult content. This still seems very suspicious to me.
  - rchaud 1y ago

imtringued 1y ago

The thing about them being moral arbiters isn't even imagined. They have had plenty of time to figure out a business model that serves these specific markets without cutting them off altogether. Instead, the payment processors are always threatening to cut off all access even to content that does not infringe upon their terms if there is even a single violation by mistake that gets remediated quickly or the payment method is disabled for the high risk content to begin with.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

b8 1y ago

How did OnlyFans overcome this issue? They were pressured by a payment processor to stop allowing NSFW content, but reverse their decision. How did that pan out?

const_cast 1y ago
I don't know exactly how they did it, but OF was/is unique in that the adult content is their entire business model. When your company is at risk of being essentially forcefully dissolved, you're gonna be desperate. I was fully expecting them to tell Visa to fuck off and just switch to a different payment processor, because that's more economically viable than complying with Visa. Maybe they threatened Visa with legal action and Visa felt that it was too risky, lest they lose their entire censorship operation. Just speculation.
- scoofy 1y ago
  I guess the real question to me is why does/would Visa even want a censorship operation? It makes no sense. They're a Fortune 500 company. They don't give a shit about the morality of nudie magazines.
  - rjh29 1y ago
    From what I understand, porn has a higher rate of fraud. It's not about morality at all.
    - Jensson 1y ago
      But that doesn't apply to Steam.
robotnikman 1y ago
I'm guessing shady back office deals with the executives took place, or at least I wouldn't be surprised if that was the case. They previously were banned (or maybe it was threatened to be banned) by the payment processors, then suddenly it went away.
1y ago

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bdcravens 1y ago

This isn't new, payment processors have exercised this kind of control over online content as long as people have been charging for content on the Internet.

ilaksh 1y ago

The solution is advanced cryptocurrency. Obviously. Almost no point in writing any comments on this site that use that word unfortunately.

gloosx 1y ago

This is a great commentary to think about for the people who believe bitcoin is a useless scam

ndkap 1y ago

What I am surprised about the most is why do these payment processors care about these moral issues this much? They are a profit-making entity and money is money -- the more money you process, the more profit you get. What is the downside for allowing NSFW content be bought using their processor? Are the boards/CEOs of these companies puritans? Aren't they handing more credibility to these alternatives like Bitcoin Lightning or Monero with actions like these?