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"We’re building a platform ourselves, and we work hard to ensure that Stripe treats businesses of all size neutrally." Since they set up the comparison themsel

"We’re building a platform ourselves, and we work hard to ensure that Stripe treats businesses of all size neutrally." Since they set up the comparison themselves, I wonder if Stripe would be in favor of legislation that forced them to forever treat all their customers neutrally vs. us just trusting them to "work hard to ensure" that end. Perhaps making it illegal to offer sweetheart deals to bigger clients for example? Arguably payments is the next most fundamental piece to a functioning internet after bandwidth, so its not unreasonable to request. If MegaCorp A received much lower rates on credit card processing than little Startup B, how could we have fair competition after all?

masklinn 12y ago
> Since they set up the comparison themselves, I wonder if Stripe would be in favor of legislation that forced them to forever treat all their customers neutrally vs. us just trusting them to "work hard to ensure" that end. ISPs already do that all the time with in-network CDNs, dedicated ports and the like. And nobody cares because it does not make things worse.
silverbax88 12y ago
I'm not sure how equal your analogy is. It would require that All Payment Processors, not just Stripe, would have to treat all users neutrally. Which would be awesome, because Stripe would beat the heck out of the competition. Plus, to be a fair comparison, it would mean regulation so that payment processors couldn't actively make it HARDER for you unless you pay them. Which again, they should be in support of. It's more like the DMV throwing down nails and tacks in your driveway and telling you that you can have them removed if you pay them more.
- tolmasky 12y ago
  Yes, just like the current rules would affect all ISPs. Sorry if it wasn't clear that the law would apply to all payment processors and not be written to solely affect Stripe.
  - neura 12y ago
    I think you may still be missing the main point, which is that network access providers already have a tight hold on your business. For a given geographic area, you usually only have access to either phone lines or cable, with some exceptions, which usually are higher cost and lower quality. While you may be able to obtain DSL service from multiple "providers", they're almost always using the same resources. Kind of in the same way that there are many mobile providers, but they all rely on the major networks. Companies like Stripe on the other hand, are equivalent to the front end of that system. Nearly anybody can provide the same service that Stripe does. Which makes it a competition to see who can provide the best service vs price (or whatever choices you're basing your decision on). If you only have access to the internet through your cable lines or phone lines, having the entities that control those finite resources legally able to charge more for different types of content over their lines or content from different locations, etc. is a pretty huge deal. Even when you use some "local ISP", if the company that controls the end point at which your phone lines are connected to the internet decides to start filtering, rate limiting, etc. the data you're receiving, there's not much you can do about it. Heck, even wireless internet providers are working with finite resources. You can't just decide one day that you want to start a business doing wireless networking over large distances without getting the FCC involved. It's to the point that you could basically consider wireless networks with enough broadcast strength to cover a city to have virtual hard lines. They essentially own those frequencies, so they may as well be considered the same type of finite resource.
dasil003 12y ago
No they didn't set up the comparison themselves, and it is a false and harmful comparison. The Internet is not the same category of thing as Stripe, or pretty much anything else that I can think of. The Internet is a network of networks. Net neutrality is what allowed it to grow and flourish to everyone's mutual benefit. It is not AT&T/Comcast/Verizon that created the Internet and thus have the right to control it, rather they are selling access to the Internet which they can profit from not because of their initiative and innovation, but because of a much larger collaborative effort and series of gentleman's agreements that predate their involvement. They have leverage because of a monopoly on the last mile to consumers and they are trying whatever shenanigans they can to capitalize on that advantage, but it's all bullshit, and to even entertain their bullshit with false analogies for the sake of some deluded sense of fairness is really a bad idea. What Stripe does is the same as any other payment gateway. Not only did they fully create their own platform, but there are dozens of competitors with no barrier to entry, and mind you, even if they did have some kind of monopoly to something they themselves built, it still wouldn't fall into the same category as the Internet. Even suggesting this comparison is to frame the debate in favorable terms for the telecoms, and they definitely don't deserve the support.
- tolmasky 12y ago
  You are free to believe that the analogy is not sound, or that the comparison is weak, but it is silly to say that they did not set the comparison themselves. You should definitely take it up with them (which was part of the point of my post). Its not really clear to me how to prove this to you other than just quoting the post back to you: "As we’ve written before, we believe in the power of impartial platforms. We’re building a platform ourselves, and we work hard to ensure that Stripe treats businesses of all size neutrally. Mr. Wheeler’s plan would push the internet in the opposite direction. It would give larger players a distinct advantage, hurt new companies, and dampen the rapid innovation that has thus far defined the internet economy." Unless you believe mentioning themselves and how they stay neutral was one big typo, or some sort of strange and irrelevant digression, it seems pretty clear that they are comparing their neutral intentions with the importance of keeping net neutrality. Their argument basically goes: 1. We believe in impartial platforms as a general tenant. 2. For example, our platform, as a subset of "platforms", should remain neutral which we strive to do. 3. The internet, another platform, should also be neutral, if not these bad things will happen: blah blah blah.
ThomPete 12y ago
That analogy doesn't really work cause that is not really the problem with ISPs today. People pay different prices for different speeds. The problem of network neutrality is much more subtle in that it introduces the idea of censorship with the type of content that is considered acceptable. If Stripe started asking porn companies to pay more than lets say a church group for the same service you could start to talk about an analogy but thats not the case.
- nileshtrivedi 12y ago
  I would say that rather than type of content, the issue is about source and destination of the packets. Payment platforms already distinguish between type of payment (shopping, fund transfer, gambling and fraud) etc. The analogy would be to not discriminate among two shopping sites.
  - ThomPete 12y ago
    I can buy that. The point to me is that you might treat people differently based on what they pay you, but you don't treat them differently based on what they are selling.
cs702 12y ago
There's a big difference between the ISP and payment processing markets in the US. Most consumers and small businesses in the US can buy ISP services only from a duopoly, the cable company or the phone company, who therefore are in a position to dictate terms to customers. In other words, there's no functioning "free market" for consumer and small-business ISP services. On the other hand, there are many payment processors in the US.[1] Say what you will about their service quality (most suck -- Stripe is an exception), but at least customers have multiple choices. No payment processor is in a position to dictate terms. In other words, there's a functioning market for payment processing services. -- [1] http://www.quora.com/How-many-payment-card-merchants-are-in-the-US http://www.quora.com/How-many-payment-card-merchants-are-in-...
- gojomo 12y ago
  Then why not promote competition and choice, via antitrust enforcement and franchising/last-mile-infrastructure reforms? Federal "net neutrality" regulations freeze into national law a particular formula for access, based on an idealized model that's never quite existed before. (To the extent the net has often been 'neutral', it's not because the FCC demanded it, but customers and businesses. And the legions of de facto exceptions have been practical, and evolving quickly, not waiting for telecom-lawyer mandarins in DC to design us a better internet.) Even if new utility-style regulation prevents certain abuses, it equally prevents valuable experiments from incumbents or new entrants. The history of regulated utilities – electric, water, classic phones – is one of stagnation, and plenty of subtle abuses from those incumbents whose margins get effectively written into law.
  - dragonwriter 12y ago
    > Federal "net neutrality" regulations freeze into national law a particular formula for access Er, no it doesn't "freeze" anything. FCC regulations of other regulated industries are very frequently updated. And regulations, while given force of law by the laws authorizing regulation, are not the same as law particularly with regard to being "frozen", as they can be changed by either changing the law on which they are based, or by change through regulatory process. They are, therefore, strictly less "frozen" than law.
collision 12y ago
Pricing neutrality is hard to enforce and can lead to price inflation (c.f. interchange), but we'd be game for something along these lines. Part of Stripe's raison d'être is making pretty advanced payment infrastructure — only available prior to those with considerable means and past experience — available to anyone. We're obviously not there yet (witness the limited number of countries, payouts only being available in the US for now) but that's where we're trying to get to.
- tolmasky 12y ago
  Don't know why this isn't higher up, it shows a consistent position on these matters, and displays a pretty mature context to the original post that set up the comparison. The question was an honest one, and as someone mentioned earlier such legislation might actually be super favorable for Stripe.
runako 12y ago
I think your analogy is flawed, and here's why. As a broadband customer, I pay for access to "the Internet". Over the last couple of decades, "the Internet" has meant access with something akin to net neutrality in place. What my ISP wants to sell me is not "the Internet", but something new, which they have yet to define. But from what their lobbyists have put into the FCC proposal, the "Internet" they want to sell me is one where both sender and receiver of data pay them for data. This is not a wholly unreasonable payment model, but it would represent a profound shift in how the Internet is paid for in the U.S. Further, under their proposal, my speeds to any particular website are dependent on how much I pay and how much the other side pays to my ISP (not theirs). Crucially, half of this is wholly outside my control. Of course, I still pay for the full pipe regardless. Note that in particular the source server has not been a customer of my ISP, but the FCC thinks they should become a customer of my ISP so that I can have the speeds I have been sold as of today. This is not how the Internet has worked, and is a new service offering being marketed as "the" Internet. So a better Stripe analogy would be that Stripe offers would be if they 1) first became as big as Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and American Express combined (that would give them approximately the market heft of the American broadband ISPs); 2) required cardholders to buy a Stripe Consumer subscription before processing their cards for merchants. I'm fairly certain that even our lax banking regulators would have something to say about this.
- tolmasky 12y ago
  So....? Just because the internet would work differently it needs to be absolutely abolished? Consider the following: If the funds ISPs get from service providers begins to completely overshadow the monthly fees from consumers, you may end up with really interesting incentives: namely, it may be in an ISPs best interest to provide as many people with as cheap as internet as possible. Doing so would mean more people using Netflix, which means Netflix paying them more. We could end up in a situation where the services providers do all the paying, and internet becomes free for consumers, since every additional free consumer is cheap for ISPs, and every additional byte delivered by Netflix to the consumer is a huge win for them. I'm not saying this WILL happen, but I think its silly to assume that everything in the world will fall apart with this model, just because its different.
guelo 12y ago
All you libertarian ubermensch refuse to acknoledge the historically unprecedented levels of innovation that the regulated internet has produced based off of government funded research. And you provide no good reason to destroy this miracle besides 'free market!'.
themichael 12y ago
It is not a good idea to compare 2 unrelated industries directly. In the ISP Industry, the customer pays for X Mbit of Bandwidth. In the payment industry, the customer pays for the transaction fees indirectly. Hence, if you were to get your internet connection for "free" and pay for it indirectly, then the comparison could be made.

masklinn 12y ago

> Since they set up the comparison themselves, I wonder if Stripe would be in favor of legislation that forced them to forever treat all their customers neutrally vs. us just trusting them to "work hard to ensure" that end. ISPs already do that all the time with in-network CDNs, dedicated ports and the like. And nobody cares because it does not make things worse.

silverbax88 12y ago

I'm not sure how equal your analogy is. It would require that All Payment Processors, not just Stripe, would have to treat all users neutrally. Which would be awesome, because Stripe would beat the heck out of the competition. Plus, to be a fair comparison, it would mean regulation so that payment processors couldn't actively make it HARDER for you unless you pay them. Which again, they should be in support of. It's more like the DMV throwing down nails and tacks in your driveway and telling you that you can have them removed if you pay them more.

tolmasky 12y ago
Yes, just like the current rules would affect all ISPs. Sorry if it wasn't clear that the law would apply to all payment processors and not be written to solely affect Stripe.
- neura 12y ago
  I think you may still be missing the main point, which is that network access providers already have a tight hold on your business. For a given geographic area, you usually only have access to either phone lines or cable, with some exceptions, which usually are higher cost and lower quality. While you may be able to obtain DSL service from multiple "providers", they're almost always using the same resources. Kind of in the same way that there are many mobile providers, but they all rely on the major networks. Companies like Stripe on the other hand, are equivalent to the front end of that system. Nearly anybody can provide the same service that Stripe does. Which makes it a competition to see who can provide the best service vs price (or whatever choices you're basing your decision on). If you only have access to the internet through your cable lines or phone lines, having the entities that control those finite resources legally able to charge more for different types of content over their lines or content from different locations, etc. is a pretty huge deal. Even when you use some "local ISP", if the company that controls the end point at which your phone lines are connected to the internet decides to start filtering, rate limiting, etc. the data you're receiving, there's not much you can do about it. Heck, even wireless internet providers are working with finite resources. You can't just decide one day that you want to start a business doing wireless networking over large distances without getting the FCC involved. It's to the point that you could basically consider wireless networks with enough broadcast strength to cover a city to have virtual hard lines. They essentially own those frequencies, so they may as well be considered the same type of finite resource.

dasil003 12y ago

No they didn't set up the comparison themselves, and it is a false and harmful comparison. The Internet is not the same category of thing as Stripe, or pretty much anything else that I can think of. The Internet is a network of networks. Net neutrality is what allowed it to grow and flourish to everyone's mutual benefit. It is not AT&T/Comcast/Verizon that created the Internet and thus have the right to control it, rather they are selling access to the Internet which they can profit from not because of their initiative and innovation, but because of a much larger collaborative effort and series of gentleman's agreements that predate their involvement. They have leverage because of a monopoly on the last mile to consumers and they are trying whatever shenanigans they can to capitalize on that advantage, but it's all bullshit, and to even entertain their bullshit with false analogies for the sake of some deluded sense of fairness is really a bad idea. What Stripe does is the same as any other payment gateway. Not only did they fully create their own platform, but there are dozens of competitors with no barrier to entry, and mind you, even if they did have some kind of monopoly to something they themselves built, it still wouldn't fall into the same category as the Internet. Even suggesting this comparison is to frame the debate in favorable terms for the telecoms, and they definitely don't deserve the support.

tolmasky 12y ago
You are free to believe that the analogy is not sound, or that the comparison is weak, but it is silly to say that they did not set the comparison themselves. You should definitely take it up with them (which was part of the point of my post). Its not really clear to me how to prove this to you other than just quoting the post back to you: "As we’ve written before, we believe in the power of impartial platforms. We’re building a platform ourselves, and we work hard to ensure that Stripe treats businesses of all size neutrally. Mr. Wheeler’s plan would push the internet in the opposite direction. It would give larger players a distinct advantage, hurt new companies, and dampen the rapid innovation that has thus far defined the internet economy." Unless you believe mentioning themselves and how they stay neutral was one big typo, or some sort of strange and irrelevant digression, it seems pretty clear that they are comparing their neutral intentions with the importance of keeping net neutrality. Their argument basically goes: 1. We believe in impartial platforms as a general tenant. 2. For example, our platform, as a subset of "platforms", should remain neutral which we strive to do. 3. The internet, another platform, should also be neutral, if not these bad things will happen: blah blah blah.

ThomPete 12y ago

That analogy doesn't really work cause that is not really the problem with ISPs today. People pay different prices for different speeds. The problem of network neutrality is much more subtle in that it introduces the idea of censorship with the type of content that is considered acceptable. If Stripe started asking porn companies to pay more than lets say a church group for the same service you could start to talk about an analogy but thats not the case.

nileshtrivedi 12y ago
I would say that rather than type of content, the issue is about source and destination of the packets. Payment platforms already distinguish between type of payment (shopping, fund transfer, gambling and fraud) etc. The analogy would be to not discriminate among two shopping sites.
- ThomPete 12y ago
  I can buy that. The point to me is that you might treat people differently based on what they pay you, but you don't treat them differently based on what they are selling.

cs702 12y ago

There's a big difference between the ISP and payment processing markets in the US. Most consumers and small businesses in the US can buy ISP services only from a duopoly, the cable company or the phone company, who therefore are in a position to dictate terms to customers. In other words, there's no functioning "free market" for consumer and small-business ISP services. On the other hand, there are many payment processors in the US.[1] Say what you will about their service quality (most suck -- Stripe is an exception), but at least customers have multiple choices. No payment processor is in a position to dictate terms. In other words, there's a functioning market for payment processing services. -- [1] http://www.quora.com/How-many-payment-card-merchants-are-in-the-US http://www.quora.com/How-many-payment-card-merchants-are-in-...

gojomo 12y ago
Then why not promote competition and choice, via antitrust enforcement and franchising/last-mile-infrastructure reforms? Federal "net neutrality" regulations freeze into national law a particular formula for access, based on an idealized model that's never quite existed before. (To the extent the net has often been 'neutral', it's not because the FCC demanded it, but customers and businesses. And the legions of de facto exceptions have been practical, and evolving quickly, not waiting for telecom-lawyer mandarins in DC to design us a better internet.) Even if new utility-style regulation prevents certain abuses, it equally prevents valuable experiments from incumbents or new entrants. The history of regulated utilities – electric, water, classic phones – is one of stagnation, and plenty of subtle abuses from those incumbents whose margins get effectively written into law.
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > Federal "net neutrality" regulations freeze into national law a particular formula for access Er, no it doesn't "freeze" anything. FCC regulations of other regulated industries are very frequently updated. And regulations, while given force of law by the laws authorizing regulation, are not the same as law particularly with regard to being "frozen", as they can be changed by either changing the law on which they are based, or by change through regulatory process. They are, therefore, strictly less "frozen" than law.

collision 12y ago

Pricing neutrality is hard to enforce and can lead to price inflation (c.f. interchange), but we'd be game for something along these lines. Part of Stripe's raison d'être is making pretty advanced payment infrastructure — only available prior to those with considerable means and past experience — available to anyone. We're obviously not there yet (witness the limited number of countries, payouts only being available in the US for now) but that's where we're trying to get to.

tolmasky 12y ago
Don't know why this isn't higher up, it shows a consistent position on these matters, and displays a pretty mature context to the original post that set up the comparison. The question was an honest one, and as someone mentioned earlier such legislation might actually be super favorable for Stripe.

runako 12y ago

I think your analogy is flawed, and here's why. As a broadband customer, I pay for access to "the Internet". Over the last couple of decades, "the Internet" has meant access with something akin to net neutrality in place. What my ISP wants to sell me is not "the Internet", but something new, which they have yet to define. But from what their lobbyists have put into the FCC proposal, the "Internet" they want to sell me is one where both sender and receiver of data pay them for data. This is not a wholly unreasonable payment model, but it would represent a profound shift in how the Internet is paid for in the U.S. Further, under their proposal, my speeds to any particular website are dependent on how much I pay and how much the other side pays to my ISP (not theirs). Crucially, half of this is wholly outside my control. Of course, I still pay for the full pipe regardless. Note that in particular the source server has not been a customer of my ISP, but the FCC thinks they should become a customer of my ISP so that I can have the speeds I have been sold as of today. This is not how the Internet has worked, and is a new service offering being marketed as "the" Internet. So a better Stripe analogy would be that Stripe offers would be if they 1) first became as big as Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and American Express combined (that would give them approximately the market heft of the American broadband ISPs); 2) required cardholders to buy a Stripe Consumer subscription before processing their cards for merchants. I'm fairly certain that even our lax banking regulators would have something to say about this.

tolmasky 12y ago
So....? Just because the internet would work differently it needs to be absolutely abolished? Consider the following: If the funds ISPs get from service providers begins to completely overshadow the monthly fees from consumers, you may end up with really interesting incentives: namely, it may be in an ISPs best interest to provide as many people with as cheap as internet as possible. Doing so would mean more people using Netflix, which means Netflix paying them more. We could end up in a situation where the services providers do all the paying, and internet becomes free for consumers, since every additional free consumer is cheap for ISPs, and every additional byte delivered by Netflix to the consumer is a huge win for them. I'm not saying this WILL happen, but I think its silly to assume that everything in the world will fall apart with this model, just because its different.

guelo 12y ago

All you libertarian ubermensch refuse to acknoledge the historically unprecedented levels of innovation that the regulated internet has produced based off of government funded research. And you provide no good reason to destroy this miracle besides 'free market!'.

themichael 12y ago

It is not a good idea to compare 2 unrelated industries directly. In the ISP Industry, the customer pays for X Mbit of Bandwidth. In the payment industry, the customer pays for the transaction fees indirectly. Hence, if you were to get your internet connection for "free" and pay for it indirectly, then the comparison could be made.