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.
Yes it's puzzling. And I don't buy the answers to your comment so far. Chargebacks? Wanting to control everything? Those are just silly hand-waving explanations that lack supportive evidence. They sound good to the people who say them, but I want more. I want data. Or at least some "aha!" evidence. Or, at least I can make up my own hand-wavy speculation.
These groups like "Collective Shout" don't seem organic to me. Where do they find members? In churches? I'm pretty clued-in to the going on in various churches, nobody knows anything about Collective Shout. It just materialized out of thin air, with a slick website and loudly claiming responsibility for these bans. "Look at us! We did this! No need to look elsewhere!"
Let me put on my aluminum-foil hat for a minute... Could this all be social engineering by some government agency that wants to ban porn (not outright, but make porn sites go out of business) to increase the birth rate to avoid demographic collapse? Just asking questions here.
I think that payment processors want to be able to control everything. I don't think they care about adult content per se, they care about being able to allow/deny anything for any reason. They also don't really care about "hate speech", which is what gets censored when dems are in power. Republicans are in power now, so they're going after adult content. But to me, it seems like they only do it this way because it's easier than doing everything at once. Their real goal, the goal that they will mask with moral concerns about things like hate speech and adult content, is to have full control over who and what can use their payment systems without any restrictions. It seems be be working really well because instead of everyone fighting censorship by payment processors as a whole, half of us choose not to care when it happens to the other half. I really struggle reading these threads because the "it's a private company that can do what they want and if you don't like it build your own" argument is seared into my memory from when this started happening years ago.
> I really struggle reading these threads because the "it's a private company that can do what they want and if you don't like it build your own" argument is seared into my memory from when this started happening years ago.
My answer to that has always been - if a "private company" is so important and critical to a nation or economy, like a payment processor, then that company has lost the right to be private and needs to be nationalized and become a public service. Had this argument all the time back in '08; if a company needs bailed out by the government or the nation/economy will collapse, its clearly too important to be a private for profit enterprise and should be nationalized and become a public service
Not everything needs, nor should be, a private enterprise for profit. Payment processors, utilities, etc. should just be public services, available to all equally and for all legal purposes.
> If an activity becomes this essential, the government should provide a competitive entrant in the same field.
I'll admit I didn't even think of that, and yeah I'd agree that's a good solution worth pursuing in cases like this. I can think of many industries where we need to inject competition into the market.
I don't understand how this would work. If the government created some entity to handle processing payments (or whatever), I assume it would be a publicly funded non-profit, since there is precedent for that. How much funding does it get? Where does that money come from? How does it compete with the existing massively powerful corporations? What incentives does the government entity have to compete? What happens if it goes bankrupt or is purchased? What happens to whatever capital was used to fund it?
It just seems like the government entity would need to actively engage with seeking profits or just existing to artificially lower costs. I don't think the majority of people would want the government to have a for-profit arm that exists to compete with businesses, and I don't think corporations would just play nice.
I'd say that USPS is the closest example of this, and it's a pretty good example of how things can go wrong as well. The active attack against the postal service to try to privatize it is terrible. It will do nothing but continue to isolate power to the ultra wealthy and make people's lives worse. For-profit corporations and the government just have (or ought to have) fundamentally different incentives to exist.
I'd be curious to know of any examples of this working well. I don't mean to be so antagonistic, I just am really struggling to understand how this could work in any way.
These are all fantastic and interesting questions and are exactly the same questions you would face if you expropriated the property of the businesses my parent proposed privatizing.
The issue is not how complicated and difficult such an endeavor is (and you rightly identify it as such).
The issue is, if we're going to do this heavy lifting anyway, might we do it in a way that doesn't involve theft ?
> The issue is, if we're going to do this heavy lifting anyway, might we do it in a way that doesn't involve theft ?
Expropriation usually involves paying the owners so it isn't theft, its just the government buying out the stocks just like a private corporation would. Are you saying Elon musk stole twitter? That is the same thing.
Anyway, here since this is shared between countries its better to just regulate what these processors can do, like the EU does when they regulate how large payment processing fees can be etc. Since its used for international trade no single country can own it.
Agreed. When people say that we need to privatize something because the government is not doing its job effectively, I always think that the government is not doing its job effectively because of the lack of competition. If you just replace the governmental entity with a private entity, then you would end up with more problems than before. The better way to approach this would be to create a governmental entity that competes with the private sector. Each can keep the other in check with competition. For example, in the case of tax prep in the US, the government can set up a competing entity that makes the tax prep software and keep turbo tax in check.
> If an activity becomes this essential, the government should provide a competitive entrant in the same field.
I'd agree, although considering our nation's decline into an authoritarian state I wouldn't trust a government competitor to be any better about protecting artistic works from censorship. Project 2025 makes the administration's feelings on this topic pretty clear.
The problem: what if the government fails to provide a competitive entrant?
We must NOT expect the government to excel at anything. We must assume it is, and will always be, a mediocre follower of established playbooks. To ensure the government accomplishes X, we must stress in the playbook that X is mandated and cannot be compromised in any way.
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.
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.
Fee structures don't scale to infinity with chargeback risk. They cut off very high risk merchants. It's the same reason cloud providers need you to request GPUs instead of exponentially raising prices to absorb cryptocurrency fraud losses.
Yeah, maybe they say its because of chargebacks as PR speak, but payment processors already cover for that with higher fees & extra risk assessment fees for businesses with a higher rate of chargebacks. If they are losing money because of a higher rate of chargebacks from adult content, then they designed their fee structure poorly.
That would be a valid point, except something like Steam isn't going under anytime soon over chargebacks, and they could demand larger reserves if they're afraid of that.
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).
Visa and Mastercard were getting pressure from New York officials to put firearm purchases into their own category, something that the gun control advocates say could help stop potential mass shooters by red flagging large gun purchases. The initiative was stopped by Republican politicians and other lobbyists.
This goes back to the origin of cancel culture. Businesses hate risk, and here is a group presenting them with a perceived risk against their bottom line.
