It's 'Stripe', and they have to follow the law as well as the rules set by the various payment methods that they allow people to use or else Stripe itself will go out of business. If you want more freedom you should simply get your own merchant account and use one of the gateways. This comes at a cost, you will need to be PCI/DSS certified and likely ISO27001 certified. Neither of these is particularly cheap or easy so it will take a certain minimum level of processing before this becomes a viable option.

Because they process credit cards and the credit card companies require them to. To a certain extent, national laws also require them to.