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://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=1969048 ("PayPal Suspends WikiLeaks Account (nytimes.com)" (2010) — 74 comments)
[1] https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=4808975 ("EU Scolds Visa et al. For Killing WikiLeaks Donations, Initiates Regulation (falkvinge.net)" (2012) — 61 comments)
[2] https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=23645305 ("Blackballed by PayPal, Sci-Hub switches to Bitcoin (coindesk.com)" (2020) — 290 comments)
[3] https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=27371787 ("PayPal shuts down long-time Tor supporter (eff.org)") (2021) — 185 comments)
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.
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.
A much milder, and more sensible, expression of your underlying sentiment is:
If an activity becomes this essential, the government should provide a competitive entrant in the same field.
Now the incumbent provider has competition, and there is a market participant tied to other incentives, etc.
No theft necessary.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You cannot mandate competitiveness.
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.
Lies: these transactions don't get charged back at a higher rate.
https://apnews.com/article/gun-violence-shootings-new-york-c...
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.
https://apnews.com/article/mastercard-visa-guns-second-amend...
Paypal IIRC also won't process payments for anything firearm related.
By inserting themselves as moral arbiters
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.
If that was the driving force, the payment processors would be reacting to the businesses on their own initiative from the dispute stats. But that is not what is happening, they are responding to public moral panic campaigns, which indicates that disputes are not the driving force.
Then you charge an additional fee in exchange for the MCC risk. This is easy.
What we're really seeing is moral policing.
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/ 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.
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.
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
Except AFAIK Visa/MasterCard are not okay with this. Because it's not actually about fraud or chargebacks.
> The cost of 15 minutes of labor from a human being wipes out the profit on the next zillion transactions
Chargeback fees are paid by the merchant for card-not-present transactions, regardless of outcome. It's not a real reason, regardless, since there'd be no point to go so fine-grained about what adult content is banned if all adult content has chargeback/fraud issues.
I, on the other hand, have experiences with payment processing for NSFW material, and based on these experiences my understanding is that the CC industry doesn't particularly want to be in the moral policing business, but avoids NSFW stuff because of legal and profitability concerns. However, as an outsider I admittedly have no direct insight into what actually happens inside the CC industry.
So my question to you is -- what are YOU basing your opinion on?
> but avoids NSFW stuff because of legal and profitability concerns
This, for example. They weren't enforcing a law, and there's no "profitability" issue as they could simply make the fees and reserves higher. So they might say that's why, but it obviously isn't the case. If it were, they'd demand a lot more than a few random handfuls of games be removed, and would target a lot more than adult content. They also would be totally fine if you sell that content through another payment method, because it's not their liability or profit at stake. However, if they're trying to censor content that isn't to their liking, this behavior makes sense.
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.
It makes no sense. They're a Fortune 500 company. They don't give a shit about the morality of nudie magazines.
They previously were banned (or maybe it was threatened to be banned) by the payment processors, then suddenly it went away.
OnlyFans has an insane amount of rules about what's allowed or not. And suspends and bans performers left and right for the slightest BS complaint (apparently usually from a competitor to that performer). That's how it panned out.
That must not be comfortable for OF because this is the kind of insanity that will make every performer keep looking for plausible alternate intermediaries so as to ditch OF. OF makes it because they are by far the largest source of traffic for performers.
It's either that or shady backroom deals with Visa.
I thought you were going for direct bank to bank operations.
I think these are currently the most practical and promising way to get out of the credit card duopoly's influence. It is more onerous on KYC check, but that sounds like a smaller price than a paid service just not existing at all.
I imagine few banks are staffed and teched to replicate payment processors’ anti-fraud systems.
Look at it from this angle: why is VISA or Stripe the arbiter of disputes between you and Netflix ? If Netflix made you pay a fee that is not part of your contract or you didn't initiate, you should be able to retrieve that money without asking a racket business to cover you.
And while banks handle fraud issues, arguably they shouldn't be the one reading your contracts and deciding how to interpret it. Some customer agency or small claims court should be more fitting ?
Perhaps you're in a place where that just wouldn't work, fair enough, but the issue should be on why you don't have these laws or institution, not why there's no private middle-men fixing the deals.
In the US, this is effectively non-existent these days.
Best case, now rare, there isn’t an arbitration clause in the EULA, so you have individuals suing companies in small claims.
The problem there is scale.
A company can screw over a lot more people than people will spend time pushing back against a company. Because fundamentally, a company doesn’t give a shit about maintaining a relationship with an angry customer.
The benefit of using payment intermediaries to run arbitration is that the company does want to continue having a relationship with them and is therefore incentivized to care more about the case than they would otherwise.
Granted, there are a lot of ills from payment processors too! But waving a wand and suggesting bank to bank transfers alone fixes the issue is naive.
Anyone else will be slow/inefficient (courts) or biased (Me or Netflix).
I find it interesting to want speed in deciding who should get screwed in a transaction.
There are economic advantages in people giving around their payment information, but the social impacts (the very existence of Visa/Mastercard and their influence on businesses or prices) aren't worth it IMHO.
IMHO people should be responsible of how they handle the keys to their money, and better tools should be given to secure and manage that, instead of a Big Brother like middlemen.
I mean, you don't pay cash at a restaurant with a string stuck to your money so you can pull it back three months after, because arguing with the restaurant feels too inefficient.
Allowing customers to claw back money unilaterally opens the door for customers to make a purchase, receive the product, then fraudulently take their money back.
There needs to be a third party in the middle to determine if a chargeback is fraudulent. Chargeback fraud already exists, and what you're proposing makes the problem significantly worse.
Baking it into the payment processing warps the whole situation.
Paying with crypto is still not very usable but you can still do it directly which limits the degree of extortion that can be applied. I think it will get better as it ceases to be 'interesting' and people develop tools that just work rather than try to revolutionize your life.
You can do all that today, although it requires some learning and setup, but at least in the US it's totally doable.
I know of Joel Valenzuela who is an evangelist about paying everything with decentralized cryptocurrencies:
The interesting thing about cryptocurrencies is using them directly, i.e. when users have their own wallets under their full control. Then it's magical when you make a transaction to somebody and think that nobody is censoring, filtering, moderating or rejecting it in any way. Oh and no PII either.
Edit: typo.
(I hate to defend the crypto space. I don't want the crypto bros to win. I really hope it doesn't come that far and it's the only option left...)
But you're right about the outcome from this. Most people don't know the difference, were only exposed to the post-2015 scams, and just assume all cryptocurrency is a scam.
So why didn't crypto block or ban them from doing these scams using their technology?
Unless you're saying crypto created the problem at this scale and can do nothing to stop the problem it created...?
I think you have a misunderstanding of the technology.
Bitcoin code is open-source. How do you prevent someone from using open-source?
And here we have a neat example of how this site, called "hacker news" of all things, can sometimes take on a absurdly idiotic hive-mind approach to some technology X where brainless hostility combines with laughable ignorance to reject something without knowing the first thing about it, even when the thing is emphatically a practical solution to a widely discussed problem.
But your basic thesis is correct, it's not apples-to-apples. Debit vs credit is a significant difference. Another major issue is that while the regulations for any one of the alternatives on my list aren't particularly onerous, I imagine the superset of all the regulations/contracts might well be.
All it takes is for RBI to say “This kind of content isn’t allowed” and you’d have the same effect. Here in the US, we didn’t build an IMPS like system until way too late in the game.
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.
Such as different middlemen having their own agenda.
Since we don't actually need visa or mastercard, but they make it damn convenient to buy stuff.
Similarly blockchain got their equivalent of this.
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.
‘That DoJ action? Might go away if you just _____.’
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.)
I don’t think there should be an obligation that money be substantially more traceable than is provided by bills having unique IDs on them..
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.
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.
Whoever said governments oppose this development? What makes you they're not ones holding the cards?
Your response is just baseless conjecture.
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.