You should kick up a major fuss. Call the media. Write a blog post. These companies should not be the moderator of what is socially acceptable.

What did the processing fees on CCBill look like, or did you get that far?

Could it run on lightspark?

Why not Square? Why not crypto? I realize HN kinda hates crypto as a group, but it solves your situation here, does it not? I realize it’s another step for users who don’t already have it, but I guess you need to determine whether it would cause enough friction to not get signups.

Because whores must be punished.

First day in the USA?

And for those that need it: */s*

> two American companies should not be able to dictate the moral standards of censorship for the world. They have too much power and too little oversight. Let's start with that.

To be fair, it's more than just two companies (and not all of them are US based). It's an ecosystem of companies with two major choke points.

Groups like Collective Shout work because Visa and MasterCard have deeply conservative Terms & Conditions and you can whine to them enough legally that they aren't taking their T&Cs correctly and "must" do a thing.

Visa and MasterCard's T&Cs are heavily conservative not just because they are conservative banking companies, but because they are conservative banking middlemen. A lot of their T&Cs also reflect all the Merchant Banks that these networks rely on to float the liquidity of the networks. Those Merchant Banks want a minimal risk on their high volume of investments in micro-loans. They express that minimal risk desire in strict, conservative T&Cs.

(It's a fun hypocrisy of the US-based Merchant Banks especially to want such minimal risk given they have the ability to use Federal Reserve 0% loans to back their portfolio of payment network loans. They have almost nothing but upside and surprisingly minimal risk naturally from that. But these are business-to-business banks that make their money the lowest risk ways.)

Visa and MasterCard get squeezed at both ends with what the Merchant Banks want and what these groups like Collective Shout want and become the easy chokepoint to attack. If the Merchant Banks backed off some Visa and MasterCard could potentially loosen their T&Cs.

Unfortunately as business-to-business banks, most of the biggest Merchant Banks (which often don't have recognizable consumer brands), several of which are not US-based, have very little interest in hearing from us and I don't see an easy strategy to encourage them to take more risks in the same way that a vocal minority team can encourage Visa and MasterCard to take fewer risks because their T&Cs already say so.

I can still blame Visa and MasterCard for being cowards on these and related subjects and not pushing back against loud complainers and highly conservative Merchant Banks, while also respecting that their position on some of this is between a rock and a hard place, as much "just a middleman" as a controlling character in what is happening.

I think the problem you have is they are clearly supporting one side or other which is accurate but I think they have censorship fear. There is no reason why they can't be called pornographic and lose access to payment systems.

I think there is credibility in saying that hiding behind the banner of stopping abuse as thin veneer of enforcing political or religious ideology. An argument is often made in the same vein for outlawing encryption. Clearly we must be against crime so we need to destroy encryption and if you don't destroy encryption you like crime. This type of argumentation is pretty similar to targeting distributors rather than content directly. Its definitely more effective but it seems like you just want to enforce your ideology rather than anything else.

Maybe you don't feel that argument was made after all it was a little bit all over the place but I saw it and there were a lot of links to organizations and achieve links and bills for you to continue research from. I am trying to balance here though because i see both yours's and the others perspective

Much more interesting is why these two companies were able to wield this much power in the first place, and why are they using it to censor this kind of content specifically?

You can't understand anything about the situation without replacing it in the context of the far right reactionary wave hitting our societies. Similarly, simply preventing these two companies of their power would be a temporary solution at best. There is a political will -and enough support for it- to push the puritan agenda.

If you truly care about fighting censorship, you should recognize where it actually comes from and fight the source.

Somebody has no appreciation for literature and writing. Philistine. Do you shake your fist at The New Yorker and The Atlantic because they don't get to the point fast enough for your poor code-addled engineer brain?

[flagged]

I mean this is just the ultimate form of price discrimination which happens to be legal. My question is why? This industry (payments) is completely driven by financials and occasionally regulations. They have no dog in a moral fight, so this must be about profits to them.

> Today it's adult content, which is an easy target.

Not even that easy of a target, because the crazy people in America want to call anything that acknowledges the existence of LGBTQ people or how they exist within greater society is "adult content" or "pornographic."

100% agreed and I think many people are missing the forest from the trees on this issue.

This stuff always starts off with "think of the children" and then evolves into something else entirely.

How about when we have a game spewing rhetoric about religion being bad (the Assassin's Creed franchise being one example) - should card processors force steam to remove those too, to continue using their payments infrastructure?

Correct.

Combine required/trendy KYC. With trendy reputation score and similar attributes for purchase/sale/trade. With machine agent automated decision flows. With pushing everything into digital. With near mono/duo/tri-opolization of goods/services.

Then, a near invisible control grid is almost complete.

But that's the goal on the face of it.

Let's use it for good, all.

Isn't that already the case? Gofundme has definitely canceled donations for racist endeavors. That's kinda similar, isn't it?

The article linked by this post disagrees:

> I’ve seen some comments floating around that suggest that the fix is to jettison Visa and MasterCard in favor of cryptocurrency.

> I think this is fundamentally a losing strategy: It moves the burden and risk of being unbanked onto the developers and publishers rather than the platforms. Yes, it decentralizes (to a point), but each node has less resources to defend themselves in court when the oppressors change their tactics again. I believe it’s better to stand together than fragment.

This is literally the original use case for cryptocurrency.

Honestly I think Visa/MC appreciate being nudged into this situation. Normalization of them as financial gatekeepers gives them a big favor that they can grant to governments by cutting the tap off to orgs/companies/people whenever. Its a direction that is convenient for them and a lot of the heat for the move gets passed on to some Australian non-profit instead of them. Hard for me to square their behavior unless they are quietly quite receptive.

DLSite (the closest thing to a Japanese itch.io) was one of the first targets of this push over a year ago. I'm pretty sure they just stopped accepting Visa/Mastercard on the site but set up a weird 'third party' where you could buy 'DLSite points' with your credit card.

So that Visa buys them, like it happened to French Carte bleue the moment it started targetting online shopping?

They did back in the 2000s, I used to buy stuff online with Edy. The problem was you had to buy a FeliCa USB adapter, or have a Sony Vaio or similar laptop that had a reader embedded. It never took off and people stopped offering it.

But even more IRL merchants are now accepting 交通系 IC cards as payment methods. I can use mine at the arcade and never worry about coins.

Please don't do this here.

Diverse, yes - but I wouldn't call it popular as a means of making regular financial transaction.

I would certainly only use it as last resort. Too slow, too cumbersome, most of the benefits being overstated or misunderstood. Even in this case, while you certainly can't block the transaction from going through, the site still needs a payment provider to manage transactions which someone might pressure into not working with adult sites.

The alternative is writing their own payment solution entirely to avoid having to work with anyone, but that's an entirely different rat's nest with regulatory complications.

They're still miserable from a UX perspective and for those of us in KYC countries? It can be very burdensome to verify ourselves and actually exchange real money for them.

Buying litecoin and sending it to someone else was a huge pain in my butt to put it mildly.

Furries making their own 00s-themed site website for chat/art/games powered by crypto would be the greatest thing. Small bonus if the website is open-source and provides data dumps, big bonus if it’s federated.

It would alleviate censorship concerns. It sounds practical, my understanding is that furries are statistically much more tech-savvy and willing to spend money and effort. Copyright and CSAM are issues that must be addressed, but hopefully small enough to be manageable, since it’s primarily furries (not realistic, not in aggressively copyrighted pop culture). And it seems like something many people would like, at least the nostalgic people in online spaces like HN. If it gets popular enough to extend to other niches I would join and help fund.

At some point they'd probably want to convert back to fiat and that's the trick. Coinbase or whichever company will probably follow suit.

I don’t care for furries myself but I think so long as it’s legal and doesn’t harm anyone. I don’t care what an adult chooses to spend their own money on.

And neither should payment processors. They have no business being gatekeepers for anyone’s money. My money isn’t and shouldn’t be subject to their shareholders interests.

No, what's happening is that people like NCOSE and Collective Shout are putting pressure on the processors. They've loudly bragged about it. It's not the first time they've done it. And they've been known to enlist government actors to help with the pressure ("Operation Choke Point").

Every time this issue comes up, a bunch of people crawl out of the woodwork trying to prove how "wise" they are by mouthing this idea about chargebacks. And the processors are happy to keep their heads down and not dispute it, or even encourage it, since they really want the whole issue to just go away.

Chargebacks are not the issue here, and if you haven't paid any attention at all to what's actually going on, you're best advised not to make yourself look like a fool by talking about what you guess might "most likely" be happening.

Most likely what's happening here is that the issuers (not Visa/MC) see a large number of chargebacks/fraud for adult content sites and have determined that it's much easier if they don't accept transactions from these sites.

That's definitely what I would claim if I wanted to take down content I didn't want. Who is going to prove them wrong?

What makes that "most likely," other than that you thought of it?

Sure but isn’t allowing those company to pick and choose what industries they service a dangerous precedent? They’ve monopolized the consumer credit markets and as such, can use that weight to dictate competition in consumer markets.

Isn't their official explanation that a religious group in Australia forced their hand?

Besides it not being a valid reason at all, they are not even trying to claim chargeback costs.

If this were actually true, then they would have gone after ALL NSFW games on Steam - but they very deliberately targeted specific genres that they didn't like.

You think chargebacks are disproportionately higher on NSFW games revolving around non-consensual themes versus other fetishes? Give me a break.

No. That's an often-repeated bullshit excuse.

Payment processors have ways of passing some of the chargeback risks onto the stores, and it's not like Steam itself is chargeback central. If you just want free games, pirating them is extremely easy, and trying to abuse chargebacks gets you banned.

The downside is of course that you limit your potential clientele to those who have bitcoin, and that every transaction is publicly logged forever.

Horrible fees, long waiting times, forced centralized exchanges. That’s after they claimed cheap, fast, decentralized. Fk that scam, I’ll stay with regular money.

No protection against theft, insane energy consumption.

Unless you live in China, Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, Bolivia, Bangladesh, Nepal, Iraq...

Who’s morals? Yours, specifically, I’m assuming?

Why does "morality" enforcement always devolve into obsession with what other people do with their genitals among consenting parties and completely ignore empathy, welfare of humankind and others, or any of the inconvenient and possibly expensive "Treating people beneath you nicely?". We never see such "moralists" punishing those who do such profoundly immoral things like actively forbidding helping the homeless.

we have it is called bitcoin my dude.

> Visa/Mastercard should have the right to refuse service.

Given their market dominance, they should absolutely not have any right to refuse service. At that level of scale, they need to be treated like common carriers, who must handle all communications/transactions.

Companies shouldn't have rights.

> Visa/Mastercard should have the right to refuse service

Really? If this was any other small to medium business where there were potentially tens, hundreds or even thousands of viable alternate businesses that provide what could be deemed as an equivalent service I might agree, but a global payments duopoly is essentially public infrastructure and should not be able to discriminate based on protected characteristics or personal subjective moral compass.

> Visa/Mastercard should have the right to refuse service.

No. A company beyond certain size functions more akin to a government body providing public service, and should be treated as such. Imagine the only ISP in the area refusing to provide service because fuck you that's why. Or Microsoft banning you from using Windows ever again. Think about it for a second - if Apple made a policy "iPhones cannot be sold to black people" would you say that a private company has all the rights to refuse service?

While freedom of association is fine on a personal level and maybe for small businesses, big corporation that are monopolies or oligopolies shouldn't have this freedom. They should be regulated and forced to serve everyone otherwise they have the power to exclude some people completely from such services with no alternative. Due to their power, their decisions affect people as if they are government decisions, yet we don't have a say on it like we do with the government so it's even worse than government censorship yet some people justify it because they are "private companies" as if that means something.

> Its not censorship when amazon removes a book

Analogies like this are misleading, IMO. Like if a theater chooses not to show a certain movie that's obviously not censorship, but if the water company effectively prevents the movie from showing by threatening to cut off the theater's water, colloquially the term would certainly apply. And what happened here seems a lot closer to the latter than the former.

> best thing .. to promote and create alternate payment processors

That would only make sense in your analogy, where the shutoff stemmed from the payment processor owner's moral compass. What actually happened here is that an advocacy group hounded the biggest processors into it, so as other processors get big enough, by symmetry the same thing will repeat.

It seems to me that what's needed here is other advocacy groups willing to hound the processors in the other direction.

Broadly speaking I'd usually agree, except that Visa/Mastercard are a two-company oligopoly at this point, with effectively no meaningful competition. Yes, other payment mechanisms exist, but consider how much it limits the viability of an online business to not accept credit cards.

> The second thing I would do is intentionally stop processing payments on behalf of anyone I was uncomfortable with on a personal level

Corporations do not have a "personal level"

This is fair, as long as you're a small operation, and those you didn't like can go shop elsewhere. Visa + MasterCard are a duopoly controlling the overwhelming majority of the market, and if they ban a seller, there's little else the seller can switch to.

I think a processor like Visa could benefit a lot from the status similar to the "common carrier". Like a telephone network must offer service to anyone, but cannot be held liable for the content of the communication (even if criminals are using it), Visa could accept the requirement to pass payments to any counterparty in exchange for dropping the KYC requirements. Let banks and merchants care about that.

I don't think that the US or EU government would agree to grant such a status though.

It's censorship because literally a censor activist group engaged in a campaign to push these processors to do this.

This is a mis-definition of censorship, similar to what happens to 'propaganda', where you're only considering the censorship that you don't like to be censorship.

If your water company stops delivering water to you because you post furry porn it becomes a problem. The problem is when a company becomes so big that it is a natural monopoly (or effectively part of a cartel), while basically being necessary infrastructure to operate in a modern society.

These payment networks fit that description, and should either be broken apart so that you get the necessary competition, or be regulated so that they have to provide service for legal goods and services in a given jurisdiction.