Hmm, maybe, I haven't thought about it much. The angle I'm taking is, as a private citizen I choose not to do business with entities I think are immoral, such as Amazon and Home Depot and Hobby Lobby and Uline and Tesla. If I were a business owner, I would prefer to continue to not to do business with those entities and I'd be pretty pissed if I was forced to by the government. That does seem to agree with your "same rights as private citizens" framing, yes, though I'm not sure I'd go so far as to defend the CU decision. I dunno. Interesting question, I'd welcome your thoughts on this.

This is how it's been done in the USA since 9/11. Data isn't subpoenaed (would getting into people's rights) it's just bought (no rights violation). Controls aren't from the government, they are 'implementing industry standards'. Want to silence someone? Deplatform them. Want to deny access? Flag them with an opaque trust score. No constitutional rights are violated.

> Is it controversial that companies aren't allowed to refuse service based on gender or race (in the US at least)?

Those are legal categories known as "protected classes," and yeah, it was and is pretty controversial[1]. I think you'd have a hard time getting purchasers of porn games declared a protected class.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964 ; further reading, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_group

> We collectively agreed long ago that monopolies do not get to enjoy the same freedoms that other companies do.

I think that's generally only the case for natural monopolies, such as power infrastructure, where breaking them up isn't really a feasible solution (ie we don't want 20 different power lines running to each house). I don't think payment processing meets that standard, we could easily break them up and re-introduce competition into the market.

i'd add, they're also not private. i mean, i know a publy-traded company is "in the private sector", but it's still a collectively-owned resource and that's a lot different from compelling a privately-owned company.

You are correct, I don't think not being able to purchase porn games rises to the same level of danger as unsafe food or climate change, to require the government to tell businesses how they may operate.

> With your logic we should have just waited for free market competition to kick in Cocal cola and McDonalds to deiced on their own to stop putting arsenic into our food.

I don't think that's a fair comparison. No one is dying here. I do think the government should step into this market and perform major intervention by breaking up the big two companies into many little ones who can compete. After that, some payment processors may choose to support these business models despite the hit to their stock price (or whatever Visa's dumb argument is for not allowing these games).

> I have IRL facepalmed reading this. This comment gave me the equivalent exposure to 10 hours on X/Twitter.

I don't know man, jumping into a conversation like this is a great way to get people to NOT listen. I agree with your following point and would add I find these matters more complicated. For example, you wouldn't be typing a comment on this site without the kind of corporate freedom that raised the standard of living for the entire planet resulting in a shared technological advancement. Seems this is always a trade off, how much freedom are you willing to give up for centralized fascist governmental control?

Known dine-and-dasher - no, I think you should be forced to serve them. You don't know if they're going to dine and dash you, you're not the police or the courts, punishing a dine and dasher. Your job is to serve food to those who pay you. If you've got a problem, make them pay for food first?

Consultant - unless you've got a legitimate need to reject providing services to them, I tend to think the same, you should have to serve them if they're trying to pay you, or there's a legitimate business need to avoid that client.

Transport company - it's not your job to judge what's being moved. It's your job to move something from A to B. If you want to avoid moving livestock, don't go into the transport business. Should that same vegan be allowed to not teach kids in school because the kids they teach eat ham sandwiches? Should they be allowed to reject someone from banking services just because they own a fur coat?

Can't you price that into their bill, or require payment before services? That is what most construction companies already do, if you are a pain in the ass they charge you more and more until you either don't want it any more or they are satisfied that their pay is worth your trouble, and if payment is potentially questionable they make you pay beforehand.

You're right - but in that instance the justification in my mind (and what you'd presumably argue if challenged legally) is that they're difficult to work with - which I'm okay with.

But not wanting to concrete that person's driveway because they're in the army, or because they're a politician or whatever else along those lines I think shouldn't be allowed.

None of this has anything to do with companies having rights. You as a person can choose to not to business with another person.

There is still an alternative, plain paper cash, and is run by the government. Won't trust most governments these days to do it though

Absolutely. But on the flip side I can also recognise that frankly, governments are terrible at running things. I think a Singapore style model is best - a giant holding company like Temasek that is wholly government funded and owned, but companies owned by the holding company are still beholden to the free market forces, are the best way to go for things like payment processors, airlines, utilities, etc.

> But, effectively, you want to tell other people what to do with their money without taking on any financial risk for those policies.

For this kind of service (again leaning on a classification as 'public infrastructure') I suppose my answer is yes.

> Why does one segment of the public get to tell another segment of the public what to do with their money without putting any skin in the game?

I'm suggesting that regulation prevents them from _disallowing_ access to payments services for things that are not explicitly illegal. In this case I don't see 'Telling X what to do' and 'Telling X that they're NOT allowed to refuse to provide service in these cases' as the same thing, even though they're both essentially 'Mandating that X operate in a certain way'. The difference here being that refusal of service, while still being a choice about how to run, is explicitly a blocking choice for others in certain situations, and not just a choice to, for example, create a new credit product for the market.

> Why does one segment of the public get to tell another segment of the public what to do with their money without putting any skin in the game?

Is this not also just Collective Shout themselves pressuring the payment processors into refusing transactions from a third party for content that they themselves deem inappropriate?

> The majority shareholders for Visa are retirement accounts and retail investors

Is Visa not refusing a legitimate transaction (non-fraudulent, no rollback or refund) going to hurt these investors when part of their investment income comes from usage fees? And if an investor that has concerns about _how_ their investment makes money is that not now a different issue?

Edit: Added last point about shareholders.

Because we know that not doing so leads to bad outcomes, and in some cases, to outright catastrophe.

A person who was not invested in subprime mortgages in 2006 had no skin in the game - yet the fact that others did invest in subprime mortgages created instabilities that threatened them. Virtually everyone agrees, in retrospect, that something should have been done then. But it wasn't, with precisely the justification you're articulating here. The problem is that that person did in fact have skin in the game, because the outcome had important ramifications for their life even if those ramifications were not in the form of direct financial losses.

Now, sure, your ability to buy furry porn is very different from sparking a global recession. But you're implicitly articulating a very strong claim here, that you cannot regulate economic activity to which you are not a party. That has a clear counterexample well within the memories of most people reading this thread.

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I think we agree that private individuals should be able to purchase legal content from the people who produce it. Without action here, that will become either impossible or very difficult, to the point of having a major chilling effect. I think we also agree that businesses should generally have the right to conduct business as they see fit, both because it allows the exploration of new ideas and because market economics is a powerful force for increasing productivity.

To me, that says that there is a tension between two irreconcilable rights. On one side, we have the rights of businesses to act in their economic best interest (which is important!). On the other side, we have the rights of individuals to (actually and with reasonable effort) engage in lawful private microeconomic activity. And when you encounter such a tension, you need to consider:

- How important the rights are

- How much of one you get by sacrificing some of the other

In this case, I would consider the ability of individuals to conduct microeconomic activity more important than the ability of corporations to conduct what is effectively a PR campaign (since no one seems to be of the opinion that payment processors are actually taking a loss on people buying porn, they're just caving to political pressure). And I think the restriction of payment processors here is small compared to the potential restriction on private individuals. So to me, the trade-off has a clear winner.

If you disagree with this chain of reasoning, can you explain where?

>The government thought regulating the drug market (that is, total ban) would make people not want to do drugs

Eh, that is what was sold to the mainstream idiot. The 'war on drugs' has almost always been a fight against immigrants and minorities. The free market doesn't solve racism against minorities.