Clarifying I find the furry art weird, and not pornographic. (Weird is fine btw, normal is the worse insult imho)

I think the biggest issue is the damage that the word "Censorship" has taken in the last few years. If I ran a payment processor, the first thing I would do is try to be as neutral as my moral compass allows. The second thing I would do is intentionally stop processing payments on behalf of anyone I was uncomfortable with on a personal level. I dont support a thing, so I wont give material support to a thing. Thats not censorship. Its not censorship when amazon removes a book, or a publisher takes something out of print. If everything is censorship, including freedom of association, nothing is censorship.

I think the best thing that can be done about this problem is to promote and create alternate payment processors. The second best thing is to help these sites accept crypto payments (yes I know the article hung a lantern on that, but still)

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.