> 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.

Great explanation, I think most people don't even consider the merchant banks at all.