> and I think they should be banned from doing so

In general though outside protected classes business can, and should IMHO, have a lot of discretion over who they choose to do business with and how they do business.

Unless we want a carve out for payment processors. Treat them as a utility of sorts? Sounds like an interesting idea TBH.

To me it's critical though that society has room to moderate itself where the government can not and should not. Something we've lost with social media is the ability to collectively ignore the guy at the bar nobody likes talking to. All the guys from all the bars are on the internet now being very loud.

> Unless we want a carve out for payment processors. Treat them as a utility of sorts?

Given that there are two payment processors that have about 90% global market share (excluding China) and your bank chooses the payment processor for the most part, yes we should regulate them and force them to process payment for any legal business.

They have the ability to effectively determine what we can spend our money on when we can’t get cash to the vendor in person, and almost every alternative processor has to deal with them and is also subject to their rules.

The only way around this is via informal networks. Cryptocurrency isn’t an option for many as it’s very hard to obtain, due to the duopoly coercing banks and governments to keep people on their systems.

I don’t live in the US, and where I live has a local electronic non-credit card payment system which has been around since the 80s. It’s less popular now because only the card networks support contactless payments instead of swipe/chip and pin. All the systems support contactless use, but banks won’t enable it because it has no interchange fees.