> If PH is having trouble processing any form of credit card, a smaller company will have no chance at all. We're seeing a sterilization of legitimate porn on the internet, done by legitimate tax paying western companies. It'll be left to whoever can operate beyond those constraints, which is kind of a sad state of affairs for free speech, separation of church and state, and policing in general.
Welcome to the "free(ish) market." As I've said before, people love to say they're in favor of the "free market," until they get one. There is no law preventing any payment processor from accepting clients in the adult content space. They do it simply because of risk and to protect their corporate image.
This pedantic argument is so tired. This is not about arguing over the details of some economic model. The problem is culturally pushing some neopuritan nonsense, always in a highly selective way as you can always find a ton of contradictions. Not to mention when you consider the practicality of outright banning entire market categories in order to combat tiny edge cases.
These conversations should be about the end results and not just blindly accepting a culture of overreacting to every sort of risk.
Forcing companies to middleman sales at gun point isn't any better of a solution either, nor is it even probable, which is really the only other economic model (besides some true-scotsman bitcoin solution).
Trying to work with the system is better than abandoning it for some pipedream or throwing up our hands like there's no solution.
"This is not about arguing over the details of some economic model. The problem is culturally pushing some neopuritan nonsense"
The problem is these companies have accumulated so much power, they can push anything they want on you. They can reach into your device, scan you files, canxell your transaction, etc. and there is fuck all you cam do about it.
Anyhow free-market is a meaningless label akin to socialism.
People misuse it so much that it lost any meaning.
Free-market means legislative anarchy of anything to do with markets. The moment the is a mandate ie corn subsidies, banned substances its no longer free by the definition.
> The problem is culturally pushing some neopuritan nonsense, always in a highly selective way as you can always find a ton of contradiction
But are you willing to argue the same for every minor group of content/business that gets selected out but the same economic model ?
We'll be pushing en masse against banning porn. Will we also be doing the same for every single category of legit business that credit card companies won't touch for any reason they feel like ?
That seems highly unrealistic to me, and we're basically saying to minority groups that the day Mastercard doesn't want them as customers they're done and done.
I think there's an expectation from people who casually support economic libertarianism, that the social compact will not come to bear on commercial enterprise when governance is removed. Anyone who thinks a little deeper about it knows it won't play out this way, and that reputation is part and parcel of the product, and public opinion will always need to reckoned with by any enterprise that wants to scale.
The chokepoint isn't the government in this case, but rather the major card brands (Visa, MasterCard, American Express). In the US, these brands have embedded morality clauses that prohibit these payments from riding their rails[1].
That being said, most US debit networks (Star, Pulse, Coop, etc) don't have these restrictions. It does damage the user experience to limit your card acceptance to most debit cards.
It's that weird American kind of funny that you can't pay for porn with an American Express credit card, but you can buy guns and a few crates of ammo.
You're slicing the baloney pretty thin if you agree that the government has taken action against these same financial institutions, with respect to their processing similar payments, but it's completely unrelated to the current situation, and that the financial institutions should act as if nothing's ever happened before.
Or non-action. Europe and Australia have regulated/reduced credit card interchange fees, but USA has not.
This whole “pay with card to get a lot of points!” thing while also allowing processors to have anti-competitive terms forbidding surcharges for credit card payments is a huuuuuuuge boon for their industry.
It's really pretty crazy when you think about it. My card is 2% cash back everywhere. Discover is basically letting me steal 2% of the revenue of every shop I visit and the shops can't do anything about it.
This is where you build a UX around buying some crypto-token in the check-out flow via a simple redirect to a partner, fix your credit card issue, and the partner immediately gets you a USDC transfer after charging the credit card.
Yes, there are companies out there that will do this.
Wow, this is sooo disingenuous I can not believe it is even being said
Aside from the fact that where a metric ton of regulations targeting processing adult content payments under the guide of "protecting the children"
There is another metric ton of regulations around creating and operating a payment processing system. There is a reason no competitors to paypal have really emerged. That reason is GOVERNMENT REGULATIONS..
Please stop saying people do not like a free market when they get one as there is NOTHING FREE MARKET about the banking industry in either the world or the US
How many of those government regulations were written by private companies who lobbied (read bribed) politicians to pass them specifically to keep out competitors? Government regulation is a very important tool, but like any tool it can be abused and used in harmful ways, especially if you don't do anything meaningful to prevent it.
> it will ALWAYS be abused in harmful ways. This has always been true, and will always be true
This is demonstrably false. There are countless regulations that are vital to your every day life which serve absolutely no nefarious purpose.
Your flaw is assuming that corruption can only come from government. You risk allowing yourself to be ruled and abused by corrupt corporations (many of which are larger and have more money than some governments).
Make no mistake, there will always be people who will try to take advantage of you. They will flock to places where they have power over others. Some of them will end up in government and some of them will end up in corporations. As a citizen, you may have the power to vote out the ones that exist in governments. You have zero power over who is employed at a corporation.
You want to weaken the thing you have at least some measure of control over to allow yourself to be ruled over by something you have no ability to control or influence.
I don't understand the willingness to subjugate yourself before powerful corporations while also tying your own hands behind your back as you bend over for them. Is it because you believe that they will be benevolent rulers? History shows us they will not. Does it make it easier to pretend that you aren't being ruled? History shows us you most assuredly will be.
Maybe it's because we don't talk much about the long history of abuses people suffer when they allow themselves to be ruled by corporations. Maybe you think that those horrific abuses which happen even today overseas could never happen to you even if you weaken the government which currently protects you from those very same conditions. It's a bit like watching someone beg to be enslaved while insisting they'll somehow have freed themselves once they are...
>>>You risk allowing yourself to be ruled and abused by corrupt corporations
Absent Government there can be no corporations, Business sure, but business absent government looks very different
Corporations are fictional entities created by government regulations namely liability shields, to facilitate investment.
>As a citizen, you may have the power to vote out the ones that exist in governments
Reality says other wise, as a citizen my vote only carries the measure if there is a tie, there as never been a tie...
This mystical rose colored view of democracy does not match reality.
>You have zero power over who is employed at a corporation.
I would say my power to say who is employed at a corporation is about the same as my power to say who is in power in government, that is not even talking about who I have the option to vote for.
In my entire life I do not believe a Single person I have ever voted for as ever won the election... I do not vote for either Republicans or Democrats
>>I don't understand the willingness to subjugate yourself before powerful corporations
that is because you have confused my position. Allow me to restate it. I am not opposed to Government.. I am opposed to the type of government we have, I believe the constitution did not do enough to limit government.
Government should only be empowered to protect the individual rights. Specifically negative individual rights. Not "Human rights" which are often defined to include positive rights, things like Housing, Health Care, and all manner of other things the government must provide..
Government should not be the parent, the nanny, or the sovereign over the people. The type of government found in most of the "First World" is a complete inversion of what government should be, subservient to the people, not sovereign over them
Read The Law by Frederic Bastiat to glean an understanding of where I believe government regulations, and law should be at and how it should be limited
The libertarian free market folks are 100% in agreement with the "those rules were written by the businesses that are supposed to follow them" point. Businesses love the regulations that protect their market share. They may be pro-free-market when times are good, but when times are bad they cry foul about speculators and lobby for bailouts. I'm sure if I was a business I'd do the same :)
The problem exists because payment processing is a duopoly, not a free market (something that, in the case of a natural monopoly, can only be maintained through vigorous regulation).
Payment processing is not a natural monopoly. The fact that it is a duopoly demonstrates that there could be competition in the space, so you can't use that as an excuse.
They remain a duopoly rather than a monopoly only because they're already the subject of massive (though still inadequate) antitrust action. An economic modelling result I saw once suggested that a competitive market requires that the top four competitors own no more than a combined 60% of the market.
Yeah. But, supposedly, in a free market, if there's demand for it (a payment processor that accepts porn), there would be supply. Someone would come up with a company devoted to just that.
The problem isn't that you need an alternative to PayPal, you need an alternative to Visa and MasterCard.
That's a lot harder because they have more of a network effect. People have a Visa or MasterCard because it's widely accepted and it's widely accepted because a lot of people have one.
The solution to this is to make it easier for people to get or accept the alternative payment network. Only now you're into regulatory barriers.
The critical feature of PornCard is that you don't have to give your name, right? Except that they're specifically prohibited from offering that.
The regulatory cost of establishing a new card is effectively the same whether you have a hundred users or a billion, so high regulatory costs put a disproportionate disadvantage on small and upstart networks, which would then have to charge higher fees, which would then cause no one to accept them.
The regulations destroy competition and without competition you don't have a free market.
Thank you! It’s incredible that I had to wade through so many comments discussing this news without getting to the heart of it. Network effects breed centralization via a lack of competition. Companies whose products or services have network effects can abuse that power in many ways, including discriminating against customers or content, as Visa/MasterCard/PayPal/Stripe regularly do. This compels everyone to have to act the way these companies dictate, which is a huge problem for any free society.
I agree with you that some regulations are harmful and are just plain old regulatory capture (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture) that protects the big incumbents. But we need well-targeted regulation for this situation where the size of existing networks prevents new payment processors from participating and having a shot in the economy. one option is that once you’re above a certain size, providers benefiting from network effects must be treated like a government entity, just like we regulate utilities. After all, services like payment processing are incredibly fundamental to our society’s operation. Another option is to force interoperability so that a new small business doesn’t face an insurmountable barrier to competition.
It’s a Monopoly. Or in this case of Visa/MasterCard, a duopoly. There are laws to break up monopolies/duopolies. In the case of an oligarchy, there are laws to break up anticompetitive behavior and collusions.
If only there was a Standardized Electronic Payments API supported by all banks, perhaps with interoperable bank account numbers. Then you could just send money to any account without the need for credit card providers.
I wonder if FedNow would help, whenever that is supposedly supposed to show up. Then there wouldn't necessarily be a need for intermediary payment networks in the first place.
I hope these have two different accounts and you can only -push- payments with a unique transaction idea. I hate the current system of the input and output account having the same number for banks.
It's far too fractured, speculative and volatile to be any sort of competition. It was probably started with those intentions and stable coins are trying to do that but the major coins are all pretty useless at this point for proper transactions. No large site wants to touch crypto as a viable payment method. Plus the reputation of being used for drugs and blackmail is hampering Bitcoin
This is a common misconception (I blame American politics). In _perfect competition_ this would hold true; however a _free_ market is not guaranteed to be competitive, much less close to _perfect_ competition.
It's not just competition, in credit card space, you basically have a duopoly with Visa and Mastercard.
If we were talking about bars, then yes, you have thousands of bars, and if legal, it wouldnt be hard to find a naked bar. But with two companies, you're far away from free-anything.
Absolutely that's why we have to have regulations. The larger companies get the more they tend toward being monopolies and warping the idea of free markets.
Where this always falls short is when there is not enough demand make it possible to run a business on said demand.
This is usually startups biggest problem - there exists demand, but not enough demand in the right mix to be able to make a living/business/millions/etc... filling it.
I refuse to believe this is some free market issue of payment processors wanting the right to not interact with businesses they find morally objectionable.
This is about liability and regulation. The processors are scared to process these transactions. It's not that they don't want to.
You can prove that, right? Because, as I said, there's no law against processing porn payments, and risk can be mitigated by just charging more. Your refusal to believe anything is irrelevant.
The reason nobody can compete is because of regulations. If it was a free market, there wouldn't be so many regulations, and people would be able to compete.
The unfortunate truth is that anarchy is better than a weak democracy, because weak democracies just become oligarchies with more steps.
Ofc, a strong democracy is better than either, and regulations are extremely important. But in this case, those regulations are more for the oligarchs than the people.
If you really want a great example of anarchy vs oligarchy, take note that the anarchy of the private world ran Trump into the ground repeatedly and called him a loser while our public world gave him all the power it could and started a cult. Anarchy isn't great, but it's better than that.
Okay, so, let me ask you a question: there are payment processors that process adult transactions; has a single one had its license pulled because of that? I can't find a single instance of that happening, only more instances of adult content providers being targeted this way: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/03/payment-processors-are...
I'm not aware of any instances of payment processors getting shut down, but government administrations have indeed had policies of greater scrutiny of "vice" businesses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point
So? Spin off everything "risky" into another corporate entity, and charge more. The simple fact that they don't do this tells me they just don't want to.
This is America, nobody will ever take seriously the argument that it's not the government doing it when they can get cheap internet points by saying "but muh freedoms!1!!"
If an article asking questions about it from 2014 is the most compelling piece of evidence that this is a serious issue then I'd say it isn't particularly compelling.
Note that the "Operation Chokepoint" wasn't just about porn - it was also shutting down payday lenders and firearm dealers. The operation was stopped by the government in 2016 and bipartisan legislation passed in 2017 to stop it happening again: https://www.forbes.com/sites/norbertmichel/2018/11/05/newly-...
Welcome to the "free(ish) market." As I've said before, people love to say they're in favor of the "free market," until they get one. There is no law preventing any payment processor from accepting clients in the adult content space. They do it simply because of risk and to protect their corporate image.