It comes down to fraud. MasterCard and Visa don't give a crap how nasty your content is (they fund terrorism, FFS). What they don't like is dealing with chargeback fees.

Stripe has pretty strict rules over prohibited businesses (https://stripe.com/us/prohibited-businesses). For example, here's their list of "high risk businesses", prohibited by their financial partners:

> Bankruptcy lawyers; computer technical support; psychic services; travel reservation services and clubs; airlines; cruises; timeshares; prepaid phone cards, phone services, and cell phones; telemarketing, telecommunications equipment and telephone sales; drop shipping; forwarding brokers; negative response marketing; credit card and identity theft protection; the use of credit to pay for lending services; any businesses that we believe poses elevated financial risk, legal liability, or violates card network or bank policies; any business or organization that a. engages in, encourages, promotes or celebrates unlawful violence or physical harm to persons or property, or b. engages in, encourages, promotes or celebrates unlawful violence toward any group based on race, religion, disability, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, or any other immutable characteristic

"Travel reservation services and clubs" bit me at some point, I wanted to build a flight reservation service and was surprised to hear I couldn't. But apparently, it's a high risk business because lots of people chargeback flight tickets.

Also, Gab completely fails that last criteria, they're not kidding anyone.

If fraud was the only thing they cared about, why was Alex Jones (and other conservatives) deplatformed by MasterCard? Why are some banks stopping every customer they have from allowing them to buy firearms?

> why was Alex Jones deplatformed by MasterCard

Oh I can't possibly think of a reason why someone would chargeback Alex Jones' Totally Legitimate Line of "BURN ALL YOUR FAT" products. Health & Wellness is a known high risk category.

> [...] firearms?

I'm talking about Visa and MasterCard. Banks have regulations to worry about.

I think it was Buzzfeed News or Daily Beast but they did an investigation into Alex jones products... they’re legit products

I'm guessing you're referencing this? https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/charliewarzel/we-sent-a...

I just skimmed it, looks like a good piece of investigative work. I don't see where you're reading they're "legit products", all the article seems to say is that they're not outright dangerous.

And this holds absolutely no value to payment processors, btw. Health & Wellness is a high risk category, period. I don't know why you think "but they're legit!" is even sort of relevant.

I really, really don't buy this explanation. It's a convenient scapegoat but I strongly believe it doesn't apply here. They came down on Patreon for this, but we never heard anything about chargebacks. Furthermore, why are they telling companies specifically what they need to block? If they are able to be this specific about why they want to block certain content, then why in the world can't we also hear the empirical reason they bothered to light the fire?

I also don't think that accusing MasterCard/Visa of 'funding terrorism' is a good rebuttal to this. Terrorists are probably better at evading the payment networks than legitimate content creators that want nothing more than to legitimately accept payments.

I mean, what's surprising about it though? These people (Gab, Alex Jones, etc)... they paint a target on their back and yell to all the businesses "I'm bad! I'm nasty! You don't want to have me as a client! It's bad for your PR!".

I'm sure you can find inconsistencies because other people/businesses are better clients, don't pain a target on themselves, and if they break rules they aren't so blatant about it.

I mean I don't know whether it was fair or not for Alex Jones to be banned, no clue. What I do know is that plenty of people who really haven't broken any rules have been told to GTFO on the basis that payment networks don't want payments for sexual content. This bugs me even as a person who hasn't been affected by it personally.

But they did break the rules. The rules explicitly state no sexual/nsfw material. Am I misunderstanding you?

Stripe has that rule, but does Visa or MasterCard?

Seeing as the category is called "Products or services that are otherwise prohibited by our financial partners", then it's definitely upstream of Stripe. I don't know who exactly has that rule, could be Discover for all I know.

The easy solution would be the simply disallow card transactions for Gab but allow other stuff.

There is more to the financial industry than credit cards. In the EU you have SEPA which basically allows you to charge a bank account like a credit card (though if you're high risk you'll need written consent from the owner).

This omgchargebacks explanation came up in a previous thread about Stripe but it's silly.

Stripe (et al) could just require higher risk categories complete AVS and 3DS to be authorised. Card companies could also manually force out-of-band verification (SMS, email, etc) you can ask but guarantee the cardholder is the card owner.

That's coming pretty soon actually. The EU is bringing new rules live in 2019 which will require everyone to do that stuff.

I didn't know that, thanks.

Yeah that adds the requirement for two factor authentication with flexible out of band options, by September 2019.

http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_MEMO-17-4961_en.htm

So yes, this further lessens the risk of "that wasn't me" when a significant-other checks the bank statement and sees a pile of porn purchases. That's the historical risk element of legitimate adult transactions.

Perhaps the card processing chain will relax after that.

My take (from a brief stint with a debit card issuer):

This is about the chilling effect of regulator's behavior.

Compliance is expensive, hard, and detailed. And if you fuck it up, it can sting very badly. Financial companies get away with a whole hell of a lot in America, but they can still get very expensive fines, and whole departments exist to mitigate this risk.

Financial software engineering is precisely as poor as you think it was. In 1985. Forget the scary stuff they build on purpose. The real fear is the scary stuff you didn't realize you built until an auditor finds it.

You don't ever want to do the kind of thing that causes an auditor to say "let's examine this closer", even if that thing is ultimately legal for reasons X and Y. You want the system to pass inspection with the minimum amount of scrutiny.

Being genuinely compliant for many types of nuanced clients is great. But it's a lot cheaper, and a lot safer, to be strictly compliant for limited types of generic clients. When you support services like this, you put a target on your back[0].

Mastercard and Visa are like Palantir. They're not innocent, but they're single nodes in a large machine that you'll never hear about because it doesn't interface directly with the public, and so they get all the shit because nobody knows where else to send it. Payment processors like FIS, the many institutions that issue cards through the card companies processed by the processing companies, they all have their own shaky infrastructure and compliance fears. No one org decides to shaft the public. They're all covering their asses. As a result, the set of industry best practices converges on the safest common denominator.

You want them to risk millions in fines and investigation that unearths more skeletons so you can host gifs of boobs? Through services where margins are measured in basis points? Good luck.

TLDLR: Visa and Mastercard are following orders from America, and behaving sanely given a corporation's fiduciary duty to not die. The correct place to attack this is with regulation that mandates equal access. Or better yet, blind access. Again, good luck.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point

Shit like this is exactly why the world needs easy to use and free as in free crypto. It's a long road until its even close to maintstream, but I do believe we'll get there some day.

Because it’s far easier to use/trust a handful of big well-known companies than hundreds and hundreds of little companies when it comes to access to my bank account?

You should be trusting no one. Your money should be a push system. You should push money to someone else instead of giving them they keys and they take the money out.

I'll trust whoever I want, and that includes the FDIC insured banking system. This is an incorrect use of the term "should" which implies obligation. I have zero obligation to go through life without trusting anyone, because I consider that a worse life than one where I make calculated decisions about who I believe to be trustworthy, as all sane adult humans do.

I imagine your alternative is some cryptocurrency that becomes worthless as soon as people stop running the nodes. Yeah, that definitely has less risk than a legal financial entity backed by the United States Government.

My alternative is not some cryptocurrency. I would be happy if credit cards moved to a system where I get a message requesting a charge and I reply to authorize it. Also cash is pretty much a push system, you hand the money to the store instead of telling them where your pocket is and letting them pick what they need. Unfortunately that doesn't work online.

My guess (and it's only a guess) is that might somehow all boil down to old money vs. new money and the tension/friction between the power-brokers in those two spheres of influence.

Software: It's open source. Don't like it? You fix it.

Capitalism: It's a free country. Don't like it? Start your own business.

So why did we need to pass GDPR and Net Neutrality? The issues they were intended to address also had theoretical solutions in "write more software and start more competitors".

Sure lets eliminate the massive, burdensome, complex financial regulatory environment, dismantle SWIFT, disband the FED, and remove prohibitions on crypto-currencies. Until then we don't have free markets where one can simply "start their own business" and do it better. We have a centrally-controlled government market.

build your own bank build your own internet service provider

Having government involved in every aspect of your financial life is a gross distortion of the word capitalism.