Yes, it can, but the question is who is going to decide it.
Going with this argument any organization large enough would be criminal.
I am pretty sure that Google and Apple and Facebook and Amazon they somewhere fund or support knowingly or unknowingly some kind of criminal activity.
That doesn't seem to be a problem for payment processors, though.
Neither is a problem that some funky stuff shows on Youtube from time to time which is promptly taken down when somebody reports it.
The question is whether PH did this knowingly and whether it is Mastercard's responsibility to act on it and how much of this is realy up to Mastercard to judge.
If PH is taking down any content that is reported and deactivating accounts then that is basically the same thing as Youtube does and we are now in gray territory when PH is being punished for not being to Mastercard's liking for some reason.
Going with this argument any organization large enough would be criminal.
Normally what will happen is if the assistance in money laundering or funding criminal activity is incidental or the organization didn't know there was a problem and couldn't be reasonably expected to know, then it's not a crime. But if the organization knows or should have known, then it is. MasterCard is now in the knows or should have known state, so continuing to fund illegal activity could reasonably be considered a crime, at least based on the typical patterns of these laws.
If it is the case that only minority of users are responsible then Youtube is likewise liable and Mastercard should stop serving Youtube knowing that at any point in time Youtube has some users that have illegal content.
It is different to stop payments for illegal activity and stopping payments to a large corporation that has huge user base that has some users engaging in illegal activity.
If it is ok to do that then practically no current large company that has large user base could be served by payment organizations.
You are missing the point here.
MasterCard doesn't care.
They have zero interest in fighting legal battles to retain PornHub's business.
> If it is the case that only minority of users are responsible then Youtube
YouTube spends a ton of money building extensive controls to catch illegal content and remove it from their platform as quickly as possible. So much so a lot of should be legal content gets sucked up and blocked/ removed.
From the sounds of it, PornHub doesn't have similar controls even as they are in a business which neck deep in potential legal/ ethical challenges.
If this rule was enforced equally, it could be a good thing overall. Yes, it would probably destroy for example YT as it is now and I'm ok with that.
The real question (for a business) is whether the profit of doing business with a company is worth the potential liability. In this case, PornHub has a rather high profile legal overhang which makes the liability potentially very high.
> I am pretty sure that Google and Apple and Facebook and Amazon they somewhere fund or support knowingly or unknowingly some kind of criminal activity.
Look at how quickly Google pulls content from YouTube based on the first sniff of a DMCA claim. Businesses have zero interest in fighting a legal battle for a third party.
Waiting to get conviction is not good way to live or business to operate.
Yes, but they don't fund crime. They just allow transactions between customers and sellers.
Especially in this case I think it's more appropriate if:
- the payment provider reports to the police
- the police is properly founded and equipped to handle such cases (hint it isn't in most countries I'm aware of).
- If after a initial short "check" the police believes a deeper investigation is adequate the payment provider might have to suspend service (temporary with time limited and telling the porn company why).
I thing this would be much more appropriate.
Furthermore: Requiring manual review of pron material and reasonable proof of consent/age if it's not obvious from the video.
No, they are not funding it, my wording was far from perfect.
This is very very similar to why Marijuana retailers have trouble with banking. There are a lot of laws around banking and criminal activity which make banks very averse to dealing with anything that remotely smells criminal.
https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2018/01/22/...
Depends on what you mean by funding. If payment processor like Mastercard is considered 'funding', so does the 'treasury' if cash is used. the factory that printed the currency bill too? how far do you really want to go with this?
I posted a link above which helps explain it above since a few people had questions about this. Fundamentally, if you perform banking activities for criminal activities you open yourself up to a landslide of legal bullshit. Banks want to be as far from that as possible.
If there’s evidence that the site isn’t policing itself, they are gone.
They do have a tremendous aversion to people involved in criminal activity or at high risk of doing so. Once PH started publicly flirting with that threshold they got dumped.
It's a different scope. Porn shops sell product in one place and local authorities deal with that. A bigger entity with interstate impact is a federal matter and penalties are much more severe.
But in this case, the drunk in question just crashed his car on the street corner just outside the bar and is stumbling up to the bar to get a drink.
Given recent news, it's pretty clear that PornHub's controls on content were terrible. There is little evidence the measures they put in place are sufficient or even that they've effectively purged all media that features underaged or non-consenting participants.
PornHub needs to show they have implemented effective controls over content. Google did it with YouTube. Facebook deals with it. Even this forum has a mechanism for preventing illegal activity.
MasterCard doesn't need domain expertise when there is a smoking gun in public. It's up to PornHub at this point to prove they have effective controls.
The amount of sex trafficing content there makes pornhub look like a church going virgin.
In your example, if the underage drinkers pay using MasterCard, then it's MCs job to check, as they're doing to pornhub.
MasterCard should stay out of it, as they do in other situations.
no, a bartender is always obligated to verify the age of people who enter their establishment if in doubt, regardless of how they pay. You won't get off the hook selling booze to minors because they pay digitally.
And that is actually very reasonable for the exact reason I pointed out, if it was MC's responsibility they would have an immediate excuse to snoop into my purchasing history for every minor transaction. (which they already have to a far too large degree).
If an online liquor store was systematically ignoring ABC laws and shipping booze to underage customers across state lines, MC would probably act in a similar way.
MasterCard has nothing to do with verifying the legality of the transaction - pornhub, or whoever, should do their due diligence to validate everything is legal.
Vimeo
Snapchat
CashApp
Venmo
Every single one of these companies has trafficking minors problem. All of them dwarf pornhub's.
I was explaining why banks stay well clear of anything which might be criminal. Whether that is how things should be from an ethical or societal standpoint is a separate question.
Pornhub itself could use a similar defense to what you suggest. Is it their job to police the content instead of the police? If they were hosting content with minors and rape (and it seems highly likely they were), they were profiting from illegal activities.
I'm on the fence. At some point the law should hold people who profit from hurting people liable. While Master Card (or PornHub) were not necessarily active participants here, they both profited from criminal activity.
Where you draw the line is tough.
But, if you are aware of a customer using your service to perform illegal activities you can't claim plausible deniability.
It's not reasonable to expect police to be watching everyone all the time.
(Ignoring, for a second, KYC-type laws that can make MC criminally liable for not policing their own platform... laws I think are mostly garbage.)
Your analogy doesn't fit, because the current scenario (MC kicking PH off their platform) would be like if a daycare discovered criminal activity involving one of the kids they watch and then refused to watch the kid anymore. (Which would be a bad thing that might make the kid less safe!)
We need to distinguish between institutions so big that they are defacto system and institutions that are mere cogs of the system.
Your argument is a good one, but it ignores attributes of the parties.
MasterCard could similarly report these alleged (alleged!) crimes, while still processing their payments, and avoid damaging someone's business without due process.
Regulating what happens on your own private platform to ensure compliance with applicable laws is, and always has been, the job of the platform owner. It is not realistic to expect law enforcement to check every platform for compliance under every law.
Even if MC would ultimately win in court, litigation is not cheap and the brand damage alone would be massive.
MC is a massive, trusted financial household name. They would be very publicly fighting for their right to knowingly process payments for a company that is serving illegal sex videos on the largest porn website in the world.
I do not envy the PR agency that would be tasked to spin that one.
If you want a company to not have this option, you need to 1) absolve them of the responsibility to know their clients 2) prevent them from arbitrarily cutting off access. If you don't absolve them, it doesn't make sense to prevent them from cutting off access - how else can they comply with their legal responsibilities?
You don't!
That's where it all gets weird.
There is beyond a doubt a massive amount of illegal activity that flows through MasterCard transactions, but MasterCard can't reasonably detect all of it. But when there is a case like this where your dirty laundry is big public news, suddenly MC can't hide behind plausible deniability.
Which is why banks won't do businesses with legal cannabis dispensaries since on a federal level, its still illegal.
Legalizing cannabis at the federal level would give a large number of dispensaries some relief from this federal oversight of the banking laws.
Is processing payments between two entities equivalent to funding them?
For example, is the post office funding someone if he sends them a letter with cash or a check?
Funding criminal activity can itself be a crime.
So financial processors who process payments indiscriminately can find themselves in court for the sins of their clients.
Most financial institutions are not willing to bear the expense of legal defense for questionable clientele.
Update: This is similar in a lot of ways to the issues Marijuana retailers have with banking: https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2018/01/22/...