Yes, in the same way it's the job of the bartender to check if there are underaged drinkers in the bar and do their due diligence. Delegation of responsibility is necessary because 1. nobody wants to live in a police state because that's what you need if everything would immediately be escalated to law enforcement, 2. the owner of an establishment has domain knowledge that the police does not have, 3. handing the responsibility over to law enforcement would immediately give law enforcement an excuse to have total access to all private matters, harming everyone else's privacy.

Applying your own bartender analogy, in this case pornhub should be properly policing the content made available on their website. Mastercard doesn't have any useful domain knowledge.

They should (as far as they can), and Mastercard should take responsibility as far as they can. Both should take appropriate levels of responsibility given the capacity and scope that they have. I assume Pornhub already does try to directly address child abuse that is obvious from the content, I assume Mastercard can go further and identify child abuse based on known entities in their payment system, and so on. And if both fail, they should delegate information upwards, but only then.

Porn isn’t business any processor wants to be publicly associated with.

If there’s evidence that the site isn’t policing itself, they are gone.

MC & Visa do business with thousands (millions?) of adult shops in the US. They have no moral compass or concerns about being involved in financial transactions with porn purveyors.

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.

The morality police are the police.

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.

This bartender analogy is terrible...

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.

I am breathlessly awaiting MC and VISA to dump Facebook, Instagram and Reddit.

The amount of sex trafficing content there makes pornhub look like a church going virgin.

I believe you're contradicting yourself.

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.

>, if the underage drinkers pay using MasterCard, then it's MCs job to check

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).

Aren't you contradicting yourself? In this case pornhub is the bartender, and MC is MC. Here we have a few underage drinkers tricking or convincing a bartender to pour a drink, and MC is stopping payment processing for the bar and you agree that's the right thing?

Its a bad analogy.

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.

No, I'm not contradicting myself, I'm saying the level of authority should be appropriate to the issue at hand. Child abuse apparently widespread enough to go beyond Pornhub's already existing moderation implies some responsibility for the payment processors, and also at the end of the day responsibility of the law enforcement. What I'm saying is there is no division of labour in the sense of outsourcing everything to law enforcement, or everything to Pornhub.

Exactly.

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.

Facebook

Reddit

Instagram

Vimeo

Snapchat

CashApp

Venmo

Every single one of these companies has trafficking minors problem. All of them dwarf pornhub's.

You are mistaking the intent of my comment.

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.

If one is unaware of a customer performing illegal activities it's one thing. That may even be a legal defense that works.

But, if you are aware of a customer using your service to perform illegal activities you can't claim plausible deniability.

Not instead of, in addition to. This is no different than expecting employees of a daycare to report criminal activity involving children to the police, or expecting startup employees to report cases of fraud (like in the case of Theranos).

It's not reasonable to expect police to be watching everyone all the time.

No, that's not the same at all. MasterCard could report PornHub to the police and still keep them as a customer. The police (well, FBI, probably) could decide what to do from there. They might investigate and find that PH isn't violating any laws. Or maybe they are, and get fined or some of their employees prosecuted. Either way, "this company is doing crimes" should have nothing to do with whether or not they can be MasterCard's customer.

(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!)

Doesn't a business have the right to decide who they get to do business with? If a business sees a customer doing something they're not comfortable with, don't they have a right to refuse service?

They do, but once you are a certain size, decision you make, create much bigger waves. At that point, 'derisking'(as the banks call it ), can easily alter the economy in unpredictable ways. This is one of the reasons, you typically do not want monopoly/oligopoly in place. MC and VISA already have amazing amount of market power. If they say they won't process your payment, you only have few options left ( wikileaks donations debacle comes to mind ).

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.

Another example. If you tell anyone at a school (public or private) or a psychiatric professional that you have intent to harm yourself or others they are also required to report it.

They're required to report it, not expel you from school.

MasterCard could similarly report these alleged (alleged!) crimes, while still processing their payments, and avoid damaging someone's business without due process.

False equivalence.

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.

No. The payment processor just needs to not commit crimes. It's also a crime for an individual to aid and abet the commission of a crime. That obviously doesn't mean "it's my job to police the behavior of every person I come into contact with."

Maybe it shouldn’t be but the laws currently on the books makes some enforcement the payment processors job.

A company should comply with laws. Shutting off payments processing to possibly-illegal clients is a way to prevent potential litigation, which may result in high penalties. This is the corporate legal framework at work.

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?