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, 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.