But when the limited collection of players in the system all act in concert to prevent access to opponents of their preferred political party, isn’t the effect nearly the same? Arguably worse, because there’s no legal recourse. I think that’s the point being made here.

Imagine all the airlines were run by Republicans, and they universally prevented anyone who works for Democratic leaning organizations (Eg ActBlue) from flying because some small number of bad actors on their side did some bad things.

We would do well to imagine what it would be like to be prevented access with no legal recourse to an an oligopoly of services that cannot practically be bypassed, and ask ourselves what potential for abuse exists when such impactful decisions can be taken without standard legal due process.

>But when the limited collection of players in the system all act in concert to prevent access to opponents of their preferred political party, isn’t the effect nearly the same? Arguably worse, because there’s no legal recourse. I think that’s the point being made here.

What evidence can you provide to support your claim that various corporations are colluding to block folks?

What evidence can you provide that said corporations have a "preferred political party?"

You have no such evidence. What's more, whether or not the nebulous set of entities to which you refer (let's have specific names and specific actions).

I'd further say that "cloud" (read: someone else's servers) services, a few large social networking sites and a small subset of payment processors (I'm guessing that this is the set of corporations to which you were referring since you don't bother to be specific) do not constitute an "oligopoly."

I'd further add that there are hundreds of hosting and co-location providers, dozens of payment processors and a variety of mechanisms to share data, information and messaging.

I find your diatribe to be sorely lacking in evidence, reasoned argument and factual information.

Finally, your analogy concerning airlines is deeply flawed, as that isn't even close to what's going on.

Please provide some evidence for your claims.

Otherwise, I can only conclude that you are arguing in bad faith.

It has happened before and recently too, so it wouldn't be exactly be shocking. Sneaked in with other stuff, they told the banks to fuck with sellers of Tobacco, Porn and Drug paraphernalia.

> Operation Choke Point was a 2013 initiative of the United States Department of Justice[1] which investigated banks in the United States and the business they did with firearm dealers, payday lenders, and other companies believed to be at a high risk for fraud and money laundering.

> This operation, disclosed in an August 2013 Wall Street Journal story,[2] was officially ended in August 2017,[3] and the FDIC settled multiple lawsuits by promising to Congress additional training for its examiners and to cease issuing "informal" and "unwritten suggestions" to banks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point

I said:

>If the government were to attempt do as you suggest, the courts would slap them down hard.

The issues around Operation Choke Point[0] that you linked to were investigated by Congress and the Department of Justice and, as I said, smacked down hard.

The above isn't analogous to the current situation, but the result was exactly as I said it would be.

Thanks for making my point for me.

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

Some elements of Operation Choke point were shut down hard, others never even got enough due process to see their day in court. We recently made the prime actors of one of these initiatives the vice president.

( https://reason.com/2019/08/26/secret-memos-show-the-governme... )

So what?

How is that relevant to Stripe? They aren't the government. They're not even one of the top ten biggest payment processors.

I can only conclude that you're not arguing in good faith. More's the pity.