Very insightful comment. When you run a gazillion dollar company, you don't care about a billion here or there from porn sites, you care about not losing your gazillion dollar business. There are plenty of examples where CEOs were not conservative enough and it cost them big time - just look at Facebook's loosey goosey approach to political advertising, which in the end turned the entire country against them. From a business perspective, it's better to take a small financial hit but continue to run your business without any additional regulatory oversight.

> From a business perspective, it's better to take a small financial hit but continue to run your business without any additional regulatory oversight.

Indeed, staying on the down low and out of regulator minds (and crosshairs) is one of those "cost of doing business" things older companies do.

> The amounts are minor as far as payment processors are concerned, but those payment processors want to avoid governments getting up their grill.

The actual profit in this specific case might be small but there are lot of money in things related to adult content. They are all now looking for a trustworthy processor. Also even for non adult content lot of people will prefer having payment processing partner who will not kick you out based on some newspaper image. There are lot of grey area in most of the business, specially the biggest ones.

i think what they were really afraid of was a grass roots boycott. It's very easy for a consumer to cut up a mastercard and just use their visa. It's virtually impossible for a business to say "we accept all cc's except mastercard".