Since when does Mastercard / Visa care about minor backlash like this and why would they? Most of the hysteria died down pretty quickly, and it's not like people were going to boycott the biggest payment processors by far.

Antitrust is trending again, especially with tech, and the Visa/Mastercard duopoly has so far managed to escape the public's attention. Those two are no strangers to that world and that kind of publicity can actually hurt them long term.

I checked the FT link pasted in this thread, and the founder seems to claim that it was an issue strictly with the banks, not with the payment processors:

>“We’re already fully compliant with the new Mastercard rules, so that had no bearing on the decision,” he said.

https://www.ft.com/content/7b8ce71c-a87a-440e-9f3d-58069ca04...

At this point, I don't take any of the press releases at face value beyond the immediate effects they describe - all I know is they announced a future ban on adult content and then reversed course.

> “We’re already fully compliant with the new Mastercard rules, so that had no bearing on the decision,”

Reading between the lines, that could easily mean "We're already fully compliant with MC's rules but they still won't let the banks do business with us, so we needed to put publish pressure on MC"

Devin Nash explains the issue here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NURYbrDk7k

tldr: Financial transactions for porn suffer VERY high cashback rates so traditional payment operators do NOT like them because they become expensive to them VERY quickly.