Analogies like this are misleading, IMO. Like if a theater chooses not to show a certain movie that's obviously not censorship, but if the water company effectively prevents the movie from showing by threatening to cut off the theater's water, colloquially the term would certainly apply. And what happened here seems a lot closer to the latter than the former.
> best thing .. to promote and create alternate payment processors
That would only make sense in your analogy, where the shutoff stemmed from the payment processor owner's moral compass. What actually happened here is that an advocacy group hounded the biggest processors into it, so as other processors get big enough, by symmetry the same thing will repeat.
It seems to me that what's needed here is other advocacy groups willing to hound the processors in the other direction.
also, how are these "puritan" groups doing the hounding? I mean, are they threatening some kind of legal action? based on old (or not so old) obscenity laws?
could the against hounding group do the same? on what legal basis? or is it enough to do the usual "securities fraud" angle?
maybe what matters is how much money the hounding group credibly has to spend on lawyers?
They're not suing them in civil court, they're threatening to use the court of public perception against them. If they allow these payments the activism groups will set up a campaign titled something like "Visa facilitates incest and child abuse!" and "Mastercard allows you to see women getting beaten".
This is a very effective strategy because there's nothing more important to these companies than a squeaky clean brand image. And what they perceive as damaging to their brand image is entirely subjective and just depends on whether an activist group can spin it in a way that looks bad for them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melinda_Tankard_Reist#Collecti...
To me it doesn't look like this group is so powerful that they forced the payment processors to do stuff. It looks more like, this group campaigns tirelessly, year in, year out, against all kinds of miscellaneous stuff they dislike, and every so often they get a W somewhere because they're more persistent than groups pushing in the other direction.
It would even make sense financially, because porn sure brings in more dough in processing fees than Kristian Karen who pays for her Starbucks Latte with plastic.
As long as being unreasonable does carry no risk people will continue to be unreasonable.
Because they are. The corporate structure as well as the internal and external systems in our political/legal/economic systems are designed specifically to make corporations work as economic engines where risk, responsibility, and liability are distributed and diluted to the point it they pretty much evaporate. This means that corporations can do things like commit full on crimes, without any real person going to jail. Why? Because they are disconnected from real people by design.
Why do we have this idea that non-democratic centrally-planned governments are these giant scary entities disconnected from real people? Majority stakeholders for state insurance, state healthcare, state pensions, state police, etc. are regular people. People calling for "democracy" want the public collectively to dictate the actions of what other regular people do with their money etc., but when you ask people in democracies if the electorate should take the *blame* when they pick a stupid government, they always say no and look at you appalled as if you'd suggest eating doggie biscuits.
Monopolies and Duopolies suck even with regulation. If you want a state owned payment processor, pursue that goal. But you will end up in the same place, with reactionary leaders using the service to ban things that the voters disagree with, which sometimes will be porn in all likelihood.
>"private companies" as if that means something.
A private company can be competed with. You can legally pay these websites just not via those 2 most popular options. If something is actually censored, the state will use violence to prevent you accessing it. Theres a video kicking around the internet of NSW cops snatching a VHS tape from the hands of people trying to run a small banned film festival. Thats definitionally censorship. I know you want to take the anger people have at censorship, and transfer it away from the government to people you dont like, but its simply not censorship.
> Due to their power, their decisions affect people as if they are government decisions
The inertia of people who wont change their purchasing decisions to avoid those to options is the issue. Not their choice not to process payments.
Widen your category definition and you'll see it.
> consider how much it limits the viability of an online business to not accept credit cards
For the vast majority of online businesses, accepting exclusively crypto, or exclusively bank payments, would result in much less business. Orders of magnitude less business. They are not viable alternatives for the vast majority of purposes.
I would add a qualifier to your statement: for the vast majority of global online businesses. An online business serving a single country could make use of country-specific payment systems, which are often very popular. If a Brazil-only online business accepted only payments through PIX and boleto bancário, that could result in less business, but not orders of magnitude less business.
Along the same lines, I qualified it as "online businesses" because there are still some brick-and-mortar businesses that require cash. It's still limiting your business, but less so, especially if you're in a context where people expect many businesses to be that way (e.g. a farmer's market).
But for online businesses that aren't country-specific, which I'd argue is the vast majority of online businesses? You accept credit cards or you get a lot less business. (And the next-most-popular option, PayPal, does even more of this kind of thing than Visa and MasterCard do, and much more capriciously.)
Corporations do not have a "personal level"
I think a processor like Visa could benefit a lot from the status similar to the "common carrier". Like a telephone network must offer service to anyone, but cannot be held liable for the content of the communication (even if criminals are using it), Visa could accept the requirement to pass payments to any counterparty in exchange for dropping the KYC requirements. Let banks and merchants care about that.
I don't think that the US or EU government would agree to grant such a status though.
These payment networks fit that description, and should either be broken apart so that you get the necessary competition, or be regulated so that they have to provide service for legal goods and services in a given jurisdiction.
I think the biggest issue is the damage that the word "Censorship" has taken in the last few years. If I ran a payment processor, the first thing I would do is try to be as neutral as my moral compass allows. The second thing I would do is intentionally stop processing payments on behalf of anyone I was uncomfortable with on a personal level. I dont support a thing, so I wont give material support to a thing. Thats not censorship. Its not censorship when amazon removes a book, or a publisher takes something out of print. If everything is censorship, including freedom of association, nothing is censorship.
I think the best thing that can be done about this problem is to promote and create alternate payment processors. The second best thing is to help these sites accept crypto payments (yes I know the article hung a lantern on that, but still)