What, exactly is the alternative? The system might not be perfect or even good, but as far as I can see there is no alternative to this kind of issue. Even if there were a million different credit card companies (and god help us if that ever happens), they would still be bound by the same requirements.
There is no competition in the duopoly that is MasterCard / Visa, and so there will be no improvement in service. They don't have to build things customers want to not go out of business.
The solution is something like Section 230 but for CC vendors. If Visa processes an illegal payment and the government finds out, Visa is off the hook, and the merchant gets a letter from the government. The payment processor has a duty to report, and that's it.
The alternative would be that payment processors don’t deny anyone unless a government regulator tells them to, and then it’s the regulator’s responsibility to draw the line.
It certainly wouldn’t be perfect either, but at least there would be some measure of legislative/electoral accountability.
This of course runs into the problem that the government doesn't have a regulator for the Internet. The FCC could maybe be pressed into the role, but it's not entirely clear what mandate they could have over what is effectively a giant privately held network. The government doesn't run the root nodes nor any of the nodes between you and the porn. They do run large networks, but those are merely attached to the internet, not integral to it.
There is the other issue that people are rightfully concerned about the creation of morality police, as they have a long and sordid history of suppressing minority communities for reasons that aren't in the public good. Everyone agrees that child porn videos should be banned/prosecuted, but after that it gets down to where to draw the line and that's an endless source of conflict. Some people will claim that homosexual content is just as damaging as child exploitation while others will say that banning homosexual content is damaging to the community. They will not find a working compromise.
Also: which government? I also don't want US regulators controlling UK content because historical accident has put payment oligopolies under US jurisdiction.
These are good points. But the problem, as discussed in this article and the comments, is we already have defacto morality police: the credit card monopolies.
Given we’re going to have content police in some form (we clearly do need them to an extent), shouldn’t they be as transparent and accountable as possible?
We should have the equivalent of bodycam footage when a decision is made—a paper trail showing who signed off and what the rationale was. There should be a process for appeals. Decisions shouldn’t be political or religiously motivated.
Being cut off from the financial system is as much an imposition on a person’s rights as being fined or arrested by the government. Sure, it needs to happen sometimes, but there should be protection against being targeted in an arbitrary or abusive way.
> Everyone agrees that child porn videos should be banned/prosecuted
What? No.
That particular crusade has caused very real harms for very nebulous gains. Everyone may agree that funding child porn videos should be banned, but it isn't even clear that stopping the free distribution of the videos themselves is a net positive (e.g. theories about said videos being an outlet for pedophiles, reducing their risk).
I know the current Supreme Court of the US is grossly biased in their decisions on such questions so it’s not clear what organization in the US would actually be capable of enforcing this fairly.
A simple solution is to let the government do the blacklisting, and payment providers only need to (1) comply with the blacklist, (2) report suspicious activity, same as today. It would be a serious offense for companies to keep their own moral blacklists.
> Even if there were a million different credit card companies [...], they would still be bound by the same requirements.
Under monopolistic market conditions, there's way less incentive to saturate all corners of the market. Just because it didn't pass VISAs risk/reward calculation doesn't mean that other companies would come to the same conclusion. It's hard to give an exact prediction, but generally when monopolies/oligopolies go away the market situation improves for all other parties.
> What, exactly is the alternative?
A simple solution is to let the government do the blacklisting, and payment providers only need to (1) comply with the blacklist, (2) report suspicious activity, same as today. It would be a serious offense for companies to keep their own moral blacklists.
It would be for the government to do it as well. Your solution is for the government to re-enact McCarthy Era tactics without due process of the law. What makes you think that this blacklist will just be limited to the "bad hombres"?
> Under monopolistic market conditions, there's way less incentive to saturate all corners of the market. Just because it didn't pass VISAs risk/reward calculation doesn't mean that other companies would come to the same conclusion. It's hard to give an exact prediction, but generally when monopolies/oligopolies go away the market situation improves for all other parties.
Your monopolistic analysis is entirely irrelevant as it fails to account the big elephant in the room. It's no longer a free market if the government makes the way people get payed unworkable. By making porn a third rail, the government has imposed a ceiling on growth in the traditional credit card sector. It's regulation that's created a zero-sum game.
What if we tried to make a distributed system? One where you could make a transaction and nobody could block it from being processed, because no one entity is in control. Something like Bittorrent, but for money.
One such possibility is for the USPS to open a non-profit banking system at every post office in the country. That would allow the now-unbanked to get an account.
And the USPS has strict regulations on when they can and cant deal with, especially in packages. I could see similar on banking regs too.
Naturally, Visa/Mastercard/Amex/Discover really dont like this.
More banks and wire transfer companies like Wells Fargo and Western Union, as well as the mega-banks like BoA that make their money off poor people getting hit with fees...less credit card companies.
e.g. Mastercard and Visa could be required to report suspected violations to a regulatory body, to which the incriminated party could appeal.
That would help separate denial of service derived from regulation and denial of service derived from corporate policy. It's a big step in terms of transparency of the impact public policies have.
