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Comment by npiazza83 | Hacker News Reader

This is akin to my bank freezing my accounts because I gave them a bad review online.

I would love to see them try to enforce this. *If a brick and mortar bank tried this there would be a run on their accounts so fast it would make Usain Bolt blush.

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As a seller, you don't have a choice. You can:

* Accept PayPal, and play ball with their policies.

* Disparage them, and get your account seized.

* Not accept PayPal, and lose out on millions of customers.

Please don't say BitCoin is an alternative. Unless you're selling heroin, or your entire customer base consists of crypto-anarcho-libertarians, it's not.

* Use alternative payment systems.

Equivalent to #3. There are a lot of people who only use PayPal online. In the HN space? Probably not that many. If you're selling shirts or random widgets online? The GP is not exaggerating by saying that literally millions of people will get to payment, see they have to type in a CC number and that PP is not an option, and they will leave.

for the most part if you use EBAY you really don't have much of a choice and as a buyer ebay pushes paypal

You're forgetting the network effects, my friend. They can get away with this because they already have people locked in.

What little competition they have is worse. Credit cards are probably on the path to the root of 'evil' for this form of (seller and) consumer abuse.

This is what legislation is for. There's always a bigger fish.

There are some parallels with rules of brick and mortar banks for credit card acquiring; at least in certain markets stating that you'd give a discount for paying cash instead of card or discouraging card payments in other ways would put you on a track to get blacklisted from accepting any credit cards at all.

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