Mastercard and visa are the de facto regulators of porn
ft.com
ft.com
The problem is once a majority of payment providers (especially in this category where there's only really 2 major ones) starts blocking things, it becomes really difficult for fringe groups that are in fact perfectly legal. I understand that porn payments are a bit more risky but the providers can simply have a policy to deny chargebacks for this category and shift the risk to the customer. Similar to the way returns of sex toys are not accepted for hygiene reasons.
Recently there was a lot of news in the Netherlands about prostitutes not being able to open bank account because all banks refused them. Think of prostitution what you will but over there it's legal work and they pay their taxes. But not being able to get a bank account gets them into very difficult situations and pushes them to shady people (which was exactly what the legalisation was avoiding).
Also other platforms like fetlife have recently been forced to validate their users, leading to potentially serious consequences if this data ever becomes compromised. Many people there don't even show their face so the result is that they have to give a lot more personal info now than they would have wanted to.
A bunch of powerful people feel some stuff should be punished, but they can’t make it illegal. So they’ll stay in good term with de facto gate keepers and nudge them in their direction.
In the article it’s some billionaire, but ruling parties are probably doing the same extensively: instead of making the controversial decisions themselves, go through all the paperwork and get all the backlash, they’ll have a private entity deal with 95% of the problem (the industry “self-regulating”) and call it a day.
A pettier exemple than money transactions: there’s no reason smartphones shouldn’t be able to record calls out of the box (using it within legal boundaries should be on the user) but phone makers will self-block that behavior with no specific interest on their side.
for example: I work in a repair shop and I know I can buy absolutely zero bottles of acetylene on the company card because visa will flag it every time. they report it to the atf and you get a lovely visit...
but propylene? just as dangerous and flammable but i can buy it by the ton. we literally swapped out all our equipment for hot work cutting because visa.
I'd expect that to be Visa covering their butt in advance to not even have to think about it ...
Which smartphones block call recording? Every brandname Android I have had enables this feature for voice calls. (Although the feature is missing for app calls, and I'm now at least 5 years behind the newest phones.)
This explains a lot because this is a more recent development. https://www.pcmag.com/news/google-is-banning-call-recording-...
As the article says it was blocked a couple years ago but there was still a loophole which is now being closed as well. Though it's by blocking apps using it from the play store which can still be avoided by sideloading so technically there still is a loophole :) But it's definitely seeing more and more restrictions.
Except at Google and Samsung apparently. And there's no way to contest this decision for users, query it or even get a straight answer out of either company on it.
iOS?
I'm not sure of the current state of Android but back in the early days this feature also wasn't there (there were tons of apps that claim to do it but they all exploited some device-specific quirk and wouldn't work universally) despite the hardware being capable of doing this from day 1.
The reason call recording is shunned is that tons of scummy companies would suddenly end up in trouble if call recording becomes widespread and accessible to anyone.
(And in any case, as you suggest most people pay more per bit transmitted on a mobile voice call than they pay per bit as data.)
Purely for fun, it would be interesting to hack up two smart phones to transmit data over a voice call. Presumably, you can keep everything binary, if you control the end-points.
Practically, you‘d be better off using a throttled (after exceeding the included data volume) native data connection.
More than likely it's a handful of well-placed (by design or by luck) moralists acting at the willing behest of legal
Though I suppose a case can be made for the Fifth as well. The fact is that the Federal Government loves wielding access to the Financial System as a gigantic exercise of soft power. Centralization nakes exercising that power feasible.
Prostitution may be a line of work where less tax is paid.
This does not make the act of prostitution less legitimate.
Hair dressers and tattoo artists also, on average, declare less of their total income, and we don't consider hair dressers and tattoo artists illegitimate businesses. We just expect them to pay taxes and tolerate, to some degree, if they don't. Going to the hair dresser or getting a tattoo isn't seen as morally objectional because of what they pay in taxes.
Less tax is paid because of cash.
This is also true for prostitution. In part because the anonymity of cash is preferable among the customers, because the sex worker avoids scrutiny by the bank, and because sex workers don't necessarily have work permits in the countries in which they operate.
Conversely, we can think of morally objectional jobs where taxes are paid.
The reason I mentioned tax is that not having a bank account was making it more complex for them to actually pay their taxes as a business. Taxation in the Netherlands is no longer something you can pay with an envelope of cash. If you want to run a legit business you can't do so without one. It was one of the things mentioned during the debate about this.
I'm not sure how it turned out because I don't live there anymore but there was talk of mandating the banks to offer them an account. After all without overdrafts or loans there is no real risk to the bank anyway.
The IRS is getting record funding. They are stockpiling ammo with all the extra funds. Taxation is theft anyways. The complicated tax code ensures that wealthy people pay less taxes while the IRS can go after middle class earners. Throwing more money at the problem won't help in my simple minded opinion.
I'd say 'simpler', not 'easier'.
> Taxation is theft anyways.
Not really. Just pretend that living in a country is like renting a shop in a mall. The owners of the mall decide what they want to charge you for. In the simplest case, they just demand rent, but they could also charge you for the number of blue scarves displayed. That's just silly, but not theft (as long as the possibility of such a charge is mentioned in the rental contract).
If you don't like the mall, move and set up shop in a different one.
Similarly, most countries let you leave, too. (Even though eg East Germany and North Korea weren't/aren't so keen on that, and the US charges you an exit fee.)
Vote with your feet!
(For example, I grew up in Germany, but wasn't too keen on the package of taxes and government services on offer there. After a few years in different countries, I settled in Singapore, which is much better value for money. I'm happy with what I am getting here for the modest amount of taxes they take.)
It would be interesting to compare to other (legal) business that keep identities secret in this way.
So I'm not sure prostitutes are anything special?
Both barber and supermarket keep records of what services they performed or goods they sold, but not who purchased them (when paying in cash). A prostitute could do exactly the same.
> It would be interesting to compare to other (legal) business that keep identities secret in this way.
Basically almost any business where you can pay in cash?
There’s no pimp trafficking you or getting you hooked on drugs and in debt to so you can make him money. Despite what the pornhub interviews tell you, it’s typically a low skill gig where you end up, not aspire to.
I suspect that depends on jurisdiction? I'm fairly sure that eg in Germany it's more common that they are employees. No clue about the Netherlands.
It’s “content creator” now. ;-)
If they were forced to allow it then it would give them cover and also their competitors would be as well - so there'd be no competitive disadvantage.
This doesn't address the banking thing, although spending and receiving money at times requires a bank account.
Or do you want to force people to deal with money made from 'blood diamonds' or from fossil fuels or tobacco or abortion clinics or gay wedding cakes or pineapple pizza etc? (I deliberately picked examples from different points of politics and with different levels of severity.)
Instead of regulating more heavily, we should look into lowering barriers to entry, so that people doing legal things can find someone to facilitate their payments (without the need to force anyone to facilitate payments they disagree with).
But when you are the dominant player let's say 20%+ of market alone or with your partners it really changes. At that point no, you should not be able to choose your customers. Outside individual reasons like repeated fraud or attempts of such.
Monetary transaction is fundamental to civilization, more than any other single service or good. You very nearly can't participate in civilization and can't at all in the free market without being able to freely spend and receive money. And this is the first time in history that monetary flow has been centralized to this degree, and it's hard to imagine things going less digital.
But chargebacks have nothing to do with return policies [1]. In theory, when you issue a chargeback you are basically saying "I didn't authorize this purchase". How do you have a general policy that says "you won't get charged for fraudulent charges, unless those fraudulent charges are porn"?
[1] If I buy a sandwich with my credit card, I can't then return it if I decide I'm not hungry 15 minutes later. But I can dispute the charge (dishonestly) and say that I never bought a sandwich in the first place.
The only case remaining is "i did initiate the transaction, but the merchant scammed me by not providing what was agreed".
Which then allows the porn providers to do very shady things.
The problem with porn is that the players on both consumer and provider side tend to be really shitty. The consumers are causing a bunch of chargebacks whenever they get called out for porn or trying to get porn for free.
However, the providers aren't innocent either. LOTS of OnlyFans girls get called out for not delivering what they promised which certainly should be able to be charged back. The big aggregators are generally run by people that will absolutely push the boundaries of dark patterns fully knowing that in person interaction will be embarassing while a chargeback isn't.
For starters, only hospitality sectors accept it here (hotels, restaurants). Outside that you can forget it. Even taxi drivers will laugh in your face in a country like Romania. In France some will accept it but usually the machine is suddenly 'broken' when it's time to pay. Then when I whip out my personal Visa it suddenly works. Right... I often have fights with the finance guys over this because I had to pay with foreign cash or my personal card.
I think the issue is that Amex charges the merchants more or something. But it's just not a useful thing over here. I curse that card.
I don't think any bank here offers it to their customers either, it's always bank-branded mastercard or visa.
At this point it’s just network effects. Visa charges more for their premium tier cards (VISA infinite/Mastercard world elite) than AMEX charges for their basic cards; but people won’t turn away a Chase Sapphire Reserve
All prohibit "badthink".
Payment providers are companies. They should be able to decide what they'll cover or not. In this case the bigger issue is that you essentially have a duopoly that allows 2 companies to affect the market with those decisions.
Companies exist to provide people with goods and services. They have no inalienable rights beyond that. If a company does so in a way we see as unacceptable (in this case discriminatory), we have the right to force it and the only rights it has are to comply or cease operation.
> In this case the bigger issue is that you essentially have a duopoly that allows 2 companies to affect the market with those decisions.
Yes, everyone know that's an issue. The solution, obviously, is to limit their ability to manipulate. We can achieve a big part pf this this by forcing them to serve everyone equally.
Why? Companies can be regulated. In cases where there isn't effective competition providing real consumer choice, I think it's perfectly reasonable to regulate them in the manner suggested.
Legislation in other industries ensures that companies are not allowed to decide what they cover or not, because when companies pick and choose it leaves parts of the market being under-served (as is happening here).
As an example - Under the Affordable Care Act, health insurance companies in the USA can't refuse to cover you or charge you more just because you have a “pre-existing condition”.
Or as another example, the idea of net neutrality.
Restaurants are companies, but that doesn't mean they can stir shit into the food. There's no law, rule, or ethical principle that says that companies cannot be regulated.
But you can ATM loophole your way through it.
Weed is still federally illegal. Porn is not.
It's the same situation for dispensaries or other legal cannabis companies operating legally in states where it is approved, yet because of the federal status, banks will not accept them either.
But what is different are the social norms and expectations. The general agreement that they are legal, makes them defacto legal ... except where the federal jurisdiction matters. But, if there was political appetite for it, federal law enforcement could arrest and prosecute everyone involved in the recreational cannabis business in "legal" states. There is just no political appetite. The Rohrabacher–Farr amendment, though, prohibits this for medical usage (just enforcement, it still is illegal).
Note I do think we should broadly decriminalize (not the same as make fully legal) most drugs, and fully legalize things like cannabis.
I don't know if this has any impact on V & MC payment processing, but the trafficking of women is still a problem in countries with legal prostitution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_trafficking_in_the_Nethe...
the overlap with all forms of work are too numerous to point that out as if it needs a different solution
labor rights, more avenues for reporting, outreach, help, evaluation of the employer
and thats only available in a place with some form of legalized framework (which can be greatly improved even in those places)
This is one type of regulation that I think needs to be more common. When the governments take the choice of playing politics with their customers away from large companies, then those companies can't be pressured into doing so by activists.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/citigroup-tried-and-failed-to-r...
I think the problem is external to Visa, where a once capitalist money accumulating machine, is having internal debates on what Furry depictions are allowed.
I feel the unnoticed casualty of the "Culture Wars", that neither side seems to care about, is that harmless stuff should just be left alone.
We don't have to have a view on everything.
To illustrate, take the artform known as 'loli'. Drawn pictures of fictional neotenous girls doing recognizably adult things most people would say crosses the line into being child pornography, even though the act of drawing it hurts no one real. The argument goes, by facilitating the fulfillment of the demand you create a follow-on market for the real thing, which is definitely illegal.
The problem isn't a harm inflicted against someone directly, but a perceived harm in potentia to the social/moral fabric and eventually the incentive structure to underpin physical harm to real victims by normalizing some form of deviance. A less controversial example (today) would be sex toys, (50 years ago) "free love", etc... In the past, many of these things were considered obscene, or at least things "not spoken of in polite company". This is exactly how you get businesses discussing whether these odd niche things are allowable on the basis of straddling the obscenity/deviance line, which necessarily entangles itself to some degree with the concept of legality.
Scale makes every question relevant. While I agree with your assertion we don't have to have a view on everything, I assure you, with a hierarchical power structure consolidating the power to make policy in fewer individuals, this necessarily means that statistically speaking, you're going to have a much smaller slice of the world that happens to A) be a payment processor/business facilitator, and B) think your niche is harmless.
So in short, while normatively we don't have to have a view on everything, practically speaking, it is guaranteed we will. Striking the right balance is a really tough nut to crack, and virtually guarantees somebody is leaving disappointed.
This post brought to you by a really interesting Philosophy of Art class covering the interface between obscenity and cultural systems. I find the nature and mechanisms of determining exactly the periphery of the obscenity line in the highest resolution possible fascinating.
Bitcoin just removes all the limitations. But that creates new problems, quite frankly. Plus, it's very difficult for businesses to utilize Bitcoin. Fiat onboards have similar limitations to Visa/MC. Many legitimate business models will be denied accounts at reputable exchanges.
Facebook and Twitter can sway elections with a press of a button.
Once your company can directly affects direct democray and lives of billions these kind of statements make no sense anymore.
Unless you like to be ruled by corporations.
1) rudeness or disrupting
2) age and health
3) intoxication and indecency
4) whatever else society can agree on (good luck!)
In fact, the obligation to serve customers by law would serve as both a consumer and merchant protection for cases exactly like this -- the fact that, until sodomy laws were ruled unconstitutional in the US just a couple decades ago, many banks refused to lend to otherwise-credit worthy gay couples or unwed heterosexual couples for mortgages (afraid of being accused of supporting illegal activities), which would be more of a moot point in this sense because the onus is no longer on the bank to scrutinize how someone lives their personal life so long as they meet objective measures of credit worthiness.
If Mastercard and Visa refuse to do business with you, you will soon find yourself out of business.
Imagine there’s only 3 car dealers in your region and they all blacklist customers who have at least once followed Elon Musk on twitter.
Visa/Mastercard hire people to do risk analysis though, those people are rightly assessing that pr0n payments is a higher risk than the insurance premium is worth. Which is newsworthy itself, goes to how credit card fraud is overtaking the insurance market and maybe those 2 companies should invest in that area.. But that's gonna take too long.
There are a lot of reasons for that. On a 'credit' card this makes sense. They own/lend the outgoing funds, you just pay them back with some interest.
The debit cards are not, the debit card is your balance being debited. Instantly. With 0 interest. I'm not 100% sure about the insurance on that, but from experience the bank itself will be the point of contact to dispute a payment that is fraudulent. The bank may or may not pursue lost monies from the insurance or debtor etc. But VISA as a whole, just processed the transaction.
There used to be, in Ireland at least, a debit card issued by banks under the name "Laser" so it was your 'laser' card you paid with.. Only in recent years, I realised this was competition. So V & MC cornered the market, "Use at X amount of ATM's worldwide" etc.
I would love to say "there is a way out, once the payment processors process without influence from V/MC" but imagine, a payment processor not accepting one of those.. That's game over.
I do think companies like N26/Revolut and co have standing to create their own 'standard' after really generating an incredible userbase, would prefer maybe open source but financal companies are slow to adopt.
Imagine a payment gateway standard that wasn't restricted, open source/readable and had it's own userbase. I'm not a proponent of using crypto as currency but you can see why they got carried away. The problems to overcome are just... Well, bureaucratic.
Why? I would say just the opposite: by default people should be able to decide who they want to do business with. Payment providers are no exception.
Some people might want to refuse to facilitate payments for eg bakeries that refuse to bake cakes for gay weddings. Some other people might want to refuse to facilitate payments for bakers that bake cakes for gay weddings. (Similar for many other issues you can think of.)
> Recently there was a lot of news in the Netherlands about prostitutes not being able to open bank account because all banks refused them.
The bigger problem here seems to be a lack of competition? If barriers to entry were low enough, presumably someone would open a bank that accepted prostitutes' money and make a tidy profit (since there would be less competition, when they are the first ones).
Banking is regulated so heavily in an attempt to keep out even slightly 'shady' things, that the effect is to drive people into the arms of the really shady.
Oh, what I would give to be a fly on the wall in that meeting
You might disagree with bitcoin and co being the answer for this, but it’s the only tech that’s posed a viable solution as of now. Viable is not perfect. But if this article bothers you, at least understand this a (the) major aspect of why people work on serious cryptocurrency projects.
Edit: Stablecoins are coming to Lightning soon enough.
I simply don't think that CC provider restrictions are a good way to deal with CSAM in the first place, basically.
How much harmful policy has been pushed through with the excuse that it will stop CSAM? Often without having any particular effect on the issues it claims to be working against. People who spread or produce CSAM will use encryption and cryptocurrencies, leaving everyone else to be under permanent surveillance.
How do you stop them? By investigating and hitting down hard when you catch them irl, just like we always have. Not by racing to a dystopian surveillance state.
Having providers of financial infrastructure assume the legal risk for its users without due process is not how things should work in a democracy with rule-of-law, because it will adversely affect innocents.
This is why e.g. there are few innovative upstarts in VoIP/telephony.
I imagine that's a major reason why we don't see many payment-oriented cryptocurrency use-cases. The allure of speculative investment is too great for many.
I can imagine these being integrated everywhere in the future. Stripe has started to get into Ethereum connectivity lately to make it easy to add them to any website. Many other payment providers and websites will follow because it's permissionless.
I imagine most people would just use DAI on Aztec when buying porn or drugs.
No, they should not? This guy is insane. Yeah, just let the big middlemen monopoly decide the fate of your business on a whim.
Things like these are what makes me hope that cryptocurrency someday becomes the norm. We don't need more parasitic middlemen deciding how we want to spend our money, especially not because of fear of backlash by some activist groups.
"The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority"
"The black-and-white character of these societal laws can be explained with the following. Assume that under a certain regime, when you mix white and dark blue in various combinations, you don’t get variations of light blue, but dark blue. Such a regime is vastly more likely to produce dark blue than another rule that allows more shades of blue."
One of the bigger bangers from the chapter:
"Yes, an intolerant minority can control and destroy democracy. Actually, as we saw, it will eventually destroy our world."
Because to me this term sounds like cryptocurrency, whose boosters constantly talk about how they are beyond governments or any regulation at all.
I do also, but separately, not really love the idea of governments being able to block payments either. Obviously there are many cases in which it's good (as there are for private companies blocking them), but I think the bad outweighs the good in the long run for essentially the same reason as speech regulations.
Their reasoning was that you can't handle recurring payments without holding a lot of personal data.
Perhaps porn sites that want to offer inter-species furry porn should bite the bullet and only accept one-off payments, just so they can make effective use of crypto.
With micropayments, the business model becomes (quite literally) pay-per-view.
> it sucks for recurring transactions.
The UX is bad at the moment, but with crypto there is this idea of "streaming payments", which work very well as a substitute for subscriptions. Basically, you make only one initial transaction to set up the "subscription" with a locked deposit. On every block (or on every X seconds if you are doing off-chain), a small transfer is made. You only pay gas if you need to "top-up" the balance or when you want to close the stream.
If your quota has insufficient Ether or you've deauthorized the contract, your "subscription" will be cancelled automatically.
All on-chain. This should be the way to go.
It’s not ideal for that type of derelict subscription business model (e.g. the gym), but neither are prepaid debit cards or virtual cards with predetermined spending limits, and they probably already contend with those.
If there's one thing that evolutionary psychology has shown, it's that women's psychology for the mating market is not wired that way.
In a lot of ways, crypto makes perfect sense for porn payments. The anonymous nature is most likely a value add for most porn subscription holders.
With crypto is the same. Once you setup a crypto wallet and learn how to use it, you can pay for anything with it.
2. The above is stronger for areas that aren't well-served - women directed producers for example.
3. Parasocial relationships have become a huge driver of revenue for performers - hence OnlyFans and other Patreon-like services.
It's been done, to various levels of success; it has it's humble beginnings with cam girls via BTC (look up Girls gone Bitcoin), and then as alts got traction post 2017 things like CUM (Cryptographic Ultra Money) [0] try to make headway but failed miserably as most alts usually do.
After Onlyfans threatened to take down all the adult content it had a real chance of making itself a MVP in this ecosystem, unfortunately these projects live and die based on short-term price swings and as you can see the value has made it essentially unfavorable for anyone but pump and dumpers.
I'd argue that BTC can and has shown more promise for sex workers, I've gone into detail about my first hand experience when in the early stage of my startup I interacted with the 'ladies of backpage' when Visa and MC shutoff access to purchasing ads on Backpage on here before. I just think that sex workers have enough on their plates that it shouldn't be this hard to just to solve something so trivial which many pay for, espcially if either Visa or MC want to be puritanical it.
PH didn't decide "we are only gonna accept crypto so we can circumvent the system" it was a position forced upon them as a punishment for their shitty behavior. Now they are trying very hard to moderate effectively in order to win back the good graces of the payment processors because they are probably going to eventually go bankrupt if they don't.
Wife catches a weird pornhub charge on your monthly statement? Whoops! Those hackers are at it again. Call it fraud and charge it off.
The high cc processing rate accommodates the increased risk.
Btc solves this as no chargeback is possible.
Buyer initiates purchase, and the seller gives them a window of x minutes to send y btc to an address, where the price of the service is denominated in btc as of the trading price at that moment.
If at least 1 transaction doesn't show up on the btc network in the x minutes, that transaction times out.
If at least 1 does, then the seller waits for w confirmations to take place before the payment is recognized as valid, where w is set to their tolerance. I've seen as low as 3 and as high as 7.
If cryptocurrencies were useful for this problem, they'd have been adopted already. It's an sector whose businesses and workers are very savvy about anything that helps them evade repression.
is there a current place they're commonly used ?
So a point for Bitcoin then?
The TL;DR is that blockchain scaling is a very difficult problem. There are scaling layers like ZKSync that are only possible because of cryptographic primitives that literally didn't exist in a usable form 14 years ago.
And I somewhat disagree with your premise – cryptocurrencies are actually used in the real world today. Most of the usage is to get around regulation, like when you want to send remittances or buy drugs, or bet on betting markets. But on the whole I do agree, it's disappointing that the technology is still so immature.
Disclosure: I work in the cryptocurrency industry
14 years ago the argument was "you just wait!"
Today, everyone in the US knows what "crypto" is, far more than know what "cryptography" is based on my casual conversations. The fact that porn hasn't moved to entirely crypto means that crypto has not survived the test of time.
There are plenty of other examples as well, the fact that Russian oligarchs (or even just regular old wealthy Russians) aren't creating massive demand for crypto to thwart sanctions is another example that crypto will never become an alternate, super-legal, currency.
It's honestly a shame that it doesn't work because, during the first wave of crypto hype, I rather liked the libertarian visions of an unregulated underground economy. I thought crypto enthusiasts were wrong then, but I at least hoped they were right.
Ultimately they have to comply with a whole bunch of federal laws regarding sale of illegal goods, money laundering, human trafficking, child pornography and more. So if you want to blame regulation, point your fingers at the people writing those laws (aka your elected representatives).
> Out of curiosity, about five years ago Stoya contacted CCBill, one of the biggest payment companies specialising in porn. Rather than the “acceptable use” policy on its website, she asked if she could see their full guidance. The detailed list. The one that precisely laid out the limits of what CCBill believed Visa and Mastercard would tolerate.
> The four pages of rules shared with her are written in a lawyerly tone and are, in parts, totally bizarre. A section on furries, an online subculture interested in anthropomorphic animal characters with human personalities, reads “content that depicts furries and humans engaged in sexual acts are not permitted across the board. Content that depicts furry engaged in sexual acts with another furry is acceptable across the board.” Lest that leave any room for misinterpretation: “Please note, per Visa regulations a furry that contains human-like characteristics is not permitted.” So, no half-man, half-furry.
90% of the people defending this stuff never bothered to read the article.
Why is this exactly? I mean, I know there’s a widespread social taboo around it, especially in certain cultures, but we’re talking about porn here, isn’t being transgressive the whole point?
Far more distasteful things like manipulating and consuming human feces is well known to appear in pornography, but apparently menstruation fetishism is completely unheard of.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/markdistefano/mastercard-activists-...
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/05/biggest-blacklist-a...
There has - most porn sites accept payment in bitcoin.
https://lifehacker.com/how-to-pay-for-porn-with-crypto-and-w...
You are one of the few comments ITT that bring this up though. On one hand, it shows how the tech’s real purpose hasn’t really permeated the general or tech public yet. On the other, it is literally the only digitally native payment solution that offers cash-but-online and solves the specific risk of payment censorship . There might be other innovations down the road though, but for now caring about these events means caring about cryptocurrency, if you care about solving the problem with today’s tech vs what’s still to come.
Edit w/update: It is indeed not allowed in their TOS, "Adult Content and Services: Pornography (including literature, imagery and other media); sites offering any sexually-related services such as prostitution, escorts, pay-per view, or adult live chat features." is under the 'Prohibited' section
Not surprisingly the only resources online about porn payments and cryptocurrency are a variety of high profile CSAM stories.
Yet another of one of the many problems with crypto adoption - it’s so frequently used/cited/associated with illicit activity that (again other than gambling on an exchange) many (most?) law abiding people associate it with criminals outside of the Disneyworld playpen that is Coinbase.
Porn is everywhere and there is no way to prevent that.
There was a legal liability change around payment providers and accidental support of sex trafficking that changed the calculus around risk for supporting these services.
As a result many of the payment providers backed out.
They're not really the "de facto" regulators - they're responding directly to incentives placed on them by government regulators.
Write up on this law here: https://www.wired.com/story/how-a-controversial-new-sex-traf...
> Out of curiosity, about five years ago Stoya contacted CCBill, one of the biggest payment companies specialising in porn. Rather than the “acceptable use” policy on its website, she asked if she could see their full guidance. The detailed list. The one that precisely laid out the limits of what CCBill believed Visa and Mastercard would tolerate.
> The four pages of rules shared with her are written in a lawyerly tone and are, in parts, totally bizarre. A section on furries, an online subculture interested in anthropomorphic animal characters with human personalities, reads “content that depicts furries and humans engaged in sexual acts are not permitted across the board. Content that depicts furry engaged in sexual acts with another furry is acceptable across the board.” Lest that leave any room for misinterpretation: “Please note, per Visa regulations a furry that contains human-like characteristics is not permitted.” So, no half-man, half-furry.
We seem to have completely lost our grasp on differentiating "real things" and "made up things"
It is interesting to note that Mastercard and other "reluctant content moderators" are starting the slow process of identifying the minimum globally acceptable standards. What is legal in one place may be illegal elsewhere but some global common level / trade off is being sought.
This doesn't have to be the case. There is infrastructure in place for these adult content providers to switch to crypto. It seems to be rather trivial for them to setup fiat on/off ramps for their customers.
https://www.getcreditcardinfo.com/generatevisacreditcard.php
or do they actually check it on all websites?
That's just objectively false we have a long history of forcing companies to take customers from Utilities, Americans with Disabilities Act, anti trust laws, forcing companies to license technology, and a whole bunch of other ones when needed; This is no different.
We are talking about it because we find the current state with Visa and MasterCard as unacceptable.
Mastercard/Visa are required by law to not knowingly allow the purchase of illegal goods/services (they can't facilitate the payment of illegal activites).
As such, they require such websites (merchants) to prove that individuals in such videos are of legal age (no minors in the videos, because if so - that's illegal and horrible).
This seems totally fair, commendable and hard to disagree with - if you ask me.
Indeed! Though it's important to note that it's more than just that (as important as age verification of performers is!).
Mastercard and Visa are also acting as de facto controllers of what is acceptable content. In other words, not just who is participating, but what is being done.
For example, "… blood is banned, even blood obviously made of ketchup. This is a disaster for vampire porn, which is akin to a forbidden good on the internet." That's not my thing, but I also don't think Mastercard and Visa should be the ones who regulate that.
If you're established, Visa and MC will make exceptions, but who decided to make Visa and MC the deciders on what people can and cannot sell. That's what US laws are for. In my opinion, this is the only use case for crypto that I can see playing out, decentralized payments. Sure fees maybe higher, but at least a private company can't restrict what you can sell online while whitelisting some competitors.
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.
It certainly wouldn’t be perfect either, but at least there would be some measure of legislative/electoral accountability.
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.
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.
Whoever is supplying content to PornHub has to uphold the law. They do that by providing evidence that there are no minors in the adult content (easy for a legit business) and that they hold copyright (somehow this gets forgotten).
PornHub has to uphold the law. They do this by keeping records supplied by the content producers about verification of actor's ages; when there's a problem, they need to remove the content. If there's a recurring problem, they need to bar the source.
MasterCard has to uphold the law. They do that by investigating complaints, and if they find illegal content, they send PornHub a warning. If PornHub doesn't act, either by showing that the content is legal or by removing it, MC has to drop PH.
There was a case recently that forced PH to delete a shit ton of content. Some of it was not even porn (just random gaming videos).
No due process. Just visa/mc threatening to no longer process their transactions
The topic is not mastercard/visa indirectly enforcing the law, it's a private institution pushing their own sexual morality on others, by virtue of controlling the payments industry.
> This seems totally fair, commendable and hard to disagree with - if you ask me.
This goes a few steps further than that, which is what makes it scary.
Pornhub's customers pay subscriptions which enable access to exclusive content. The illegal content in question was user-posted and made available for free without a subscription. So Mastercard and Visa were not "knowingly allowing the purchase of illegal goods/services." Instead, they took action against one of their customers because that customer was unintentionally guilty of unrelated illegal activty. That sets a pretty scary precedent IMO and demonstrates the frightening power of modern payment processors.
The article criticizes that they block things even when they're legal.
What's even the point of this? If I take money from someone, should I do a background check on them, in case the money was stolen? No, if it was stolen, the victim should report it and the authorities should handle it. Then, if a porn website is reported to have some illegal content, shouldn't it also be the authorities dealing with it?
Revenge porn is already illegal. If someone were to sell it, the problem with that scenario is not that those people were able to exchange currency, and I don't like the idea of setting up more barriers on the ability to give someone money.
Didn't read the article huh?
That's very much not what it outlines.
TBH i'm sure that the C{E,I,T}Os of Mastercard and Visa can recomend us some good sites.
At least for companies that don't have a Chief eXperience Officer.
More rule-by-oligarchy, as usual.
Banks are so inherently risk averse that even the most stalwart of them is likely to submit to even regulatory-coercive overtones, which effectively makes them arms of the government, but with enough "by proxy" to leap around constitutional hurdles.
[1] - Operation Choke Point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point
[2] - Redlining: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining
But I think the details around Operation Choke Point give me confidence, not wariness. Yes, Operation Choke Point was government overreach, but when the truth came out:
1. US Congressional reps proposed laws to stop the practice.
2. The FDIC Inspector General and the DoJ investigated the operation.
3. The FDIC issued a letter "effectively ending the practice" in early 2015.
4. The government officially ended the practice in 2017.
That is, IMO, government worked here: overzealousness came to light relatively quickly, was debated publicly, and was terminated.
... that 2008 never happened.
Banks are risk-averse when it suits them to be so.
While this is about Child Pronography. And we should have zero tolerance. I do think Visa and Master overstep and took the action to be basically against porn. The case against porn only got backlash when Onlyfans were hit with similar issues.
I could have rant about American companies like Visa and Master policing thoughts again, but both of them have been somewhat respectful in most cases. Their challenge to the EU court have been thoughtful and well reasoned even though you might disagree with them. Compare them to Silicon Valley Big Tech, which somehow all became social justice companies and full of self righteousness.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/opinion/sunday/pornhub-ra...
[2] https://twitter.com/BillAckman/status/1335244143950442496
It will also probably lead more men to pay for porn, since the companies running these websites will then make it one click.
Systems like Mozilla Persona would solve this on a technical basis, and was way ahead of its time, but there's no political incentive to standardise on something like this.
I don't know about ... but as a child my access to porn was rather ... limited ( to not say restricted ).