I fought the PayPal and I won
jessesingal.substack.com
jessesingal.substack.com
1. https://ymeskhout.substack.com/
2. https://ymeskhout.substack.com/p/eleven-magic-words-unlocked
Also what a writer, wow.
Thank you and grandparent for recommendations.
The lawyer asked "“Is there anything the court would like to review to reconsider?” and the judge said, oh, well "since you have asked if I want to, yeah I guess I do, so I'll just change my ruling for no reason?"
In one sentence the idea is that because public defenders know that the overwhelming majority of their clients belong in jail, and the judge knows that public defenders know that too, if a public defender makes an extra plea to the judge that's a signal that the public defender knows something that means this client really shouldn't be in jail and therefore changes the judge's opinion of the client.
https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/w5jyyd/eleven_mag...
Apparently I'd have to be an attorney to get it, in which case I'd have presumably learned about this obscure legal hack in law school.
That's the point, there was nothing remarkable about the eleven words. Goes to show you how arbitrary the system can be.
From Eleven Magic Words Unlocked:
>Recall how plea deals are structured, and how the entire purpose of a suspended jail sentence is to dangle the anvil over someone’s head to “encourage” them to do the things they’re supposed to do.
I was in a relationship with a police officer for a while, and this is what she said about probation: "Fuck that, send me to fuckin jail." And she reiterated it a couple of different ways to make it perfectly clear she wasn't joking.
A lot of people who haven't experienced it think probation is "being let off easy". It's not. You have to show up for check-ins, and excuses aren't tolerated. You have to pay for this punishment out of your own pocket too. And any other things the court applies to you too. And if you fuck up, and fail to show, you go to jail. If your car breaks down on the way, you go to jail. Your pregnant wife gives birth on the way and you reroute to the hospital, you go to jail. It's basically setting you up to go to jail, but rather just having the threat of it hanging over your head. At least in jail it's hard to fuck up and you're not responsible for anything while there. Probation is putting you in charge of your own punishment and making you literally pay for it too.
To hear an actual, currently employed police officer say they'd prefer jail to probation is a far weightier than it first seems statement. A police officer, in jail. With inmates who'll probably find out that they're a cop and take out their understandable if not justified frustrations on them.
Would rather go to jail than face probation.
Remember this the next time someone says "they just got probation", I'll never forget it. It's a very stressful, and expensive anvil they've got over your head, and it might fall on you for things completely out of your control. You're not "free", you're not "out", you're sitting under a very real sword of Damocles.
Edit; I guess by having written this, if a PayPal manager reads this, the Dutch support will get an ‘urgent read now!’ email from their manager to not waste so much time on customers…
I guess you found out as well, like me, the US has the last say in any matter and they don’t really listen to their overseas colleagues if their flagging algo/AI says ‘nope’.
Did the lawyer work? If it did, I am happy that at least it seems possible to go against them. I will never touch them again though.
Surprisingly, customer support was very helpful and let me transfer out the (minimal) balance in the account to another, completely unconnected PayPal business account I happened to have. Which is even more disconcerting, because it meant they were sufficiently convinced about my identity to let me transfer money out, but not enough to let me login in. Insane.
I'm still (very, very occasionally) using that business account today, even though the underlying business also ceased to exist years ago. I wonder when the banhammer will drop?
I could’ve gone on using it if I hadn’t told them. But in NL this is an issue (hence I tried so hard); bank accounts to companies need to be closed asap when the company gets closed and you definitely cannot pay or receive money with them as that will anger the tax office.
> Who provides the Service?
> The Service is provided by PayPal (Europe) S.à r.l.et Cie, S.C.A. (R.C.S. Luxembourg B 118 349) (“PayPal”) to registered users in the European Economic Area. For details on how to reach PayPal, please refer to this page on Customer Service, or in an emergency, see “What to do” below.
> PayPal is duly licensed in Luxembourg as a bank (or “credit institution” in legal terms). We are under the prudential supervision of the Luxembourg financial regulatory authority, the Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier or CSSF. The CSSF maintains a register of the organisations that it regulates at https://supervisedentities.apps.cssf.lu/index.html?language=.... PayPal is number B00000351 on the register, but you can also look us up on the register by our name.
[1] https://www.paypal.com/nl/webapps/mpp/ua/servicedescription-...
If they transfer money out and it turns out it was fraud they can easily compensate the original account holder by putting the money back in their account and there's little harm done, especially if the sums are small.
If they give unauthorised account access then there's far greater harm including risk they'll get penalised by regulators over data security as well as the damage being potentially hard to undo if further changes are made to the account.
Does it become acceptable to require the blood of my first-born because the risk levels are different?
Of course not. They're not even allowed to store that in the US (PCI-DSS), so the other poster must not be in the US.
1) getting locked out for not having the CVV of some random card that expired a decade earlier
2) being allowed to transfer money out, but not to login into the account
3) being allowed to keep my second account, even though they don't trust me enough to give me access to the first
None of these make sense individually, and they make even less sense as a whole.
After many years, there may not be a force to assure these processes are consistent, have rules that make sense in relation to one a other. I think the answer may just be it’s “dumb” because no one cares or has the power or will to look at things holistically.
But, once he'd learned that all of the other ½ cents are left floating around inside the megacorporation's database, Gorman hacked into the company's computer system and funneled them all into his next check, accruing the amount of $85,789.90, (a crime that would be later be known in slang as "salami slicing").
My conclusion that they simply lied to my face!
I was around the time when PayPal got some bank like regulatory status in Ireland and might have needed some more data so they forced me to provide through a bullst claim. At least this is the only scenario I find feasible. I had very little money there, after gaining access again (giving them a lot of data on me) there was no sign of any activity there that not belonged to me, nothing.
I decided that their practices are shady and I will never ever trust them!
(I did not report it eventually to the authorities, even the preparation for it took time with little supporting material, and I already had an unrelated matter to tackle, it was simpler leaving them and spread their reputation. PayPal definitely did not bother reporting it as I was never approached or questioned about the suspicious activity in my account ever. It was about 10 years ago btw.)
Now when I do absolutely need to use PayPal, I use my card on a friend’s account (with their permission).
LOL, I kinda had the same issue, but I had to remember the last 4 numbers of some old credit card. Couldn't find it in any email, so yeah ... couldn't use my Paypal anymore.
Filling in the KYC sometimes restores it, but then it gets locked again because the KYC changes account details, which triggers the KYC process and reverts the changes.
Thanks. I feel lighter.
They will find subtle ways to force-link your real bank account to paypal, and then its game over. They have the keys to the kingdom.
One day you will get some random charge on your account that keeps growing and growing and you don't recognize the transaction at all, but you can't do anything because they can pay themselves from your linked bank account.
I advise all businesses that use paypal that at worst case, link a completely unrelated bank institution to paypal, and then keep this secondary bank to low funds as often as possible.
Otherwise, you will never know when paypal may poison the well and your physical bank business operating account is suddenly unavailable!
for most reasonable sized US banks, once you have one account that has enough money not to be charged fees, you can open additional accounts with them, and easily transfer money between them. You could open a paypal-only account and keep it empty. You could also close it, and open another one whenever you need to verify an account with PayPal again
I already have 1 business and 1 personal account which is their limit and got permission from PayPal to open this one.
I kept getting an error when I go through the official form. Possibly because I have a linked account already.
So I talked to customer support and after a huge timesink and getting passed around between several agents and contacting them multiple times they gave me an alternative place to upload.
Which worked but I think no one saw the documents as that alternate form.
I contacted customer support again and they said that alternate upload form was just for personal accounts.
In the end I just decided not to accept PayPal as means of payment for that business.
Luckily wasn’t a big deal for me in this case.
I hate that I have to do this and to be viewed as defending a vile organization like PayPal but this specific incident here could be the result of another department/silo (compliance/anti-fraud?) within the corporation issuing an immediate ban for your account to avoid or limit any regulatory burden.
But in this case they knew it was a special case and should have informed the other parts of PayPal so this would not happen.
So this is not a good defense
The scale of these absurdities is just wild. Years ago I signed up for a domain for my blogger.com blog. At some point google decided to transfer the management of that domain to google workspaces ... I don't know how or why but they did. So when it expired I was told to login to google workspaces, but I don't have a google workspaces account at the email they kept emailing me at ... and their emails never told me what email to login with.
To get help on the website I was told to contact my google workspaces administrator ... but not who that is.
I figured out who the domain registrar was and told them my story and they helped me get a hold of the domain. Kudos to them to having a very fast and effective support team.
Now even more years later I get more emails from google workspaces that my account is expiring and sorta implying some consequences (but not actually saying) ... not that I can do anything about it.
At this point I have it in the back of my mind that any given day google could find this weird situation, assume malice, and ban me... a situation that 1. I didn't make happen. 2. I can't even fix. 3. I don't even know how it happened / what the problem is / google won't really tell me.
They locked an account and wouldn't unlock it.
Years later I get a letter from the State Comptroller about how they are about to receive my balance ($200) from PayPal because they (PayPal) haven't been able to contact me (Don't they have my email address?) There's a number to call, I call it, the PayPal employee says "How do you want your money, check or in your PayPal account?" I choose check, of course, because the account is locked.
And that's the last I ever heard of it. No check. No new letter from the comptroller. PayPal must have kept it. They found a loophole in the system.
It's literally not worth my time to pursue it, so instead I just mention this story in public from time to time.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
I disagree. ETSY and eBay appear just as weird, crazy, and up to various odd machinations. The Internet is littered with tales of people completely baffled and perplexed at having their accounts suspended without explanation, then getting the runaround or cold shoulder from customer service.
There is also speculation about some type of secretive blacklist that is floating around and used by various companies for preemptive actions.
americans can sign away their rights to sue at their own courts? That seems wrong.
For me, as a german, the paypal contract reads that i can escalate a conflict to the EU consumer protection agency or the french regulatory authority for financial institutions (which signs their banking license). It further reads that the governing body of law and court of of justice should be in Wales, but that this does not limit my consumer right to sue at my local court. No arbitration clause, especially no mandatory arbitration with an agency of the corporations choice.
I do understand the idea that private arbitration may be cheaper than court proceedings, but is mandatory arbitration even legally enforceable, or is that just scary text a court would overrule?
You still have immediate access to the courts if you are challenging the legality of the contract (i.e. something is actually against the law in the contract or you are claiming the contract is so unjust it should be allowed ). If it's just a dispute under the terms of the agreement, you usually have to do arbitration and then you can go to court. Every time I've done arbitration, the outcome has been pretty fair (which to me, means I won) and even a better experience that US Courts are. US Courts use an adversarial system, so if you don't spend a lot of time in courtrooms (which I don't), it's not a pleasant place to be even when you win.
Mandatory arbitration can be enforceable if certain requirements are met. The big difference between the EU and US is the American rule, each side bears their own costs. Lawyers might be $300 an hour, so arbitration can be a lot less expensive for everyone
As far as the byzantine arbitration process described here, signed off on by the US Supreme Court and adopted across most of the corporate world, with the obvious intent of making it hard for ordinary citizens to sue corporations for damages, see this quote:
"Control the coinage and the courts -- let the rabble have the rest." Thus the Padishah Emperor advises you. And he tells you: "If you want profits, you must rule." There is truth in these words, but I ask myself: "Who are the rabble and who are the ruled?"
-Dune, by Frank Herbert
> "Had the incident taken place in Washington, D.C., it would have likely been illegal. The District of Columbia has an anti-discrimination law covering political affiliation. In Madison, Wisconsin, it most certainly would have been. The city’s broad non-discrimination clause defines political beliefs and physical appearance in its law. Political views can include 'opinions, manifested in speech or association, concerning the social, economic, and governmental structure of society and its institutions.' "
Hence a dedicated person could plausibly incorporate their business in the District of Columbia, and then bring a (potentially very expensive and public) lawsuit against PayPal on the basis of political discrimination. Such incidents might be relatively rare, but they could also have major negative PR effects as well as the possibility of large jury awards, outcomes that binding arbitration is designed to avoid.
https://huckleberry.com/blog/right-to-refuse-service/
As far as where the line between 'respectable political affiliation' and 'member of a violent organization' lies, Irish history is worth looking at, i.e. Sinn Fein vs. the IRA.
"You do not want to be read as someone who is angry and needs to be talked down. You want to be read as someone collecting a paper trail."
I don't use PayPal any more. Their support staff are impossibility hopeless so any kind of problem with your account will cause you a world of pain.
One problem I have found with some UK eCommerce sites though is that their payment gateways are often broken with Brave/Chrome and the paypal payment option is an easy way of bypassing this issue.
The financial institutions at the receiving end of FOS decisions don't necessarily regard it as effective. Claims management companies, for instance, can flood banks with very many dubious claims, with the FOS as effectively the enforcer.
So I called the public utility commission, which apparently starts fining both parties within 48 hours of the complaint, which I submitted on Sunday. Monday morning arrives, and there is a comical gathering of trucks with crews frantically working to replace the pole (which is a fascinating process).
The foreman told me that the government is essentially level 3 support, and had I worked through the company, he probably would have inspected it over a few months before any work would have started, and only if I was persistent.
The key lesson is that large companies only perceive pain. PayPal lives in a big loophole, so it’s difficult to inflict pain on them and thus difficult to ever be satisfied with them.
Just taking that first step towards the Financial Ombudsman was enough.
If you don't use the word complaint then companies can argue that they thought you were merely providing feedback or engaging in something other than a complaint.
As soon as you use the word complaint, they can't argue that and it puts you on track to escalate to the ombudsman and the companies know it, and they know you know it.
There was a crowdfunding which was successful, they charged all of us, told the creator they were sending the money, then after a week canceled the crowd funding and refunded our money.
According to their TOS, they were NOT a party to the contract we had with the creator and forced arbitration, so we fought it. Each participant (200+ iirc) each had to pay $200 while IGG had to pay the other $2300/participant (~$460k) to get the arbitration initiated. Then they tried to push it to a class action (to simplify their legal battle) but according to their own TOS a class action was not allowed so that died quickly.
So then we collectively worked through one firm who iterated on our filings based on how each one went.
After a year+, IGG finally unlocked the creator's account, issued an apology, and updated their TOS. Insiders at IGG claim that the legal bill was into the millions.
It's not easy but you can fight bad behavior from these guys.
This one hundred times. There has been a surprisingly-effective PR scare campaign around arbitration in the U.S. Sure, for sexual harassment, it’s a bad forum. That’s approaching criminal territory. But for civil disputes, it’s straightforward and cheap.
I always wondered what would have happened if I'd had any kind of dispute with them; would this have over-ridden the various "we're updating your terms and conditions" emails I received from them over the subsequent years? Or would continuing to use my account have amounted to acquiescence? (I assume the latter)
In practice I closed my account a couple of years ago when I moved to Sweden as it's not possible to transfer the account between countries. I hadn't used it much because (Transfer)Wise makes international bank transfers so much cheaper than they used to be and for everything else I use a debit card (or, within Sweden, Swish).
I don't think I'd go long on Paypal shares...
NAL, but a contract requires a "meeting of the minds"[1]. You altering the contract without the other party knowing makes it invalid.
The process when modifying a contract is generally to have all parties initial next to each modification to indicate that they've read and agree with the change.
I don't think it's as clear-cut as all that, though in practice I wouldn't much want to trust my weight to that rather flimsy hypothesis. I'd love to hear a real legal opinion on this though, just for shits & giggles.
https://www.leagle.com/decision/infdco20150717729
This person secretly edited their post employment discrimination release agreement. In court, they got out of the agreement, but they were forced to pay back the consideration + interest.
I know this won't be popular here, but I stand by it.
At this point, I'm not worried about Paypal's security, but more about their own policies of shutting down accounts. I wish companies were required to specify why an account was blocked, but I'm 99% sure they don't and they've weaseled their way out of it so that challenging the decision becomes more difficult. If they specify a reason to someone who is more ligituous or who knows legalese, they could probably pick the reasoning apart.
Or just a "oh you have ruled 'fraudulent activity'? Prove it"
For quick transfers I can use Revolut. For buying something I can use card. For easy payment integration with Web apps there are countless tools.
So I am wondering what use cases PayPal still serves, use cases which aren't already better covered by better means. Why pay heavy commissions to PayPal?
PayPal offers all that in a neatly packaged solution. It's no surprise users would choose that instead of 3+ different services that serve different purposes
It took my company three years of litigations and finally PayPal did in fact return our money.
He gave me a UPS tracking number which belonged to a package that was delivered to another city, another person, was part 1 of a 3 package delivery and weighted 28kg, pretty heavy weight headset. The only match was the zip code everything else had nothing to do with me.
So I complained to Paypal, gave them all the data that showed that the tracking number wasn't from the right package and still PayPal let the seller keep the money.
We have even cities that share a zip code but are in different federal states.
However, if you do a lot of mailing, you'll discover some zip codes that cross state lines (because some remote area is actually served by a post office across the state line).
Or some area where several towns & cities map to a single "preferred" name that the USPS uses (example: Centennial, CO).
Zip codes are for the convenience of USPS and to make their life easier. The edge cases are very fuzzy & fractal.
Works even with merchants that don't support PayPal. Everyone supports good old card numbers.
Source: I use a card as my funding source.
But I still find them useful for long therm subscriptions to provider. That why when I need to change the card I don't need to login to (and remember) all websites where I have an ongoing payment plan
Yep. Therefore, we also use PayPal a lot to transfer money to a friend when we're at some place that is cash only and someone doesn't have cash on them. No need to type an IBAN and wait for a day.
Also, it's a great backup solution for online purchases if I don't want to share my credit card details or things don't work. For example, many vendors borked the 3d visa verification process so PayPal often was the only realistic option.
The delay can be skipped in many cases via the IBAN instant payment option. Requires both banks to be participating in the program and trust each other (the delay will happen if additional checks are needed, for example if the transction gets flagged for manual inspection, eg if you write "funny" purpose text, etc)
Source: I work in finance.
1) they offer services for free or for a low cost (compared to "normal" banks)
2) when these services work, they do work
3) when - for whatever reasons - these services do not work their assistance/support is either not-existing or unreachable, and when (if) you manage to contact them they provide no solutions/fixes and more likely than not you end up with your account frozen or closed (with no actual idea of the reasons why it was frozen/closed)
Surely there must be something (in EU) that complicates matters (anti-money laundering Laws/limits to transfers/National and EU Authorities/whatever) but right now it seems to me like none of them is actually reliable (if it is used as secundary or tertiary card/means of payment they are fine but I wouldn't trust any of them as "primary".
BTW - just for the record - right now N26 has been ordered to suspend making new accounts in Italy by the Bank of Italy (since March 2022) assertedly due to not full compliance with anti-money laundering checks:
I've never been in a situation where a next-day SEPA transfer wasn't good enough though.
This is incredibly annoying and unhelpful, but there's no other option.
Could you (or anyone else) comment on these?
I think the most popular indeed are PayPal and Stripe, whereas any others (like Paddle) are more niche or some others (Alipay) are just more regional.
Second, I wish there was more followup from "My account got limited/blocked, and I need help." HN posts of that nature—assuming they reach the front page—typically get resolution in enough time that the person with the issue posts a followup, but I don't think that's the norm.
> He did share correspondence with me where prominent free speech attorneys told him, in an apparent contradiction to my claims, that he had no viable legal recourse to getting his account reinstated.
Though somehow money is speech, the author never supports his claim how PayPal, which is not a government actor, can violate free speech. The First Amendment does not prohibit private individuals, companies and employers from restricting speech.
The US constitutional guarantee of freedom from government interference in speech is just one aspect of the matter. If private companies own every method of articulating your views, and are preventing you from doing so, then you aren't free to speak.
They aren't. We're nowhere even close. To the point where I can't even envision how that could happen.
Perhaps in some sort of fantasy libertarian future where everything has been privatized, including the streets and sidewalks. But that's certainly not anything like now.
1. Imagine a world where all the major online spaces - twitter, reddit, facebook, tumblr, HN, tiktok, instagram, youtube, twitch, slack, and discord and so on are privately owned. As are skype, zoom and google meet. Imagine a world where you can't even send e-mails if private companies don't like your 'sender reputation'.
2. Then imagine a world where all Radio and TV channels, newspapers and billboards are owned by private corporations. Maybe they're even owned by a tiny number of corporations, with specific political leanings.
3. Then fantasise that universities and similar venues for public speaking are a law unto themselves, and are within their rights to choose who they invite to speak.
4. Imagine a world of rising land values and increasing urbanisation, where only the absolute richest people could hold an event of any scale on land they own themselves.
5. Then imagine a world where public squares and parks in cities increasingly in private ownership. Perhaps city hall is sold to an investment firm who lease it back to the city. As it's private land, private security can move anyone on for 'unacceptable behaviour'.
6. There's still a risk some free speech would happen on public roads - we probably can't transfer those to private companies. We'll have to use the state's power here and arrest them - but don't worry, it's not a free speech issue. They were, uh, obstructing ambulance traffic. Or we could just make it legal for motorists to drive into people and let nature take it's course.
Thank goodness such an absurd fiction could never happen in real life :)
I believe you want to force a large company to accept an advertisement on any topic whatsoever, at a "reasonable price", and that that there should be no First Amendment right of free association which allows them to deny that advertisement.
If not, do you want to force them to post that same information at no cost?
Your list didn't include federated systems like Mastadon or IRC. It didn't include open source systems like Zulip that you can host yourself.
I don't use one of the big email providers, so I do get bounces when an organization thinks my ISP is untrusted. But that's not "can't even send e-mails if private companies don't like your 'sender reputation'" only "can't send e-mails to some people". And those people decided to use that system in part because they want the email provider to filter out some of their email.
We are not in a world where "all Radio and TV channels, newspapers and billboards are owned by private corporations." Member-supported radio and TV, and college radio, are still things, as is community/public-access cable.
Further, how do you want to change it? Do you want a government station which is required to be open access so anyone can broadcast anything?
Universities and similar venues for public speaking have always had the right to choose who they invite to speak. This is what freedom of association means.
Also, they are not a "law unto themselves". There are limits on the types of speech they can prohibit - a public university is restricted by civil rights laws, as is a private/non-publicly funded school which allows public rental of a space.
How do you want to change it? Do you want them colleges to be forced to accept any speaker on any topic, whatsoever?
We see events like the Gathering of the Juggalos, with 20,000 people, and wonder what you mean by 'only the absolute richest people could hold an event of any scale on land they own themselves.'
And I already commented on your "As it's private land" in my "fantasy libertarian future where everything has been privatized" - as something we aren't close to doing.
Yes, I totally agree that privatization of public spaces is something I don't like, though I'll point out the oddity of how the privately-owned public space at Zuccotti Park was a better site for the Occupy Wall Street protest than a public park, because the latter had curfews.
Ah, that's actually a real example, from London https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/jul/24/revealed-pseu...:
"Outside City Hall on the south bank of the Thames, home to London’s democratically elected mayor and assembly, private security guards working for the More London estate (ultimately owned by the sovereign wealth fund of Kuwait) prevented the Guardian from carrying out any interviews.
Security officers intervened within moments of a reporter attempting to ask questions of members of the public, and immediately escorted him to the security office where it was explained that unsanctioned journalistic activity is banned on the site.
So the example of a city hall leased from an investment fund with private security moving people on for unacceptable behaviour is, unfortunately, not merely fantasy.
> Further, how do you want to change it?
Who says I want to change it? My beliefs don't include defending to the death other people's right to glorify the holocaust.
I recently lived through a pandemic where offline means of communication and assembly were severely curtailed - and everything from education to concerts to job interviews to doctor's appointments to courts to funerals to national legislatures ended up reliant on multinational tech companies' servers.
It seems to me, in other words, that almost all communication was in the hands of private companies.
If someone says they support free speech except when private companies are involved, IMHO they might as well say they support free speech except on days ending in Y.
I specifically called out POPS as something I don't like.
FWIW, the HQ for the Greater London Authority has since moved, to a building owned by the Greater London Authority - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_Hall,_London_(Newham) . (Confusingly, as I just learned, it's not a city hall, in that it does not serve a city.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privately_owned_public_space says "the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan promised to publish new guidelines on how these spaces are governed." - any progress?
> If someone says they support free speech except when private companies are involved, IMHO they might as well say they support free speech except on days ending in Y.
IMHO, those who support free speech without also supporting the right of free association ... are not actually supporting free speech. Hecklers do not have a veto right.
I would change it by having and enforcing significantly stronger anti-trust laws, restoring restrictions on media conglomeration, stronger personal privacy rights, including strict limitations on resale of personal information, and restoring postal banking for anyone to use. For starters.
Yet the result will still have all major online spaces be privately owned and nearly all Radio and TV channels, newspapers and billboards owned by private corporations.
Do you think it would still be so dystopian?
Could you elaborate more on real-world examples of your points #3 and #4?
Regarding #3 has many cases where a college has changed its mind on inviting a speaker, but every case I've read seems to be a valid exercise of a right of free association.
We are pretty close - Mastercard and Visa's (non-public) BRAM rules are pretty clumsy and arbitrary, and effectively do have a tremendous impact on global speech as they are effectively a duopoly. Their terms apply to essentially every business that requires any revenue, and therefore any platforms that people might want to speak on.
That is a problem. A terrible one. And they abuse it.
I'll note that WikiLeaks is still around, and I believe they could always receive wire transfers. (As a less relevant point, WikiLeaks uses the money for ongoing acquisition and curation, and not only dissemination. The information was mirrored and available elsewhere.)
This therefore isn't an example of b800h's "private companies own every method of articulating your views."
Which other examples were you thinking of?
They are and have been for decades. One of the reasons of passing laws preventing businesses from engaging in certain forms of discrimination is because because businesses had enough power that to discriminate based on a protected factor could lock someone out from society. This is extremely noticeable in smaller communities where there might be only a single grocery store, but even in larger communities you'll find companies often working together and that they share common suppliers of certain goods or services who can lock you out of the majority of companies all at once.
Up until now we have tolerated it because the forms of discrimination we wouldn't tolerate have since been individually banned and there haven't been enough cases of coordinated denial of social involvement to prompt further legal action, but the power is there. I assume the threat of legal action further limiting the power of companies to discriminate has prevented the threat from going too far, and why companies will even walk back cases when enough popular support gets behind it.
What you describe seems more true of the labor movement, and especially company towns.
It is, however, a consumer rights issue. It's obviously the case that some larger tech companies -- PayPal, Google, Amazon, Meta, etc -- can have a large impact on one's life if they decide to suspend or ban your account, but legal remedies are...limited. As happened here, often they don't even tell you why, and greatly limit or block your ability to appeal. This is a problem, not a free speech problem, but a consumer rights problem.
Constitutional rights are also civil rights, which are things companies may not violate.
"Congress shall make no law [...] abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press"
I really don't see how this can be taken to mean that a private company can't establish a rule abridging the freedom of speech.
Note that there is another part where I would agree that it establishes a positive right:
"Congress shall make no law [...] abridging [...] the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances"
The language here does seem to assume that there exists a right peaceably to assemble, so you could argue that private companies also have to respect this right, even if the amendment only explicitly calls out Congress for this as well.
Heck, the literal phrasing is "Congress shall not abridging the freedom of speech". The fact that congress is mentioned means that others can also abridge the freedom of speech.
Note that 'abridge' means diminish in scope. If your boss says "If you say ducks are nice, you will be fired" that affects your freedom of speech. It isn't a first-amendment issue unless your boss is the government. But it remains someone inhibiting your speech.
Companies that scaled up quickly in earlier days of the internet tend to treat their customers like trash.
Today, as they reach the limits of their growth (hard to grow when nearly every person on the planet has had an account with you or has one with a competitor), they will find that poor customer service comes back to bite them. Everyone will remember the time PayPal closed their account without warning, or the time AirBnB refused to refund them for the rodent feces and other unlivable conditions in their rental, or the nonsensical response from Google's "support" that ignored everything you sent them.
Populist take:
I would really love for some regulation and standardization of service usage agreements. We already know basically nobody actually reads them, despite the checkbox or button confirming it. Give us a summary with some popular icons or simplified lists.
I'd also love for some regulation around forced arbitration clauses. It should not be legal to waive your rights to remedy by trial any more than it is to waive your right to minimum wage.
Well, it is just much cheaper to optimize for the 90% Case (Everything works just fine, nothing unusual is happening) than aiming for covering 100% of cases. Ofc this is more of a general business rule imho than just startups(=scaling fast), but when you grow fast, you also need to prioritize much more.
But in the more general sense it seems to me, that this is also the reason that government spending is quite a bit higher than if a company would do the same, because governments should be (and mostly are) aiming for 100% and not the most convenient subgroup of the population.
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-consortium-imposing-the...
This has now generated such controversy that MPs are proposing amendments in parliament preventing Paypal from blocking accounts on political grounds.
[0] https://freespeechunion.org/about/
[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2022/09/27/paypal-reins...
Every time I have to solve 2 captchas and fill the log in form twice until I log in.
I’ve switched to using my online banking to pay for stuff over clicking the PayPal button.
You can have an "account" and hold money in it and it may function similar to one, but it has none of the federally mandated legal protections of being a bank.
Some much more recent Fintech startups such as Chime are legally underpinned by something that is an FDIC regulated bank.
Back when it was x.com, they were trying to figure out how to avoid being a bank, and they did it with something that violated credit card merchant agreements: by crediting accounts without correlated purchases (you can still do this today, depending on your card processor I think).
That got noticed, so they just started holding the money instead. I never figured out how a company that holds your cash with exclusive rights to do anything they want with it has avoided banking regulation.
Regarding PayPal: I've always avoided getting an account with them, because I generally don't like online services having access to my bank account. Two weeks ago, though, I was forced to create an account with them to pay a conference fee - just to have the PayPal account locked literally the minute it was created. I have no idea why, I didn't get any further information, and no useful response from customer service. So I guess I will remain a non-PayPal customer...
> Notably, neither Square nor Stripe offer to cover arbitration costs, and Stripe even requires the loser of the dispute to pay the winner’s entire legal expenses
I am glad the author got it sorted, but it appears that if this was a material dispute with money at stake for PayPal, the game is stacked against you so much, you might as well be a medieval surf teying to get justice against the Lord that has wronged him.
... and the incentive for an arbitrator to favour the corporation for repeat business.
> (Notably, neither Square nor Stripe offer to cover arbitration costs, and Stripe even requires the loser of the dispute to pay the winner’s entire legal expenses.
yikes.
Correction: Shopify does not have an arbitration clause. Instead they specify the court of jurisdiction. Looks like it's Ontario court system for me.
So a bunch of Tumbler users who get mad at someone can report en masse a Twitter user, or an Etsy employee who gets his feelings hurts can click on a button and get an account blocked. The C staff and legal have no idea this is going on.
I’m under the firm belief that this is just our federal government pushing a censorship and “misinformation” policy that is unconstitutional, but using pressure on private companies to accomplish said policies.
Twitter docs leaked: https://theintercept.com/2022/10/31/social-media-disinformat...
PayPal: https://www.techdirt.com/2010/12/07/visa-mastercard-kkk-is-a... (yes source is questionable , but actual events did occur
My problem is that PayPal is the primary, and often only method of payment accepted on online auction sites, specially person-to-person of used electronics.
I buy electronics by the boat load (I think, never seen the boat) to experiment with them. Most Asian or individual sellers will accept just PayPal.
Yes, it is a monopoly in the niche field of online auctions.
What's the group? I clicked on the link and it points to a podcast that's over 1.5 hours long.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puget_Sound_John_Brown_Gun_C...
[edit]
And specifically mentions liking guns in the about page.
https://bgr.com/business/new-paypal-rule-the-company-can-tak...
In the EU paypal is deemed a bank I believe thus must abide by the same rules as regular ones. That's not the case in US.
Legal claims fall under the Luxembourgish laws. I'm not seeing any language in the Dutch terms of service that mention any arbitrage.
Another thing to note is that the European branch of PayPal actually has a banking license. The Dutch national bank lists the permits (though the registration was done in Luxembourg, obviously): https://www.dnb.nl/en/public-register/information-detail/?re...
It looks like the 2007 basic banking license was extended around 2018.
https://www.afca.org.au/make-a-complaint
This is AWESOME, other countries have it.
Paypal refunded a customer over one thousand dollars despite the tracking number AND the buyer saying the item was delivered after they opened a case, the buyer simply failed to close the case but they commented on the case saying it was delivered and tracking showed it was delivered.
AFCA got my money back, got them to pay me compensation and I got a personal apology from someone in Ireland over the phone.