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Comment by btown | Hacker News Reader

Then the goalposts shift to: “This isn’t for reputational risk, it’s because we consider fraud more likely for this type of industry, and we are within our rights to take a proactive approach to fraud.” And there is no requirement that they disclose the reasons for that decision.

Don’t get me wrong: it’s progress. But it’s far from a panacea.

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It would be a hard sell to finger Steam as being at high risk of fraud. Steam has a very generous refund policy, and if you don't consider it generous enough, and chargeback a purchase on your Steam account, they just lock it (and access to all your games) until you pay them.

I don't have insider information about how often Steam gets hit with fraud alleged chargebacks, but I can't imagine it's a significant percentage.

> Don’t get me wrong: it’s progress. But it’s far from a panacea.

Progress in this day and age is great. Progress right now is at least 2 orders of magnitude better than patiently waiting for a panacea.

> Steam has a very generous refund policy

It doesn't.

Can you provide counter examples? I've legitimately never had a refund refused within the terms they outlined.

I bought Path of Exile 2, spent 5 hours just waiting to get access to the servers, something about the movement in the game made me physically ill after just two hours of playing, asked for a refund, was denied.

For fraud related risk they should still be considered a common carriers but may adjust rates for certain types of transactions or businesses, if, in good faith and backed by empirical data, they can demonstrate the monetary risk to the card processor, and that the increased transaction costs are aligned with the level of risk and are not punitive or discriminatory.

The key point here is ”good faith”.

I don’t want to disadvantage their business or make them absorb fraud costs, but I want all excuses off the table.

OTOH Visa and MasterCard testified in front of Congress a couple of months ago that they have >50% profit margins which indicates to me that there is a regulatory failure in antitrust here.

i think that sounds like a perfectly fine compromise - choosing not to provide services that are an especially high risk of fraud should be within their rights.

it just means that they could be forced to defend those decisions in court, which is good and exactly the sort of thing that courts are supposed to decide.

Exactly. If they are misapplying their fraud criteria, companies start suing and winning and Mastercard stops misapplying their criteria.

This sounds great on paper, but what incentive does Valve have fighting for a game listing with only 100 players?

I get the feeling many companies would find it easier to allow payment processors to censor something if the product isn't earning them much anyway.

"That's one of our least popular items we sell so honestly we don't really care..."

Which is within the right for the reseller to decide, but it does nothing for protecting access to a product that's otherwise only available on a select few digital storefronts.

Then it becomes an issue for the game studio, who may not have the funding to fight a case to remain available. And then you have a situation where the game studio has become a victim of a payment processor's conspiracy theory that they're tied to fraud.

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