[HN Gopher] Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken...
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Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down
Author : croes
Score : 520 points
Date : 2025-08-04 09:27 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.pcgamer.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.pcgamer.com)
| nottorp wrote:
| Wrong title.
|
| "Mastercard finds out there are a lot of gamers out there, makes
| an attempt at damage control." would be more appropriate.
| v3ss0n wrote:
| Why you care about whatever we do with do with digital pixels
| at our free time ? Gamers trying to save the game they play and
| Master card have no business banning the games we play on our
| own private
| crinkly wrote:
| A classic tale. Finger pointing between merchants, card providers
| and banks. All of them: it was someone else!
| yreg wrote:
| In this story, Itch and Valve are 10x more trustworthy than the
| card processors.
| crinkly wrote:
| Oh 100% agree there. It's who they have to deal with who are
| the problem.
| otherme123 wrote:
| The fact that Visa and MasterCard are the primary payment
| options for OnlyFans, makes this story a mess. Some time ago
| Visa and MasterCard very vocally banned Pornhub (at least)
| from using their cards, 100% sure this comes from them.
| duped wrote:
| > Visa and MasterCard very vocally banned Pornhub
|
| Not exactly. Visa was named as a counterparty in a class
| action against Mindgeek for monetizing child porn on their
| website. They lost, and there have been subsequent class
| actions.
| morkalork wrote:
| You mean like this?
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/aug/19/onlyfans-
| to-...
|
| Ultimately the ban was undone _in exchange_ for onlyfans
| limiting the type of content available on the platform. So
| effectively, payment processors dictate which type of
| sexual activities, performed by consenting adults, are OK
| to depict and sell. Why? Why do they have that power?
| xcrjm wrote:
| The government historically uses the the financial
| industry to police crimes and behavior that it does not
| want to or that it is not expedient to police directly.
| Clearly they like the outcomes of the payment networks'
| rules and enforcement decisions and see no need for
| things to change.
| o11c wrote:
| > Some time ago Visa and MasterCard very vocally banned
| Pornhub (at least) from using their cards, 100% sure this
| comes from them.
|
| That was because the government was prosecuting Pornhub for
| breaking the law (rape with _real_ people, unlike these
| games).
| vintermann wrote:
| That also suggests they do not want to out exactly who pushed
| them to this, whether it was external or internal.
| amiga386 wrote:
| But it seems fairly straightforward who it is.
|
| If it was indeed Collective Shout's pressure campaign that
| led to Valve and itch.io being told by their payment
| processors to remove games, then this is how it went:
| Collective Shout -> Mastercard -> Mastercard's head of brand
| risk (or equivalent role) -> Mastercard's business partners
| -> Valve and itch.io
|
| We know it was Mastercard who told the payment processors
| what to do, as the rule they cited to Valve says "in the sole
| discretion of the Corporation, may damage the goodwill of the
| Corporation" -- the Mastercard Corporation used its sole
| discretion to tell payment processors what to tell Valve and
| itch.io. The payment processors did not decide this for
| themselves.
|
| Mob bosses order hits, wise guys carry them out. The mob boss
| has clean hands.
|
| Keep the pressure on Mastercard.
|
| We need to stop these side-channel attacks on democracy. If a
| government deems some media lawful, you shouldn't get to de-
| facto ban it by going after publicity-averse private
| companies that provide hosting, payment processing, etc.
| https://protectthestack.org/
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| Free market.
|
| So when some country decides something isn't appropriate for
| their culture, that's being backward, look at American
| exceptionalism and free speech..... unless its payment gateways
| enforcing their thumb down any free speech throats.
| phkahler wrote:
| Tossing around "free speech" in this case is kinda silly. The
| first amendment only applies to the government, not some
| company.
| SSLy wrote:
| the concept is not limited to what the US constitution
| specifies.
| reactordev wrote:
| Incorrect, it applies to companies too as companies are
| citizens according to citizens united ruling over a decade
| ago.
| criley2 wrote:
| >Incorrect, it applies to companies too as companies are
| citizens according to citizens united ruling over a decade
| ago.
|
| This doesn't even make sense. If a corporation is a person,
| then 1A Freedom of Speech means that the government cannot
| restrict the corporations political speech.
|
| The corporation is absolutely allowed to restrict their
| users free speech, including political speech, because A)
| the bill of rights only binds the government, not
| corporations and B) it would actually be against free
| speech to compell a private corporation to engage in speech
| it does not agree with.
|
| Should you be forced to post political or sexual content
| that you disagree with on your accounts or on a wall at
| your house? Of course not. Similarly, if you start a
| business, you cannot be forced to post political or sexual
| content you disagree with. Your freedom of speech as a
| business is what matters here.
|
| The idea that we have "speech anarchy" where all people can
| say anything they want and punish anyone who doesn't
| reproduce their speech is insanity.
| zb3 wrote:
| What kind of "speech" are we talking about here? If a
| payment processor is already required to be secure, it
| could also be required not to deny any legal
| transactions. This isn't even political, you wouldn't
| expect a mobile carrier to censor your phone calls (at
| least in the EU we don't have that.. yet).
| criley2 wrote:
| The concept that you're talking about in the US is a
| "common carrier" e.g. a taxi can't deny some people or a
| hotel can't refuse some people.
|
| In the US, payment processors are not common carriers and
| operate on a contractual regime that allows them to
| refuse or terminate service for non-compliance, risk
| management, or policy reasons.
|
| Mobile companies here are common carriers and are much
| more strictly regulated.
| mathiaspoint wrote:
| Free speech the idea applies to everyone. Free speech the
| implementation applies to the state's delegation of power to
| the federal government via the constitution.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| Free speech can refer to two distinct but related concepts.
|
| 1. Free speech as in the US first amendment. This indeed is
| limited to the government.
|
| 2. Free speech as in the enlightenment ideal upon which
| western liberal societies are built.
|
| It is usually obvious that people mean the second because it
| is the only one that is even relevant outside the US. Somehow
| the narrow-minded people who can not conceptualize that free
| speech is broader than the first definition think it is a big
| gotcha' to jump into conversations with this kind of "um
| achtually".
|
| This is becoming tiresome.
| koonsolo wrote:
| If only we had some kind of decentralized internet money system.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| Or a legally protected right to transact, ideally with cash-
| equivalent anonymity. I'd take either one.
| zb3 wrote:
| Both require repealing AML/CFT laws. But maybe that's the way
| and we should focus on the underlying crime instead..
| wongarsu wrote:
| Bitcoin (and most other crypto) unintentionally strikes an
| interesting balance here. Through the ability to trace
| blockchain transactions and impose KYC laws on exchanges
| you can in principle figure out who most money belongs to.
| That puts you in a position where if A wants to send B
| money you can't prevent that, but you can go after either A
| or B. That gives you freedom of payment, but after the fact
| you can still go after people laundering money or financing
| terrorism
| zb3 wrote:
| Until the bank closes your account because it's deemed
| "high risk" and they're absolutely allowed to do that
| without explanations.
| anankaie wrote:
| I'm feeling a little maximalist about this: How about both?
| ranguna wrote:
| The digital euro will be released in the coming years. It
| allows for digital offline transfers.
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| And this is not the first time this happens. The exact same
| thing happened to PornHub - their premium subscription model
| got cancelled due to Visa/MC not liking some "questionable"
| content. Even though PH purged 60% of its content (basically
| every video uploaded from an unverified account), they are to
| this day still not accepting CC - probably as they are still
| banned. Instead they accept Crypto and SEPA payments in the EU.
|
| This makes a strong case for Bitcoin - no matter if you
| consider it a ponzi scheme, or the BTC price to be
| overinflated, you will not be able to deny it is truly
| censorship free.
| projektfu wrote:
| It's a strong case for, perhaps, Algorand[1], but Bitcoin can
| no longer play this role properly. Transactions are too
| difficult and slow and the network is too expensive. And
| Lightning is not a real solution.
|
| 1. Specifically a stablecoin running on the network
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| Why is Lightning not a solution, care to elaborate?
| projektfu wrote:
| It's basically unused and difficult for even motivated
| users to set up. If it was going to work, it would have
| been successful by now.
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| Stablecoins are not decentral and would suffer the exact
| same censorability as Visa/MC. That does not improve the
| situation.
| weberer wrote:
| We have privacy focused crypto systems like Monero, but the EU
| effectively banned them last year through "money laundering"
| laws, and they're moving to completely ban them within the next
| few years.
|
| https://www.bitcoinsensus.com/news/altcoins/eu-to-restrict-m...
| jasonlotito wrote:
| One that is anti-consumer when compared to the CC system.
| roenxi wrote:
| The US has some clear laws against government controlling speech
| and, in the abstract, that makes it pretty much impossible to
| censor games. Various factions - exactly who it is difficult to
| pin down - have been working hard to set up a system where they
| can shut things down without ever explicitly instructing anyone
| to do anything. This appears to be the system engaging by
| accident because some crazy from Australia accidentally said the
| right thing to the right people.
|
| So I do actually believe Mastercard when they say this, but
| holding them accountable anyway is probably for the best. They're
| likely the single group with the most influence over the
| regulators.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| Say fuck on TV.
| rs186 wrote:
| Apparently you can do that between 10pm and 6pm on broadcast
| TV, or on cable TV.
|
| Which is a pretty messed up situation.
| chrisrhoden wrote:
| In addition to the sibling comment about safe harbor hours,
| the FCC regulates not speech but the shared airwaves. Print
| is irrelevant, and that's why you can do whatever you want on
| cable.
|
| Also, the FCC does not directly set standards and instead
| responds to complaints from the communities in which the
| broadcast is available. So it's conceivable that in an
| environment where nobody cared, you could do this at any time
| of day.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| Didn't know the FCC regulates Youtube. Nevertheless, in a
| country with no regulations about saying "fuck" on TV, I
| get beeps on Youtube.
| terinjokes wrote:
| Many stations affiliated with the ABC network did, from 2001
| to 2004, in primetime by airing "Saving Private Ryan"
| unedited for Veterans Day.
| perihelions wrote:
| > _" The US has some clear laws against government controlling
| speech and, in the abstract, that makes it pretty much
| impossible to censor games."_
|
| For background,
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Entertainment_Merchan...
| ( _" Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association"_ (2011) ( _"
| ruling that video games were protected speech under the First
| Amendment as other forms of media"_))
| p_ing wrote:
| First Amendment applies to the _government_, not private
| entities.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| I think the larger point here is that the government is
| suppressing protected speech by using private sector actors
| as intermediaries.
| roblabla wrote:
| Is there proof the government actually uses this
| apparatus?
|
| I don't think there's any government involvement
| necessary here - Mastercard has some censorship apparatus
| (which they claim to be necessary for their brand's
| reputation), and they used it (apparently through
| pressure from an Australian group) towards video games.
|
| This is really bad but I don't think it makes sense to
| believe a government was ever involved here. Of course,
| there should be laws put in place to regulate mastercard
| into a common infrastructure. They should not be able to
| deny processing a legal payment because of nebulous
| "brand reputation" reason.
| dlgeek wrote:
| In this case? Not that I know of, but I'm not following
| closely.
|
| In general? Absolutely - search 'Operation Chokepoint'.
|
| There's a great summary in the middle of this (very long)
| article under that header:
| https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/debanking-and-
| debunki...
| switknee wrote:
| There are laws in place to regulate this behavior, but
| the government has chosen to protect mastercard from
| enforcement in this instance. That's the smoking gun.
|
| Mastercard could simply refuse service for those games in
| particular instead of demanding (through proxies) that
| the games be banned from Steam. There's a clear antitrust
| violation.
| hexyl_C_gut wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point
| 93po wrote:
| if we're going to point to this there are much much more
| problematic instances of this happening, in particular
| democratic pressure to platforms like twitter and
| facebook to suppress certain information as
| "disinformation" even when it later came out to be true
| (hunter biden laptop)
| weberer wrote:
| Now read the grandparent comment you're replying to. You're
| just talking in circles now.
| clarionbell wrote:
| In age of megacorps, this is a great weakness of this
| right.
| SilverElfin wrote:
| We need to break them up solely based on size - if
| they're too big on revenue or profit or market cap or
| employees, break them up. Or at least huge taxes on the
| largest companies and lower taxes on small ones. Market
| cap about 500B? Here's an additional 25% tax on profits.
| Above 1T? Make that 50%.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| For certain industries it also applies. Common carriers
| (e.g. telecoms) and utility companies are also not able to
| censor or refuse lawful business.
| infecto wrote:
| I am quite surprised how wrong opinions like yours are. There
| is no argument of free speech here, they are a private business
| and as such can decide what they allow and don't allow on their
| network. It's no different than if cloudflare had a click
| through that said no adult material.
|
| You can hand wave around well they are a monopoly or some
| related argument but the government does not see it that way.
| Visa and Mastercard for decades have censored adult sites on
| their network. At the end of the day I suspect they would be
| happy to take the fees but they are the ones underwriting the
| risk and there have been cases over the year in the US at least
| that challenge how extreme you can go with Adult material. Even
| today there are certain categories that are much harder to get
| setup for processing.
|
| Edit: to be ultra clear, I would love more competition in this
| space but at the same time there is no argument around free
| speech here.
| lightedman wrote:
| "There is no argument of free speech here, they are a private
| business"
|
| Constitutional rights are also civil rights - businesses may
| not violate them nilly-willy in this specific manner which
| causes damages to people.
| infecto wrote:
| You're confusing constitutional rights with business
| obligations. The First Amendment restricts government
| actions, not private companies. Mastercard isn't violating
| free speech by refusing to process certain payments. Civil
| rights laws protect against discrimination in specific
| categories like race or religion, not content moderation.
| Unless adult content is a protected class, your argument
| doesn't apply.
| Kinrany wrote:
| The argument from free speech is that government should not
| be allowed to censor, regardless of the mechanism. Payment
| processors currently offer that mechanism.
| infecto wrote:
| If the government were coercing Mastercard into censorship,
| that would be a free speech issue. But absent state
| pressure, a private company choosing not to do business
| with certain content isn't censorship in the constitutional
| sense. That's just market behavior. If you want to
| challenge the influence of financial infrastructure on
| speech, that's a separate (and valid) policy debate but
| it's not a First Amendment violation.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| Your distinction is correct as far as it goes, but there
| is a third observation that must also be taken into
| account, which is that the tidy division of economic,
| social, and political matters into private and public
| domains is uninteresting from the perspective of power.
| An example of this is how gov'ts, constrained by law,
| cannot legally engage in widespread surveillance, have
| found what is morally a loophole by involving private
| companies who are able to do so more freely. Or, for
| example, the policing of certain ideas on privately-owned
| social media which have become de facto public forums. It
| is completely uninteresting to claim that you aren't
| forced to use these forums or that you can start your own
| as jejune free market extremists like to claim. A little
| intellectual maturity will make plainly obvious why that
| is the case.
|
| Now, I happen to think that, pace Dershowitz, adult
| content does not fall within the scope of free speech.
| The _entire_ purpose of free speech is to allow the truth
| to be to expressed. Free speech takes an attitude of
| pragmatic permissiveness toward certain varieties of what
| are objectively bad speech as the price for that to
| happen. It 's a choice that was made in American
| political history, but even here, the bounds of what is
| legally permitted under free speech have not remained
| fixed for various reasons.
|
| Adult content is nowhere in the vicinity of this notion
| of free speech, and certainly not its moral purposes.
| There is no right to produce or to view adult content.
| There is no right to anything that is objectively
| unethical, and both the production and consumption of
| such content is unethical. Gov'ts can choose to take a
| permissive stance toward such activity for prudential
| reasons (for example, historically, while prostitution
| was categorically condemned on moral grounds, gov'ts took
| a permissive attitude in some respects, because they felt
| that banning it would cause still greater problems), but
| they have the authority to criminalize it.
|
| So, given that it isn't a free speech issue, I have no
| problem, in a free speech context, with private companies
| banning such content from their platforms or from being
| the subject of transactions passing through their
| systems.
| Kinrany wrote:
| It's a free speech issue if the government _can_ pressure
| Mastercard and, separately, Mastercard _can_ act as a
| censor. That government isn't using this ability in this
| particular instance is no more of a consolation than if
| there was a law that permitted censorship but was not
| used for that or enforced in practice.
|
| Severing either of these two links would be enough
| though.
| infecto wrote:
| You're shifting from a First Amendment claim to a broader
| "potential for abuse" argument. That's fine, but let's be
| precise.
|
| 1. Government pressure only triggers a First Amendment
| issue when it's actual, not hypothetical. Courts require
| clear state action or coercion.
|
| 2. Mastercard acting on its own isn't censorship in the
| legal sense, it's a private company making content-
| moderation decisions. You may not like that power, but
| it's not unconstitutional.
|
| If you want structural reforms, like regulating payment
| networks as common carriers, that's a policy question,
| not a current free speech violation.
| root_axis wrote:
| What is the government's role here? As far as I can tell
| the censorship was coordinated and facilitated by private
| parties.
| infecto wrote:
| You have a for profit business that in some areas like
| adult content walks a line between regulatory oversight,
| public outcry and the risk to underwriting the business.
| In this case it was public outcry, there have been
| instances in the past where different local jurisdictions
| have come forth. My point is they walk the line between
| those three areas.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Competition doesn't matter if entities have to simultaneously
| follow all of the payment processors' rules. It means in
| order to compete you have to find people willing to give up
| everything else. Which is an impossible proposition.
|
| It's like if a tier 1 ISP only peered with networks that peer
| with networks that censor XYZ. Allowing for these kind of
| agreements leads to censorship and is why net neutrality is
| important from the government.
| immibis wrote:
| FWIW, "tier 1 ISP" is less prestigious than you'd think.
| Many tier 2's are bigger than many tier 1's. Being a tier 1
| is kind of a self-exclusionary, nose-snubbing policy and in
| some ways it's surprising they manage to hang onto
| existence at all, though not in all ways.
|
| This typically comes up when someone thinks they're getting
| better transit service from a tier-1 than a tier-2. They're
| not. A tier-2 ISP can have better routes, since a tier-1
| will refuse to deliver your traffic anywhere that requires
| them to pay money. Some places are just unreachable from
| tier-1 ISPs.
|
| Famously, for over a decade Cogent has refused to receive
| packets from Hurricane Electric without payment because idk
| profits, and Hurricane Electric has refused to pay them
| because it's a tier-1-ish, so you just can't talk to Cogent
| customers if you're an HE customer and vice versa. (I think
| HE eventually relented by paying a third-party to forward
| packets to specifically Cogent, even though they have
| tier-1 status to everywhere else)
| hollerith wrote:
| What prevents any old ISP from claiming it is tier 1?
| welshwelsh wrote:
| You're confusing the concept of free speech with the First
| Amendment. Any time a person is prevented from expressing
| themselves is a violation of their freedom of speech, even if
| they have no legal right to speak.
|
| But even in the context of the First Amendment, freedom of
| speech does not only apply to the government. For example,
| net neutrality laws prevent ISPs, which are generally private
| companies, from restricting Internet traffic on free speech
| grounds.
|
| To the extent that it is legal for a payment processor to
| censor speech, the only reasonable conclusion is that the law
| is wrong and must be amended. Large corporations are much
| more similar to governments than they are to private so
| individuals, and should be treated as such.
| infecto wrote:
| You're incorrect on both legal and factual grounds. The
| First Amendment applies only to government actors. Private
| companies, including Mastercard, have no legal obligation
| to carry or support speech they disagree with. This is
| settled law (Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck,
| 2019).
|
| Net neutrality was about common carriers (ISPs) due to
| their chokepoint role in internet access. Payment
| processors are not classified as common carriers and are
| not subject to those rules.
|
| If you want laws changed to regulate them like utilities,
| that's a policy argument, not a free speech violation under
| current law.
| armada651 wrote:
| > This appears to be the system engaging by accident because
| some crazy from Australia accidentally said the right thing to
| the right people.
|
| This has been happening for years already, this is not an
| accident caused by a crazy lady from Australia complaining to
| the right people. She simply took advantage of Mastercard
| already engaging in censorship and challenged them and their
| payment processors to take on an even broader interpretation of
| Mastercard's obscenity rules.
| kmfrk wrote:
| Full title that doesn't fit in the HN headline:
|
| "Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down, but
| Valve says payment processors 'specifically cited' a Mastercard
| rule about damaging the brand"
|
| (For the people who don't click the link to read the article.)
| petcat wrote:
| There are definitely a lot of links in this chain. Maybe leafo
| can chime-in and say exactly what happened with Itch.io. But I
| suspect that someone downstream of Visa/Mastercard anticipated
| that the payment card companies would not permit the
| transactions and relayed that back up to the merchants, and
| they shut it off preemptively.
|
| But it's hard to say. Mastercard is now saying that they never
| said or did anything. So where did the outrage come from?
| Someone must have done something.
| Shank wrote:
| > But I suspect that someone downstream of Visa/Mastercard
| anticipated that the payment card companies would not permit
| the transactions and relayed that back up to the merchants,
| and they shut it off preemptively.
|
| It sure is tragic that benevolent and majestic Mastercard is
| having their name thrown into the mud over this.
| Coincidentally, it sure is convenient that they have a number
| of middleman scapegoats who can take the blame on their
| behalf.
| eastbound wrote:
| All Mastercard has to do is say "We ordered payment
| processors to let Valve sell their games". It is sure
| convenient that they stop at "We didn't say the opposite."
| Mindwipe wrote:
| FWIW Mastercard are simply lying, as anyone who has ever had
| to touch adult payment processing will tell you.
|
| There's even a (non-public) list of keyword banned terms.
| TimorousBestie wrote:
| Indeed, and the keywords are vague and they refuse to
| rigorously define them. Adult payment processors just run
| around in the dark until they trip over one of these
| landmines.
|
| Even the (rare) categories of content that have been
| legally determined to be non-obscene (e.g., werewolf
| erotica [1]) can fall under banned keywords (in this case,
| "bestiality").
|
| It's a stupid extralegal system and ought to be destroyed.
|
| [1] https://time.com/archive/7118599/california-prisoner-
| fights-...
| leafo wrote:
| Throughout this our only contacts have been representatives
| at Stripe and PayPal. They indicated that they got a notice
| and kicked off their own audit.
|
| As far as I'm aware, the Collective Shout letter caused a
| "formal card network inquiry" to originate from both
| Mastercard and Visa. I did not have access to the actual
| inquiry, but my assumption is that it wasn't "we see this
| content, take it down" and more like "we saw this letter,
| look into whats going on before we do our own investigation
| and fine you"
| weberer wrote:
| It was Mastercard's rule, but any one of the companies in the
| payment network could have brought it up to Valve. The whole
| system is set up so one transaction has to go through up to 6
| different companies, and they all have to abide by each other's
| rules. The US Internet Preservation Society explained it
| recently:
|
| >Each of these companies maintains its own terms of service and
| each of them can block a transaction by themselves.
| Additionally, intermediary companies that handle card
| transactions are mutually and individually bound to the terms
| of every Card Network, so even if you never do business with
| Discover or American Express, you must still obey their rules
| if you want to accept Visa or Mastercard. For online
| businesses, there are no alternatives: you will do exactly what
| they want, or you will not do business at all.
|
| >If you are banned from processing payments, you will not be
| informed why or by which point of failure. "Risk management" is
| considered a trade secret in the industry. You have no right to
| know, you cannot sue to discover what has happened, and you
| also have no right to appeal.
|
| https://usips.org/blog/2025/07/fair-access-to-banking/
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _was Mastercard 's rule, but any one of the companies in
| the payment network could have brought it up to Valve_
|
| Did Mastercard threaten Valve? Or did Valve precomply?
| braiamp wrote:
| They cite a rule about Mastercard brand damage. If
| Mastercard didn't specify that such content would result in
| MC brand damage why would they cite it rather than their
| own rules?
| detaro wrote:
| Some options:
|
| a) they are worried Mastercard might randomly decide it
| does and punish them
|
| b) it's convenient to be able to blame someone else
|
| c) someone somewhere said something and the rest of the
| orgs isn't aware or over-interpreted a statement
|
| Vague rules like this are great to dilute responsibility.
| It can both be true that Mastercard didn't tell the
| payment processors to force the issue and that the
| payment processors strongly thought they had to.
| amiga386 wrote:
| Valve's payment processors told Valve they would withdraw
| payment processing unless Valve banned specific categories
| of game from their online store.
|
| The payment processors did not cite any law; Valve selling
| those games was not illegal. Instead they cited
| Mastercard's rules, which say that they cannot submit
| transactions that _Mastercard_ believe might damage
| _Mastercard 's_ goodwill or reflect negatively on its
| brand. Those rules also say Mastercard has _sole
| discretion_ as to what it considers breach these rules, and
| Mastercard _gives a list_ of what it deems unacceptable:
|
| https://www.mastercard.us/content/dam/public/mastercardcom/
| n...
|
| > 5.12.7 Illegal or Brand-damaging Transactions
|
| > A Merchant must not submit to its Acquirer, and a
| Customer must not submit to the Interchange System, any
| Transaction that is illegal, or in the sole discretion of
| the Corporation, may damage the goodwill of the Corporation
| or reflect negatively on the Marks.
|
| > The Corporation considers any of the following activities
| to be in violation of this Rule:
|
| > 2. The sale of a product or service, including an image,
| which is patently offensive and lacks serious artistic
| value (such as, by way of example and not limitation,
| images of nonconsensual sexual behavior, sexual
| exploitation of a minor, nonconsensual mutilation of a
| person or body part, and bestiality), or any other material
| that the Corporation deems unacceptable to sell in
| connection with a Mark.
|
| The payment processors threatened Valve first. Mastercard
| doesn't need to threaten Valve or even contact them at all
| to force its will on them: it just needs to threaten its
| payment processors, the same outcome is achieved. Valve did
| not remove games from sale until threatened. If they did
| not do that, and instead initiated some kind of fightback,
| they would most likely find themselves _completely_ removed
| from all payment processors, with no recourse. If you want
| to call that "precompliance", so be it.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Valve 's payment processors told Valve they would
| withdraw payment processing unless Valve banned specific
| categories of game from their online store_
|
| Do we have a statement from Valve saying as much?
| amiga386 wrote:
| Click on the article link at the top of this page and
| find out. Let me quote the article for you:
|
| > In a statement provided to PC Gamer, Valve said that it
| had tried to work things out with Mastercard directly
| prior to removing the games, and suggested that
| Mastercard did have at least an indirect influence on the
| outcome.
|
| > "Mastercard did not communicate with Valve directly,
| despite our request to do so," a Valve representative
| said. "Mastercard communicated with payment processors
| and their acquiring banks. Payment processors
| communicated this with Valve, and we replied by outlining
| Steam's policy since 2018 of attempting to distribute
| games that are legal for distribution.
|
| > "Payment processors rejected this, and specifically
| cited Mastercard's Rule 5.12.7 and risk to the Mastercard
| brand."
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| This text is also consistent with Valve making a
| determination, checking with payment processors and not
| being told no. (Versus the payment processors reaching
| out to Valve first.)
|
| Like yes, there _is_ a problem with Mastercard. But I
| want to know this isn't Valve having complied with some
| activists trying to cover their tracks.
| nemomarx wrote:
| As far as it goes, collective shout claimed Valve didn't
| respond to them and that's why they complained to MC visa
| about it. They even mention how many calls they made to
| them to get the complaint heard.
|
| So everyone would have to be pretty invested in this show
| for it to have originated from Valve?
| Maken wrote:
| Which means Collective Shout didn't have any legal weight
| behind their demands.
| nemomarx wrote:
| Of course - they've never invoked a legal justification.
| What they seem to be leaning on is basically "we can
| create bad press about you supporting payments for X",
| promising headlines like "MasterCard is paying for women
| to be beaten and raped!" or other sensational nonsense.
| shagie wrote:
| They're based out of Australia and so have the Australian
| porn laws behind them.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornography_in_Australia#Il
| leg...
|
| > Some types of pornography (both real and fictitious)
| are technically illegal in Australia and if classified
| would be rated RC and therefore banned in Australia. This
| includes any pornography depicting violent BDSM, incest,
| paedophilia, zoophilia, certain extreme fetishes (such as
| golden showers) and/or indicators of youth (such as
| wearing a school uniform).
|
| https://www.sydneycriminallawyers.com.au/blog/pornography
| -la...
|
| https://www.kptlegal.com.au/resources/knowledge/pornograp
| hy-...
| aranelsurion wrote:
| Steam already has the ability to block certain countries
| and regions from buying specific products. IIRC many of
| the adult games were already banned in the German region
| for example.
|
| If it was about the laws, at worst Valve could block
| Australian users from buying adult content and that would
| be it.
| shagie wrote:
| ... and if Valve and Itch had blocked content that was
| illegal in Australia before Collective Shout weaponized
| the Australian laws, we wouldn't have heard about it
| beyond it showing up in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lis
| t_of_banned_video_games_in_...
|
| From the Valve rules: 6. Content that
| violates the laws of any jurisdiction in which it will be
| available
| amiga386 wrote:
| 1. Everything on your banned list that Steam sells was
| already banned in Australia (you can tell by looking it
| up on SteamDB and noticing it has "n/a" for the
| Australian price e.g. https://steamdb.info/app/2456420/)
|
| 2. Collective Shout aren't weaponising Australian laws in
| this case - those only apply in Australia. At best they
| could get games banned in Australia by drawing the state
| censor's attention to them. What Collective Shout did was
| weaponise _American corporations fear of negative
| publicity_ by calling them repeatedly and threatening
| them with negative campaigning, and as a result got games
| banned in countries they don 't live in, over and above
| the say-so of the people who do live in those countries,
| and the laws of those countries allowing them to purchase
| such games.
| amiga386 wrote:
| If this is just evil old Valve, why did itch.io - a site
| founded on openness and the right to sell adult-only
| games, _especially_ if they cover LGBT themes, tell
| everyone that _their_ payment processors also want _them_
| not to offer adult-only games?
|
| Which is more likely:
|
| 1. Porn-hating, sex-hating, LGBT-hating activist group
| from Australia bombards Mastercard with complaints that
| Valve and Itch are selling adult games. Mastercard
| reminds its payment processors not to bring shame on The
| Mark. Valve's and Itch's payment processors tell them not
| to sell adult games.
|
| 2. Porn-hating, sex-hating, LGBT-hating activist group
| from Australia bombards Mastercard with complaints that
| Valve and Itch are selling adult games. Valve and Itch
| agree with these harpies and remove their revenue streams
| and support for developers (because they hate revenue and
| hate supporting their developers; they'd much rather
| align with moral prudes from Australia in order to lose
| money and abandon the people who make them that money),
| then they sneakily pin the blame on Mastercard. Valve and
| Itch also use telepathy to know Collective Shout's
| desires, which they agree with, to ban games precisely at
| the time Collective Shout are calling up Mastercard, in
| order for it to be Collective Shout -> Valve/Itch rather
| than Collective Shout -> Mastercard -> Payment processors
| -> Valve/Itch
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _why did itch.io - a site founded on openness and the
| right to sell adult-only games, especially if they cover
| LGBT themes, tell everyone that their payment processors
| also want them not to offer adult-only games?_
|
| Thank you, this is the context I was missing.
| jfyi wrote:
| What is more likely is the processors made the decision
| themselves and cited Mastercard's rule without
| interacting with Mastercard.
|
| If Mastercard cared about this stuff then processors like
| CCBill wouldn't exist. The absurd amount of money that
| porn brings in on the internet would dry up over night.
|
| This was a decision made by paysafe and paypall and so
| far they are the only ones not getting the blame pinned
| on them.
|
| Itch: Our processors told us to do it.
|
| Mastercard: That is correct, we weren't involved.
|
| Half of Hacker News: MASTERCARD AND VISA!!!!!!
|
| The other half: VALVE AND ITCH!!!!!!
|
| Paysafe and Paypall: Lol
| amiga386 wrote:
| > What is more likely is the processors made the decision
| themselves
|
| If you think that, please explain how the payment
| processors didn't say anything since Valve started
| selling adult games in 2018... and only a few days after
| Collective Shout specifically started targeting
| _MasterCard_ and _Visa_ (not PayPal or Paysafe)... the
| payment processors used by Valve cited MasterCard 's
| rules to Valve?
|
| It's also MasterCard that set the rules. Valve can always
| get another payment processor. They can't get another
| payment processor that is not beholden to Visa and/or
| MasterCard.
| rpdillon wrote:
| Mastercard pressured their processors and the processors
| turned around and talked to Valve about it and cited
| Mastercard's rules. It wasn't pre-compliance, but there was
| a proxy that allows Mastercard to deflect responsibility.
| immibis wrote:
| As I understand it, Valve was threatened by a middleman
| because the middleman precomplied with Mastercard.
| jfyi wrote:
| Both Valve and Itch use Paysafe and Paypall for
| processing. I'm glad someone is paying attention.
|
| I feel I've been screaming at a wall for a week now. All
| this rage and it's all directed at the wrong
| corporations.
| rtkwe wrote:
| An intermediary between Valve and Mastercard likely was the
| one that brought it up because they have to comply with
| those rules, or the rules of someone upstream of them that
| has to and imports them into their own rules, so they have
| to interpret vague "brand damage" rules and they err to the
| conservative side because if they run afoul of the rules
| they could lose access to process Mastercard transactions
| ~20% of US transactions, which would really mean losing
| most of their customers not just the 20% of Mastercard
| flows.
| socalgal2 wrote:
| I'd be interesting to know if Valve is big enough to start
| their own payment system. Yea, I know it would be hard but
| their customers have libraries of games in their system and
| Valve has lots of good will. Valve could also offer discounts
| ($X off if you use ValvePay). It would take years. They'd
| have to drop the adult games now, start ValvePay, promote it
| until the majority of their customers used it. Then put the
| games back and tell Visa and MC they can eff-off.
| csours wrote:
| Or even a Plausible Deniability system - you can't buy
| these games with currency, you have to use tokens. Here's a
| token store where you can buy tokens with your currency.
| carstenhag wrote:
| Simpler: why can't I buy nsfw games with a regular dumb
| bank transaction (SEPA EUR) in my case?
|
| If MasterCard/Visa don't want these transactions, stupid,
| their loss. But at least let me use a payment method that
| works & doesn't have these morale restrictions?
| dude250711 wrote:
| Anti-monopoly laws are good, but how about some harsh anti-
| duopoly laws?
|
| Could also hit the iOS-Android bird with the same stone!
| dchest wrote:
| Existing "antimonopoly" laws already cover unfair competition,
| market manipulation, etc. regardless of the number of entities.
| techpression wrote:
| It's not even a duopoly, look at the majority shareholders of
| both Visa and Mastercard, Vanguard and Black-rock in both. So
| it's effectively a monopoly.
| dublinben wrote:
| Vanguard and Blackrock are just asset managers. Public
| companies are owned by everyone with mutual funds, like
| pension funds and individual retirement accounts.
|
| https://factcheck.afp.com/doc.afp.com.34N76K4
| techpression wrote:
| Thanks, but "just asset managers" feels a bit generous,
| from that same link; "But large asset managers may help
| bring issues to the attention of boards." Is that the case
| here, no idea (likely not), but I do find it strange that
| both Visa and Mastercard refuse to take part of the multi
| billion dollar industry that is adult content. I have heard
| that it's a volatile market with a lot of cash backs and
| fraudulent transactions, but they are happy to participate
| in other such endeavors.
| IanCal wrote:
| I feel like nobody cares really and none of the companies care,
| but are all worried because of the massive stranglehold 2 players
| have (and realistically each has almost entire control).
|
| Mastercard don't care you want porn, or games, or whatever.
| Neither does VISA. They like money. They want money and want
| people to move their money so they can siphon off some of it for
| their own pockets. Almost nobody is going to avoid using a bank
| because their card provider let some other people buy rude games
| on steam.
|
| The payment processors don't care. They want you to send money
| through them so they can take their cut.
|
| Steam doesn't care. The people making the games don't care. They
| all just want to sell stuff.
|
| The only thing that impacts this really is chargebacks, which
| iiuc are much more common with adult stuff.
|
| But payment processors can't guarantee what mastercard or visa
| will do, and players like steam (and they're _huge_ , this is not
| about tiny store issues) can't guarantee what payment processors
| will do and given the potential downside - blocking all sales -
| people need to be careful.
|
| While I can see how these situations come up, it's also
| absolutely insane as an end result because I just want to give
| *my money* to someone else. I've ended up using crypto before for
| buying things, not for ideological reasons, but purely because I
| could buy them and then give them to someone else for the
| "flagged as risky" goods/services because I couldn't pay for
| things using _my money_ and _my card_.
| simion314 wrote:
| >The only thing that impacts this really is chargebacks, which
| iiuc are much more common with adult stuff.
|
| I think this makes no sense, like "we makes less profits from
| adult stuff because of charge back, so let\s give up on this
| profits". Anyway this companies did not use this excuse so why
| do this old excuse is resufecing now if they did not use it.
| giantg2 wrote:
| They usually just charge a higher fee for the riskier
| category. If a particular vendor has too many charge backs,
| they could drop them for that. Obviously not the case with
| Steam.
| IanCal wrote:
| I didn't say it was an excuse given here, have you tried
| reading the whole comment? It's not very long and shouldn't
| be hard to understand. If it is I can help explain it.
| simion314 wrote:
| We are not on reddit here, have you paid attention?
|
| Now seriously, you brought some old excuse here for some
| very inteligent reason, explain please? Do spouses will
| read that the guy bought something from Steam and she will
| then conclude the dude is playing very adult games? The
| excuse does not work as far as I can see, so explain your
| thoughts or explain why you are just pasting random excuses
| and then act like a redditor
| IanCal wrote:
| Read the whole comment because that statement is not an
| excuse, it is simply a nod to how it differs from other
| payments. The rest of the comment explains why I think
| the situation arises like this. It really isn't hard to
| read so try and if you think your understanding clashes
| with my explanation of _my comment_ feel free to assume
| I'm bad at making a point and read it in good faith.
|
| I clearly don't understand your issue with what I wrote,
| and won't with more accusations of being like a redditor.
| simion314 wrote:
| I will respectfully disagree, I can't see your comment on
| topic. you said "The only thing that impacts this really
| is chargebacks, which iiuc are much more common with
| adult stuff." and this is something claimed about porn
| sites but explain how this applies to Steam or GOG,
| please explain clarly or admit it does not apply.
| IanCal wrote:
| It's not about chargebacks. If you can't understand that
| from the comment and my followups I'm not able to explain
| it clearly enough for you and we should end it here, have
| a nice night.
| giantg2 wrote:
| This has nothing to do with charge backs and everything to do
| with the Australian and US laws.
| IanCal wrote:
| What laws are stopping Mastercard taking money for adult
| games but not onlyfans or pornhub?
| giantg2 wrote:
| It's not for adult games, but for sexually violent games in
| Australia. Also, Pornhub already appeased the payment
| processors when they purged a bunch of content.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_banned_video_games_
| i...
| logicchains wrote:
| What's stopping a large, profitable company like Valve from
| starting its own payment processor? Surely the technology part of
| it can't be an impossible hurdle.
| ddtaylor wrote:
| I mean they kind of do. Most of the time I would hand wave away
| any company offering gift cards or credits, but Steam has
| created an economy / structure that I think warrants mentioning
| here.
|
| I have sold a few items on Steam because I don't care about
| cosmetics in games. I'm also lazy and because of that "sat" on
| items for a while that appreciated. I mention this because
| Steam credit is very fungible: it can be easily converted.
|
| Steam also makes it very easy to redeem credit, gift, etc.
|
| I believe you can buy Steam cards at most places Xbox cards and
| similar are sold as well.
|
| Also in the early days of Bitcoin buying and selling of digital
| Steam assets was one of the most popular things.
| Hamuko wrote:
| I know that physical Steam gift cards exist but I've quite
| frankly never seen them anywhere. Nintendo/PlayStation/Xbox
| cards are pretty ubiquitous though. I recently tried getting
| a Steam one from a grocery store but they only had the
| console ones.
| reginald78 wrote:
| I've definitely seen them. A quick search shows them
| available at BestBuy and Walmart at least.
| Hamuko wrote:
| I'm not American so I've never stepped inside a BestBuy
| and Walmart. The last place I checked was a Lidl, where
| they only had the console ones.
| ascagnel_ wrote:
| On the other hand, I'm absolutely amazed some US states
| hasn't yet gone after Valve for running an unlicensed casino
| with no age verification.
| ddtaylor wrote:
| I think loot boxes as a whole need to be regulated as they
| are clearly gambling. I'm not a fan of regulation as a
| solution to most problems, but when it involves children I
| think it sets a good framework for safety and if someone
| wants to start gambling later they are free to do so.
| mschild wrote:
| Adoption.
|
| You'd have to onboard hundreds/thousands of banks and terminal
| providers so they accept/give out your card.
|
| I excpect the underlying technical stuff isn't that hard
| compared to getting people and companies to actually use it.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Aren't cards last century technology? I'm paying with my
| phone anyways. Seller can use phone as well. Why does it need
| to involve incumbent banks and terminal providers at all? If
| Valve started something like that the banks would bang on its
| door relentlessly just to not be left out of the loop.
|
| Gaming is the business bigger than movies, music and books
| combined and Valve is Google of games.
| Jensson wrote:
| > Gaming is the business bigger than movies, music and
| books combined and Valve is Google of games.
|
| Valve is not Google of games, the app stores Google and
| Apple has dwarfs steam sales and the individual game
| consoles are similar size as the steam store.
|
| > I'm paying with my phone anyways
|
| Right, since the phone ecosystem is large enough to be its
| own payment processor, unlike steam.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Phone is the platform. You can put any payment system
| there. In various countries it was figured out in a lot
| of different ways. Valve with global reach could really
| compete.
|
| Also Google Play store might have more consumers and or
| sales but they are of worse quality. It's scummy, it's
| exploitative. The whole system is propped up by whales
| decieved by gambling mechanics and deceptive ads. It's
| nowhere close to real world economy. Valve is much
| closer. Despite using Play Store since it came to
| existance I never paid for anything on Google Play
| because I don't trust it enough to add a single payment
| method there.
| mpalmer wrote:
| You should maybe look up how paying with your phone works.
|
| And what in your mind is the thing banks will be begging
| Steam to be let in on? This reads like payment processing
| fan fiction.
| scotty79 wrote:
| I know how it works because connecting your bank account
| to your phone can be crappy and fiddly as it goes through
| Visa/Mastercard. But it works that way just to ride on
| customers of legacy systems. It doesn't have to work that
| way if you bring your own customers. It would have to
| start online of course and eventually move through phones
| to the real world.
|
| I don't trust Paypal, at all, because its brand is
| damaged beyond repair, but I would put enough money on
| Valve account to do all of my online shopping with it if
| Valve did even just what Paypal does (even without
| connecting Visa or Mastercard directly).
| mpalmer wrote:
| It seems like you're treating your personal knowledge and
| preferences as the basis for Valve to take on an entirely
| new source of revenue and risk. It's a fantasy.
|
| Even if 100% of Valve's user base cared as much as you
| (they do not), why would Valve take on the massive risk
| of connecting to its users' bank accounts? Of having to
| collect on debts? etc.
| scotty79 wrote:
| > It's a fantasy.
|
| Of course.
|
| > Of having to collect on debts?
|
| Why would they need to do that? "Credit" part of credit
| card is completely irrelevant when it comes to payment
| systems. It's a trick to milk the customers. Why would
| Valve lower themselves to that level?
|
| My point is, with crystal clear, pro-consumer reputation
| Valve could be real alternative to gambling industry of
| Google Play store, payday loan business of
| VISA/MasterCard and gym membership style of extortion of
| other services. And betting on consumer was a recipe for
| success for Valve so far.
|
| Why would they try? Because it's always good to 10x your
| revenue.
| yetihehe wrote:
| > Aren't cards last century technology?
|
| I don't pay with credit or debit card for steam, I can use
| Blik, which is paying with my phone or one other payment
| processor, but I'm not in USA. This is USA problem.
| scotty79 wrote:
| My point exactly. Valve could easily introduce something
| like Blik globally.
| numpad0 wrote:
| The backend of electronic payment is a huge mess of
| microservices, and lots of those services has portions of
| infra shared with Visa/Mastercard. So whichever alternative
| service you use is likely vulnerable to the same pressure.
| scotty79 wrote:
| The point is to cut MasterCard and Visa out of the loop
| entirely. Payment systems in many countries don't have
| them as intermediary. Payments in China work perfectly
| well without them. Or in Germany. Even Poland has widely
| used alternative payment scheme. With future European
| digital currency a lot of commerce will be done
| completely without any involvement from Visa and
| MasterCard.
| creer wrote:
| > You'd have to onboard hundreds/thousands of banks
|
| It's perhaps a good idea. It's likely that not very many
| banks and terminal makers and payment processors really
| matter. It would be a little delicate because the ones that
| matter would be pressured or at least would feel pressured
| NOT to participate on threat to their currently main
| business.
|
| And the project doesn't have to become mainstream probably,
| just accepted "enough".
|
| A better reason is that it's not really Valve's battle. They
| have plenty of other business. They don't need to fight this
| war. A company like OnlyFans, yeah perhaps they do - but they
| are likely much smaller.
|
| Valve is in a situation that helps: they charge separately
| for each item. Some that the credit card networks are okay
| with and some that they are not. So they could support two
| regimes on their site: some items could only be paid through
| the Valve new card network (and gift cards and bitcoin),
| while other items could be paid through all the above plus
| the legacy credit card networks.
|
| Valve (and/or OnlyFans) then gets paid for trying to enter
| the very lucrative payment network business. And gets to use
| these separate charges / two regimes of payments to
| distribute content that would be too dangerous within the
| current single payment framework.
| raincole wrote:
| You mean Valve, the company that has been intentionally keeping
| itself lean to the point they only have 300 employees?
|
| (Visa employee count: 30,000+)
| kasey_junk wrote:
| If you believe Steam et al, the payment processors are bowing
| to the card networks in this. So being a payment processor
| wouldn't help. You need to sidestep the networks.
|
| In the US that means either dealing with ACH at scale, which is
| a challenge, building a new card networks (which is hard) or
| only using alternative payment methods such as bnpl or crypto.
|
| Each of those will limit your buyers, which as a merchant is a
| tough business decision.
| benterix wrote:
| > In the US that means either dealing with ACH at scale,
| which is a challenge, building a new card networks (which is
| hard)
|
| Which is why someone has big interest in keeping it this way
| as in Europe practically every country solved this issue a
| long time ago and people do daily shopping completely
| omitting Visa/Mastercard. They try to fight back without much
| success.
| kasey_junk wrote:
| Europe is not a monolith on this. You see utilization rates
| going as high as 75% in Europe for credit cards, so in
| those countries merchants would have similar choices to
| American merchants. That's before accounting for debit
| cards which use the main network rails.
|
| And most of the alternatives are either government
| controlled and thus subject to different censorship
| concerns or private (for instance bnpl) and subject to the
| same.
|
| That is to say people seem to be dancing around there being
| some fundamental right to transact. Thats not one of the
| traditional rights and not one that is codified most places
| (anyplace?).
| IshKebab wrote:
| How would that help? Then MasterCard would drop them directly.
| WolfRazu wrote:
| Well in this case MasterCard is claiming it wasn't them, but
| their intermediary.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Sure but also in this case MasterCard are clearly full of
| shit.
| giantg2 wrote:
| If they start their own payment processing company, they will
| then be subject to the same laws and regulations and the
| existing processing companies. Who manages the money doesn't
| matter. Even if you use Crypto, Steam would still remove the
| games due to the Australian law.
| raincole wrote:
| Steam didn't remove the games due to Australian law lol.
| Where did you get this idea?
|
| Steam games' availability is per-country. They could've
| removed games for Australian users only. NSFW games are not
| shown to Chinese and German players on Steam since forever.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "lol"
|
| This whole thing came about because of the Australian
| campaign to remove rape games consistent with law. Payment
| processors could be found liable for processing payments
| related to illegal activities. Steam anad the payment
| processors could have made it region specific, but didn't,
| probably for PR reasons.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_banned_video_games_
| i...
|
| Also, Steam Direct didn't update their policy on game
| content from what I see. Doesn't look like Steam fought
| back. Seems as though Steam has never supported games with
| rape, incest, child exploitation, etc.
| Moomoomoo309 wrote:
| The regulatory environment is absolutely insane. The things
| you'd need to do to interoperate are nightmarish, it's damn
| close to an impossible hurdle. (I work at a fintech company)
| nullc wrote:
| It's basically impossible from a regulatory perspective.
|
| Paypal exists because it broke the law, was prosecuted, and the
| outcome of the prosecution fined them heavily but also
| grandfathered their existence.
|
| Anyone who wants to make a new payment processor likely has to
| take a risk of going to prison.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| This entire situation is badly misunderstood all over the
| Internet. As the article itself states, alternative payment
| processors that are used primarily for adult content already
| exist. CC Bill was the example given. And they accept Visa and
| Mastercard. They're used by websites with plenty of explicit
| adult content, including simulated rape, incest, and "teen"
| porn. It isn't Visa and Mastercard forbidding this. In this
| case, it's Stripe, though it seems likely they're doing it
| because of pressure from Mastercard, which in turn received
| pressure targeting these particular platforms from some
| advocacy group in Australia. But itch.io and Stream could still
| use CC Bill, and customers would still be able to pay with Visa
| and Mastercard.
|
| The reason mainstream websites don't use CC Bill and it is used
| almost exclusively for porn, is because they charge a lot more
| than Stripe and the more mainstream payment processors do.
| There isn't really a ban on this kind of material, provided the
| platform hosting it is willing to use alternative processors,
| so much as a price increase.
|
| Even with Pornhub and OnlyFans debacles, they never hosted
| content that can't be found elsewhere on sites that allow you
| to pay with Visa and Mastercard. The reason those platforms
| were targeted was never the content itself, but non-compliance
| with rules that professional studios have always had to abide
| by requiring they keep copies of government-issued ID of all
| performers and provide those to any viewer who asks for it, in
| order to be able to prove they aren't accidentally hosting
| content with children or otherwise non-consenting performers.
|
| Ultimately, if a website wants to host content with a guy
| taking a shit on his twin underage daughters, they can do that,
| and you can pay for it with Visa and Mastercard, as long as
| they use something like CC Bill for processing and they keep
| adequate records enabling them to prove the "underage"
| characters and not actually played by underage performers, and
| the people involved aren't actually related. Or, maybe more
| precisely, you can have real twins in a scene together, but
| you're then limited by byzantine country-by-country laws I have
| no personal knowledge of regarding what they are and are not
| allowed to do together that counts as sex.
|
| The Internet is where nuance goes to die, so this all gets
| distilled down to "Visa and Mastercard don't allow you to buy
| porn" by the time most people find out about any of it.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Lots of outrage at the card companies, but strangely, no outrage
| at the laws that actually caused this. One is the Australian law
| to remove that type of content and the other is the US law that
| says the payment processor can't participate in illegal
| transactions.
| Jensson wrote:
| Then they would just get removed in Australia, not worldwide.
| giantg2 wrote:
| My guess is that Steam wasn't able to adequately block the
| games in Austrailia. If people use a VPN to access the
| content, could Steam still be liable?
| ohdeargodno wrote:
| No, it hasn't been the case. The group in question,
| Collective Shout, has been pressuring Mastercard. Not
| Mastercard Australia, not Steam Australia: it's a concerted
| action to take down things they don't want. It's not a one
| time thing either: sex workers have been under attack by
| similar extremist catholic bigots. Furries, porn, anything
| they see as deviant is being attacked. And MC/Visa are
| happy to help.
|
| Do I mind that MDMA Date With Hitler was taken down ? No, I
| don't believe it's a massive loss. However, the way it was
| done, through payment providers threatening to shut off
| access to the entire payment system because of their rules,
| is incredibly dangerous to the whole world.
| Maken wrote:
| This so much. The problem here is not the content that
| was blocked, it's the completely unaccountable process
| that was used to block content _worldwide_ bypassing any
| legal protection.
| 0983736882 wrote:
| Content which already violated the policies of MasterCard
| and Visa. All Collective Shout did was bring it to their
| attention.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Steam Direct didn't update their policy on game content
| from what I see. Doesn't looked like Steam fought back.
| Seems as though Steam has never supported games with
| rape, incest, child exploitation, etc.
| Maken wrote:
| So what? Steam simply didn't want to start a fight with
| its payment providers over some niche content. The
| problem is that this incident has proven it's possible to
| ban whatever content you want, globally, by pressuring
| middle management in Mastercard and Visa.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "Steam simply didn't want to start a fight with its
| payment providers over some niche content."
|
| Or the content was never supported by Steam, per their
| policy. You can check Wayback machine for support for my
| position. Dod you have any evidence of Steam's motive
| otherwise?
| Maken wrote:
| I don't think inferring causality here is far fetched.
| They were fine with the content before. And we know it
| because said content was banned in some countries
| (including Australia) to comply with local regulations,
| so they clearly _knew_ what the games were about.
|
| Given that fact we have two options: either they decided
| to change their approach to content moderation and remove
| games that previously passed all their checks, with these
| games being coincidentally the same that were requested
| by Mastercard; or they decided to remove every game
| requested by Mastercard regardless of Steam's own
| policies.
| nubinetwork wrote:
| Your steam account has a record of the country it was
| created in, and so does your credit card when you use it.
| You'd have to also get a foreign credit card and create a
| new steam account to even use a VPN to buy games from
| another region.
| benterix wrote:
| No, it's enough that they do basic geoblocking just like
| streaming and other companies.
| Mindwipe wrote:
| Steam already blocks games sufficiently for Australian law
| in some cases about ratings and drug use, as it does in
| many territories.
| meinersbur wrote:
| They absolutely do have that infrastructure. They
| implemented every country's content rating system, such as
| PEGI, ESRB, ... . Games are regionally banned, such as in
| Germany [1]. Games can also have regionally censored games,
| typically for violence/gore in Germany [2]. With the
| strange effect that if you change your account's region, it
| re-downloads some of the games.
|
| The legal situation with VPNs and traveling between regions
| is the same as with any internet service.
|
| [1] https://steamcommunity.com/groups/foruncut/discussions/
| 17/41... [2] https://steamcommunity.com/groups/foruncut/dis
| cussions/17/39...
| ddtaylor wrote:
| Do you have info on the US law? I am curious if it follows the
| same trend Russia set years ago with requiring them to put a
| large deposit and if they break the rules they get to keep all
| the money.
| giantg2 wrote:
| It doesn't go that far. These are part of the Know Your
| Customer type of law. These have increasingly been pushed as
| part of anti money laundering onto banks, investments, and
| processors. If a company is selling illegal things or things
| that even could potentially be illegal, then they get
| blacklisted. Similar thing to pot companies.
| ascagnel_ wrote:
| Marijuana sales, at least in the US, are a whole different
| can of worms, because marijuana exists as kind of a
| Schroedinger's illicit substance: its legal at a state
| level in most US states, while simultaneously illegal at
| the federal level. Anyone with a multi-state footprint that
| exists in that transaction chain could be held liable.
| ddtaylor wrote:
| And they have threatened payment processors, etc.
| basically anyone who gets to big.
| tmvphil wrote:
| As opposed to a hypothetical scenario where it is legal to
| participate in illegal transactions?
| freddie_mercury wrote:
| Why would there be outrage at laws when the article we're
| talking about specifically says this isn't about any laws but
| instead about a Mastercard rule about damaging their brand?
| giantg2 wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_banned_video_games_i.
| ..
|
| Also, Steam Direct didn't update their policy on game content
| from what I see. Doesn't looked like Steam fought back. Seems
| as though Steam has never supported games with rape, incest,
| child exploitation, etc.
| v5v3 wrote:
| But it wasn't illegal to put up a NSFW game if sold to a adult.
|
| Were Steam selling it to kids?
| shagie wrote:
| How would Steam know?
|
| And yes, that's a problem that they're dealing with right
| now. Bellular News : Steam Faces Financial Obliteration:
| Others Are Already Dead https://youtu.be/AlDkL3DndtM
|
| The law being talked about in the video is
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Safety_Act_2023 /
| https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/online-safety-
| act...
|
| That said, not all NSFW content is allowed in all
| jurisdictions. Australia and Japan (for example) have laws
| about particular content that differs from US laws.
| giantg2 wrote:
| It is if it includes things like rape, which supposedly was
| what was removed.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_banned_video_games_i.
| ..
| cedws wrote:
| I'm glad the Mastercard-Visa duopoly is finally getting some
| attention, these companies shouldn't be allowed to exercise the
| financial control they do. Payment infrastructure is not a free
| market - you can't just choose to pay via some other processor if
| they turn you down, they ARE the processors. Therefore, they
| should be under intense scrutiny when they refuse.
| p_ing wrote:
| There's no meaningful attention, here. Until it is on the US
| Gov't radar, this 'attention' is just a collection of upset
| redditors furiously posting forum messages which will fissile
| out in a few months, at most.
|
| Besides, it's not like you can boycott Mastercard or VISA.
| pjc50 wrote:
| I don't think having this on USgov radar would improve the
| situation. Since FOSTA/SESTA, and various state level age
| verification laws, it seems likely that government attention
| would simply bring a bigger hammer down on games. It's the US
| anti-money-laundering system that ultimately exerts a lot of
| financial control, after all.
| delta_p_delta_x wrote:
| > it's not like you can boycott Mastercard or VISA
|
| In many countries, if you pay locally, you absolutely can.
| China's UnionPay, India's UPI, PayNow in Singapore, PromptPay
| in Thailand, PayPal, Cash App, and more.
| p_ing wrote:
| That's great to hear, but this is a US-centric complaint
| discussing US-centric companies.
| cubefox wrote:
| In principle, a service like this could be offered in the
| US as well, without any credit card companies acting as
| middle men: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FedNow
| tau255 wrote:
| It is not really US-centric. VISA and Mastercard actions
| resulted in delisting content in all the markets
| globally. Steam and Itch.io pulled games from all
| regions, Manga Library Z was hit in Japan, Patreon and
| Stripe are pressured globally. Suggesting to boycott VISA
| and Mastercard if you have an alternative is valid.
| wongarsu wrote:
| And places like Steam take a lot of payment options. Most
| online services that wanted to have wide international
| appeal in the 90s and 2000s had to simply because credit
| cards were rare in many places, and a lot of those services
| still have a wide array of options
| p_ing wrote:
| Maybe they could come out with a client named "Steamy"
| where they post all the nudie games and take all forms of
| shady, underground, scandalous payment methods, like btc
| and doge.
| je42 wrote:
| Steam added recently a rule 15th what you should not
| publish:
|
| 15. Content that may violate the rules and standards set
| forth by Steam's payment processors and related card
| networks and banks, or internet network providers. In
| particular, certain kinds of adult only content.
|
| See discussion here for example: https://steamcommunity.c
| om/discussions/forum/0/6019100814124...
| pwillia7 wrote:
| You need the government to cajole the market to create safe
| and free inter bank transfer programs. We're not going to
| do that in the USA -- no one's buddies would get their
| kickbacks!
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Like FedNow that was launched in 2023? https://www.frbser
| vices.org/news/fed360/issues/071625/fednow...
| https://www.frbservices.org/resources/fees/fednow-2025
| Spivak wrote:
| Not even close the service offered by, as an example, Pix
| in Brazil.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Granted, but Pix didn't have to compete against
| entrenched political interests.
|
| I expect the meta-plot with FedNow is to commoditize the
| backend network, then allow private companies to compete
| on top of it (e.g. Zelle on FedNow), then after adoption
| as the backbone, finally roll out P2P and P2B type
| support that finally kills off Visa / Mastercard / Amex
| (as processing networks).
| guiambros wrote:
| Not sure why you were downvoted. Pix is a fantastic
| example of how much more efficient p2p payments can be,
| without relying on the Visa-Mastercard duopoly.
|
| Of course Pix had the backing of the government, so it
| had a huge initial boost, and didn't have to compete with
| entrenched players for market share.
|
| Still, the fact is that it's universal, fast, efficient,
| lower cost for merchants, and less prone to censoring.
| What's not to like?
|
| In a way it's more convenient than making congress pass
| laws to define payment providers as common carriers. With
| Pix, payment companies are free to chose their policies,
| but now citizens have options. Unfortunately that's not
| the reality in the US.
| sofixa wrote:
| > You need the government to cajole the market to create
| safe and free inter bank transfer programs
|
| We've had that in EU/eurozone for years, SEPA.
| mathiaspoint wrote:
| The US also has Discover/Capital One and American Express
| and if you live in some of the nicer parts people still
| take checks.
| Spivak wrote:
| Does that actually help? Because it would send a pretty
| strong message if the payment screen said, "sorry you can
| only buy this with amex/discover" (click here for why)
| but that doesn't seem to be how this plays out.
| 15155 wrote:
| Because making these products for sale _at all_ in the
| catalog will cause Visa /MC to pull out for other,
| "approved" offerings.
| ginko wrote:
| Honestly I hope this comes under the EU's radar.
| bboygravity wrote:
| Oh the EU will happily pass new laws to screen your entire
| life when you'd like to buy a game (and to record and store
| everything you talk about with fellow gamers in case you
| say something that goes against EU policies).
|
| EU will even arrange a special new bank account for ya
| outside of Visa Mastercard called CBDC.
|
| No problem. EU is here for ya! /s
| p_ing wrote:
| _1984_ took place in the EU. I mean, if Brexit hadn 't
| happened and the EU existed in 1984, of course.
| weberer wrote:
| You can just say it happened in Europe.
| seanhunter wrote:
| That's factually untrue. 1984 takes place in Britain (now
| known as "Airstrip one") which in the universe of the
| book is part of Oceania along with Australia, southern
| Africa and the Americas.
|
| The other two superpowers are Eurasia (which as the name
| suggests is Europe less the UK and Ireland but with Asia)
| and Eastasia, which is South-East Asia more or less
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_geography_of_Nine
| tee...
| yladiz wrote:
| What are you even talking about?
| Herz wrote:
| EU is already working on an alternative: Wero
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wero_(payment)
|
| Honestly, I'm really critical towards EU, but this is one
| of the few things that EU does well. When the market is
| stagnating, it's better than nothing to propose an
| alternative or some kind of benefits in order to change the
| market a bit. Like the Roaming in EU.
|
| Regarding the rest, the EU is mining competition with the
| obsession of regulating everything.
| ginko wrote:
| I don't even think this is a problem of competition
| (although more is welcome).
|
| This is just Visa+Mastercard abusing their market
| position and the EU should come down on them like a ton
| of bricks. Incur heavy fines or break them up if
| necessary.
| Herz wrote:
| I disagree. The need for regulation in this case stems
| from a lack of competition.
|
| Regulations are empirical decisions, based on a very
| limited amount of data, whose implications can be
| endless. Regulations are a shortcut capable of poisoning
| the market and competition. Just look at what's been done
| with energy, automobiles, AI, GDPR, etc. Bureaucrats are
| not gods; they often make mistakes and don't predict the
| future. Regulations should be the last resort.
|
| Furthermore, we're talking about a US monopoly here. The
| goal would be to grab a share of the pie through honest
| competition, not to enstablish golden collars.
|
| Regulation should facilitate competition, not legitimize
| the status quo.
| danaris wrote:
| How is "abusing their market position" _not_ a "problem
| of competition"?
|
| The only reason they _have_ that market position is
| _because_ there is insufficient competition.
| socalgal2 wrote:
| It is a problem of competition.
|
| https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-
| department-s...
|
| Go to Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Japan, Taiwan and
| see that there are 20-30 payment systems at every
| convenience store, electronics store, grocery store,
| etc... Then go to the US where there's effectively 2. The
| government claims this is because Visa and Mastercard
| have prevented competition.
| sofixa wrote:
| > Regarding the rest, the EU is mining competition with
| the obsession of regulating everything.
|
| Like with DMA/DSA that force gatekeepers to open up? SEPA
| that mandates free immediate bank transfers? Caps on
| credit/debit card transaction fees? The million
| infrastructure projects? Ensuring that AI can't be used
| to make life or death decisions if it's decision making
| can't be explained (which the AI act boils down to)?
| Ensuring there is competition on e.g. railway operations?
|
| It's such a common refrain that EU is just stifling
| competition with "regulating everything", but quite oftne
| EU regulations are actually _forcing_ competition where
| none was possible before.
| Herz wrote:
| I stated quite clearly that not every regulation is bad.
| But it seems that you want to hear that every decision
| made by the EU is right. I'm sorry, but I'm not a
| religious person. And I think self-criticism is a great
| privilege of democratic (not dictatorial) countries, so
| let's use it.
|
| > Ensuring that AI can't be used to make life or death
| decisions if its decision-making can't be explained
| (which the AI Act boils down to)? Ensuring there is
| competition on, for example, railway operations?
|
| It's such a naive question that I can't understand how
| you can take it seriously.
|
| Just because you can explain how you arrived at a
| specific decision does not mean that failure does not
| exist. Every machine is fallible. Every human is
| fallible. Moreover, you cannot determine decision-making
| made by humans. So how can you trust humans? Why should
| you trust them?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_by_pilot
|
| I would like to see the data, not the social or
| individual biases. It's only a matter of "when" AI will
| prove to be safer than humans at performing task X. I
| find it absurd to deprive ourselves of such an advantage,
| supported by data, just because our understanding isn't
| absolute.
|
| Can we prove the safety or determinism of what we use or
| do on a daily basis? I doubt. Shouldn't we experiment
| with physics because our understanding is limited, and we
| might accidentally create a black hole? I doubt.
|
| Also, I find it such a generic definition... Google Maps
| implements AI, and accidentally sends you into a ditch.
| What do you do? Ban AI from Google Maps? What doesn't put
| people's lives at risk?
|
| I totally understand the skepticism and fear. The risks,
| etc. But I'll leave it to the fortune tellers to pass
| judgment before it's even "a thing".
|
| > It's such a common refrain that EU is just stifling
| competition with "regulating everything", but quite oftne
| EU regulations are actually forcing competition where
| none was possible before.
|
| Is killing the car market "forcing the competition"? How?
| sofixa wrote:
| > I stated quite clearly that not every regulation is
| bad. But it seems that you want to hear that every
| decision made by the EU is right. I'm sorry, but I'm not
| a religious person. And I think self-criticism is a great
| privilege of democratic (not dictatorial) countries, so
| let's use it.
|
| But you still said that you think most of the EU's are
| bad, so I'm opening the discussion with multiple that I
| consider to be good.
|
| > Just because you can explain how you arrived at a
| specific decision does not mean that failure does not
| exist. Every machine is fallible. Every human is
| fallible. Moreover, you cannot determine decision-making
| made by humans. So how can you trust humans? Why should
| you trust them?
|
| Of course not, but being able to _explain_ the decision,
| and thus prove that it is wrong, and have humans being
| able to correct it, is good. It means that stuff like
| United Healthcare Group using algorithms to decide if
| care can be paid for, with a terrible failure rate, and
| employees just shrugging "computer said no" _cannot_
| happen in the EU. The fact that this kind of things are
| considered as "EU is killing AI with too much
| regulation" is really concerning to me.
|
| > Is killing the car market "forcing the competition"?
| How?
|
| How is the EU killing the car market, exactly?
| goopypoop wrote:
| "under the radar" means _not_ noticed
| perihelions wrote:
| > _" which will fissile out in a few months"_
|
| A tangential nitpick: it's _fizzle out_ , from a Middle
| English etymology meaning "to fart"; not to _fission_ (
| _fissile_ being an adjectival form), from Latin "to split".
|
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fizzle#Etymology ( _" Attested
| in English since 1525-35. From earlier_ fysel _("to fart").
| Related to_ fisa _("to fart"). Compare with Swedish_ fisa
| _("to fart (silently)"). See also feist. "_)
|
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/feist#Etymology
|
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fissile#Etymology ( _" From
| Latin_ fissilis.")
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I've never heard fissile out but I love it for describing a
| problem that will go away once the full consequences have
| already been felt.
| GlacierFox wrote:
| It's _fizzle_ where I 'm from in the UK. To fizzle out is
| to weakly and pittifully end with no meaningful after
| effects.
|
| Like after lighting a firework that didn't actually go
| off.
|
| "It's fizzled out!"
| 93po wrote:
| guessing it was autocorrect issue :)
| dpoloncsak wrote:
| "to fission (fissile being an adjectival form), from Latin
| 'to split'."
|
| Does this mean "Missile" means "to miss"? 'Cause boy have
| we been using those things wrong :-)
| btown wrote:
| The missile needs to know how to miss, because it knows
| where it is from knowing where it isn't.
|
| https://youtu.be/bZe5J8SVCYQ
| philipov wrote:
| No, 'missile' means ' _something that is sent_ ' or '
| _suitable for throwing_ '
| raincole wrote:
| > Besides, it's not like you can boycott Mastercard or VISA
|
| Most countries have some kinds of domestic transaction
| systems, or at least a more local credit card brand. They're
| also usually instant. It's more or less an US-only situation
| that people use Visa/Mastercard even for intranational stuff.
| forgotoldacc wrote:
| Most countries I've been to use Visa as their most common
| card. Living in a major Asian country and every bank and
| credit card company offers Visa as their main card as well.
|
| China is kind of an outlier with Union Pay, and while a
| large number of countries offer their own alternatives, I'd
| say most are Visa-first. Apparently about 37% of cards
| around the world are Visa, so that's a huge chunk. JCB is
| the biggest non-Chinese non-American provider by revenue,
| and even they're a minor player in their home country.
| weberer wrote:
| That is absolutely false. In pretty much any western
| country, you're forced to use the VISA network, even for
| debit cards. Take a closer look at your locally branded
| card, and you'll almost certainly see a VISA log tucked
| away somewhere.
| bolobo wrote:
| Depends, in France for instance all the cards are dual
| "VISA/Mastercard" and "CB ". They will use CB in france
| and use the partner network in foreign countries.
| gus_massa wrote:
| You can switch to Amex, but here in Argentina like half of
| the postnets don't recognize it.
|
| Also there are a few QR networks, some made by the banks like
| "Modo" and other no-a-bank ones like "MercadoPago" and a few
| minor ones. Even the guy/gal that sells hot bread on the
| street accept most of them.
| Hamuko wrote:
| Amex is only available on Steam in the US. I have a basic
| free Amex card as a backup, but I wouldn't be able to use
| it for my Steam purchases. Presumably because the
| processing fees are just that much higher.
|
| Somehow I'm able to use a JCB card though. As far as I'm
| aware, JCB cards aren't even available here.
| xeonmc wrote:
| > You can switch to Amex, but here in Argentina like half
| of the postnets don't recognize it.
|
| To this point, it was even a punchline in The Hitchhiker's
| Guide To The Galaxy.
| ipaddr wrote:
| You can boycott both but say goodbye to saas purchases and
| being tracked.
| fennecfoxy wrote:
| The EU should certainly look into this though. I don't always
| like what they do, but a conglomerate of many large markets
| (countries) means that these shitty fucking companies and
| scumbag executives get forced to sit up and listen.
| infecto wrote:
| Whole heartedly agree. I would also rather the discussion be
| how can we disrupt the problem rather than a mob mentality to
| take down Visa (which is never going anywhere anyway).
| Guthur wrote:
| It is on their radar, but they only care that the whole world
| pays a US tax via these payment providers. The US does look
| to kindly on local payment systems.
| pchangr wrote:
| Germany actually uses their own card system .. or cash. They
| are very much against visa/mastercard due to their "high
| commission fees" and "privacy concerns"
|
| Girocard charges a 0,3% fee vs visa/mastercard 3%
|
| See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girocard
| EgregiousCube wrote:
| You're comparing a regional debit network to an overarching
| network that includes lots of different fee structures. The
| USA has debit networks (STAR, etc) with similar cost
| structures too - Germany is not unique in this regard.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| My debit card is a VISA.
| gruez wrote:
| >Girocard charges a 0,3% fee vs visa/mastercard 3%
|
| AFAIK all credit cards in the EU have similarly low
| interchange rates because of EU regulation.
| jamesrr39 wrote:
| 0.2%
|
| > Payment service providers shall not offer or request a
| per transaction interchange fee of more than 0,2 % of the
| value of the transaction for any debit card transaction.
|
| https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2015/751/oj/eng
| f6v wrote:
| So does Russia, Denmark, Belgium/Netherlands, Iran, China.
| I'm sure there're others. I know someone working on unified
| payment platform for games in Africa. They have dozens of
| different payment systems instead of the two.
| k_g_b_ wrote:
| That's somewhat outdated and Wikipedia even slightly
| alludes to it with "Some banks are phasing out girocards".
| "some" in reality is "nearly all". Girocard is practically
| dead and I don't see it coming back without state
| intervention. There's a few holdouts in stores here and
| there that only accept Girocard and no other cards (my vet
| for example), but it's on the decline there, too.
|
| "Privacy concerns" won't hold out long against relentless
| pushes for more deregulation of privacy laws for AI/other
| tech/"the economy"/etc and removal of data access hurdles
| for police/security services/etc coming from certain
| political spectrum - whose voters generally don't have high
| concern for such fundamental rights issues when at the
| ballot box.
| Maken wrote:
| Germany also sold Eurocard to MasterCard.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| Unfortunately, that's not enough to shake the
| MasterCard/Visa stranglehold. Even if all of Valve's German
| customers used Girocard and Steam sold those particular
| games only in Germany, they would still have to yield to
| pressure from MC and Visa because losing them would cost
| them many more of their global customers.
|
| It's not enough to simply have an alternative to the credit
| cards, that alternative has to be in the pockets of 90% of
| your user base before you'd be willing to lose the method
| of transaction they currently rely on.
| bityard wrote:
| > Besides, it's not like you can boycott Mastercard or VISA.
|
| Why not? Lots of people, especially in lower income brackets,
| don't have ANY credit cards at all. I know many. They buy
| groceries and gas with cash and pay their utilities by ACH or
| mailing a check. Everything else they need, they buy locally.
|
| What you mean to say is that it's _inconvenient_ for you
| personally to boycott Visa/Mastercard. Which may be true
| enough.
| no_wizard wrote:
| Visa and Mastercard run debit networks for majority of
| banks and credit unions. They get fees there as well.
|
| Even lower income citizens use debit cards more than cash
| nowadays.
|
| You would need to use different networks like Discover and
| American Express to effectively boycott them
| filleduchaos wrote:
| Well, we are discussing an online storefront/distribution
| service for a digital good (with obvious relevance to
| people here). Are you suggesting that it's merely
| inconvenient for Valve and its customers to not transact in
| cash?
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| That depends entirely on who you are paying. Many places
| reject checks, fail to setup ACH, etc. Those aren't direct
| competitors anyway: that would be American Express, which
| is often rejected since their business model is centered on
| customer bonuses funded through high transaction fees.
| no_wizard wrote:
| You can, if you switch to using American Express and Discover
| cards. They're both closed networks that only take their
| particular card.
|
| It's almost trading one for another but it would be an
| effective way to boycott these companies
| immibis wrote:
| > Besides, it's not like you can boycott Mastercard or VISA.
|
| Every single time I have the option to buy an event ticket by
| SEPA transfer or credit card, which is actually very often, I
| choose SEPA transfer.
|
| One time I even used Bitcoin.
|
| It does seem to be mostly event tickets that have this
| option, for some reason. And I'm not talking about the
| TicketMaster monopoly, either.
| pwillia7 wrote:
| Does the government view it as 2 throats to choke and so the
| risk is 'worth it' or is it just a condition of gilded age II
| and corp and political greed and corruption?
|
| Why did we make all those monopoly laws only to completely
| forget they exist or why we ever made them?
| ethbr1 wrote:
| It's mostly just the way things turned out without government
| intervention.
|
| American Express' card started in 1958, as a pivot of their
| then already 100-year-old business: https://en.wikipedia.org/
| wiki/American_Express#1920s%E2%80%9...
|
| Visa also in 1958 as a Bank of America (and friends) card,
| which quietly expanded into the mid-60s:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_Inc.#History
|
| Mastercard in the mid-60s from banks who BoA wouldn't invite
| into the Visa clubhouse:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastercard#History
|
| And Discover in the mid-80s because Sears was big enough to
| be its own financial services firm:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discover_Card#History
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| I think the mint should maintain a payment processor, and the
| post office should maintain an official email address for
| everyone.
|
| these are basic things we need to exist in society, we should
| not be at the whims of private organizations.
| Damogran6 wrote:
| What's the profit in that?
|
| /s
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| You say /s, but a government issued and USPS operated
| e-mail service may be very profitable. In the Netherlands
| we have a government message system where the tax office,
| local counties, water companies, etc can send you
| 'official' messages. Thing is though, each message costs
| EUR0.25 to send. I think this is ridiculously expensive for
| a glorified email, but I suppose they have a lot of
| certifications and audits and the like. I hope, anyway.
|
| Anyway, email itself is broken, but this system works
| because if it costs money to send a message, it discourages
| any spambot and/or misuse.
| Symbiote wrote:
| EUR0.25 is much less than the cost of printing and
| posting a letter, and presumably this service comes with
| proof of delivery.
|
| (There's a similar system in Denmark.)
| egypturnash wrote:
| Is a payment processor operated by the Federal Reserve good
| enough? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FedNow
|
| Well, it probably would be, except guess who killed it in
| favor of a crypto scheme?
| https://www.jitumaster.com/2025/06/us-president-signs-
| execut...
|
| I agree about the PO though. Social media shouldn't be a for-
| profit enterprise either.
| Arubis wrote:
| Ugh, they killed FedNow too? That hadn't hit my radar. Why
| a waste.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| I don't think so?
| ambicapter wrote:
| Here's the EO, I don't see where it kills FedNow, it
| seems like it just mandates electronic payments and
| disallows paper checks:
| https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-
| actions/2025/03/mode...
| lesuorac wrote:
| Heh, while I like the idea of using immediate electronic
| dispursement over the mail.
|
| I do find the ending of the EO pretty amusing. You're
| telling the agencies exactly what to do, how is that not
| impairing their authority?
|
| > Sec. 7. General Provisions. (a) Nothing in this order
| shall be construed to impair or otherwise affect:
|
| > (i) the authority granted by law to an executive
| department or agency, or the head thereof; or
| Arubis wrote:
| You can be almost certain these EOs are composed in
| tandem with LLMs.
| tcmart14 wrote:
| And its okay because the federal employees who need to
| know what these say will just ask their LLM what it says!
| /s
| somenameforme wrote:
| That's boilerplate that's been attached on most of all
| EO's for decades now.
|
| The point of EOs is that they aren't laws and cannot
| change laws, but they can provide [mandatory] guidance to
| entities, under the Executive, on how to implement laws.
| So imagine there's a law that says some agency _can_ ban
| whatever widgets they want. An EO requiring that they not
| ban widgets made in Timbuktu would not contravene that
| law, but provide guidance on how the law will be
| implemented. By contrast if the law said that the agency
| _must_ ban any harmful widgets, an EO would not be able
| to prevent them from banning harmful widgets, even if
| they happen to be made in Timbuktu.
|
| Thankfully modern EO's are (contrary to intuition) pretty
| much weak sauce because of this balancing act. See, for
| contrast the dictatorial mandate that is executive order
| 6102. [1]
|
| [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102
| lesuorac wrote:
| But how does mandatory guidance not impair the authority
| of an agency?
|
| The agency is no longer allowed to do something against
| the guidance! Or the Order must not be ordering some
| action?
| somenameforme wrote:
| It's the _law_ that must not be ordering some action.
| Laws generally provide e.g. regulatory agencies with some
| degree of discretion on how to apply a given law, like
| ban a widget. But that discretion can be defined by
| executive order. By contrast, if a law says an agency
| _must_ do something, then an EO cannot override that law
| and direct them not to do that thing.
| laughing_man wrote:
| Government agencies in the executive branch don't have
| independent authority. They work for the president, and
| an EO isn't much different than the email you get from
| your boss directing you to do work a certain way.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| FedNow has not been diminished through policy, still full
| speed ahead.
| Maken wrote:
| This is amazing.
| easton wrote:
| Is there another source that says what exactly happened in
| that executive order? I can't find one signed on june 6th
| that had anything to do with payments.
|
| [0] was from March, and demanded treasury modernization
| (like paperless and stuff), but didn't really say anything
| about crypto or FedNow. And FedNow's website mentions
| nothing about the program being slowed down (just
| announcements about new things happening in Q3 and a bunch
| of new signed on banks).
|
| 0: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/03/28/202
| 5-05...
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| I think the federal reserve is too close to the status quo
| to be effective for this. It is owned by the federally
| chartered banks, the same ones that all have longstanding
| relationships with the current payment processors.
|
| A government organization like the mint should be in charge
| of the layer 1 of money transfer. Let the current providers
| adapt and sell their other services on top of it. It could
| be crypto, copy the existing systems, or be something new
| all together. It doesn't even have to be free, they could
| add in a small transfer tax or whatever. The point is that
| any person or business should be able to send money to any
| other, for any reason. At the very least within the
| country.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| The banks have longstanding relationships with payment
| processors but they aren't stupid. The duopoly has fat
| margins that the banks want a cut of, hence earlier
| initiatives like Zelle.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| Every time we have this discussion someone brings up
| FedNow, and I will repeat the same question I always ask:
| when I visit the farmer's market this weekend, will anyone
| there be able to practically accept payment in FedNow? What
| would that even look like? (FYI the vendors take most
| cards, Apple/Google Pay, Venmo, paper cash, Square Cash,
| Apple Cash, etc.)
|
| If the answer is "no for these reasons", then this probably
| shines a big light on why FedNow is not serving the same
| use case.
| throwaway6977 wrote:
| What is preventing any of those mentioned card vendors
| from integrating with FedNow either directly or via some
| abstractive layer through another entity? I don't
| understand why the answer would be 'no for these
| reasons'.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| The retail payment companies I've seen all use the same
| structure: they provide a retail interface and then
| handle monetary transfers within their own proprietary
| network (effectively a centralized database). To
| interface with the financial system, they provide a
| mechanism to occasionally wire funds to/from a
| traditional bank account. If FedNow has any role in these
| systems, it's just to speed up the occasional funds-
| wiring process by a few hours. I have yet to see anyone
| actually _directly_ using FedNow in any meaningful sense
| for retail payments.
| toast0 wrote:
| Most likely, what it would look like is they would have a
| routing and account number posted. You'd go into your
| bank app and push a payment to those numbers, and they'd
| say yeah great; not confirm the transaction and
| everything would probably work out.
|
| Is that satisfying? Not really. Is it possible? Yes.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| There are over a thousand different companies affiliated
| with FedNow, so the answer is going to be "it won't look
| like FedNow, but you will use some wrapper for it"
| tchbnl wrote:
| I can find nothing about FedNow being replaced or even
| changed recently. Your source is the only one about this,
| and it's some no-name crypto junk site nobody's ever heard
| of.
| strbean wrote:
| That article is XRP-pumping misinformation. Like almost
| 100% of content related to Ripple.
| axus wrote:
| I thought FedNow was for settlement between banks, not a
| consumer-facing service. That would be a "Central Bank
| Digital Currency": https://www.federalreserve.gov/central-
| bank-digital-currency...
|
| There were some bills on the subject, Republicans opposed
| to a CBDC to demonstrate their libertarian credentials:
|
| https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-
| bill/1919...
|
| https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-
| bill/1430...
|
| HR-1919 passed the house, but it's not clear if "they"
| intend to bring it up for vote in the Senate.
|
| People have submitted comments to the gov for using XRP as
| a mechanism, but AI tells me that FedNow is not killed or
| being replaced.
| ghostDancer wrote:
| That's socialism or even communism./s
| throw10920 wrote:
| Wouldn't it be better to try to regulate the _necessity_ of
| needing these services out of existence?
|
| For the sake of reducing complexity in an already very
| complex world, I'd rather that it be illegal to require an
| email address to sign up for an account (or, alternatively,
| make it illegal to require an account for things like making
| a reservation at a restaurant) then being provided with an
| email by the USPS.
|
| Doubly so given the interactions that I've had with digital
| services provided by my country's government and the bad (and
| in several cases extremely bad) experiences that I've had
| with them.
|
| To be clear - I don't object to e.g. an address from the USPS
| _complementing_ my existing email - I just don 't want to be
| _forced_ to use it for anything due to it being given some
| special properties that normal email providers aren 't.
| belval wrote:
| > Wouldn't it be better to try to regulate the necessity of
| needing these services out of existence?
|
| No because these things are genuinely useful. As much as
| people lament that we are going cashless, it's very
| convenient to be able to just carry one card and it's
| genuinely useful to just give my email as an identifier
| when registering for stuff.
|
| Regulating their necessity means forcing people to accept
| cash and then using this as a reason why MasterCard and
| Visa should be allowed exist. In practice if something is
| that ingrained into daily interaction, then it should have
| something like the common carrier rules, set the fee to a
| static percentage of the transaction and that's it. The
| current 50% profit margins rent-seeking approach is just
| inefficient.
| throw10920 wrote:
| I completely agree with a lot of what you said! I'm not
| against technology in general or think that things like
| email aren't useful.
|
| I think my argument is harder to make for payment
| processors, but in the case of email, it _is_ preferable
| to not _need_ an email address to create an account (even
| if it 's convenient to have the option), and have other
| identifiers that can be used, like OAuth using an
| existing account or phone number, for instance.
|
| Or, like I said, even better if you don't even _need_ to
| create an account to participate in a one-time
| transaction (instead of a service relationship) with an
| entity.
| mapt wrote:
| The USPS and state DMVs should also collaborate on the novel
| role of identity management. Right now if you lose your
| phone, half of your life disappears because Google won't even
| log you into the email address that contains every "lost my
| password" redirect without 2FA on a new device. This is a bad
| scene. We need boring old meatspace ways to establish, re-
| establish, and federate our identity as a real person.
| Something that demands that I wait in line, that I show them
| a utility bill or drivers' license, that I confirm with a
| retina scan or fingerprint printed out on a sheet of paper
| that nobody else has access to. Something that is only
| trackable in one direction, from which you can generate a new
| identity if one is compromised. This is so close to the
| functional role of the "Credit card number" that you may as
| well tack bank transfer verification on there.
|
| The One Digital Identity Service To Rule Them All is always
| vulnerable to mass hacking. We need to connect it with
| something slower, something more private, and the interface
| to that slow identity needs to be something that already has
| a branch open in the middle of nowhere.
| dmix wrote:
| How does that fix censorship concerns? The main issue is that
| political pressure campaigns has a lever over the entire
| payment processing sector because of cartel like behaviour. A
| public service could provide an alternative for sure but it'd
| have to be done very carefully and independent.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Actual government stuff is way more legally constrained
| than private sector stuff. It would be trivially to sue for
| freedom of speech if I was gov.
|
| Public-private partnerships like chartered banks, and
| outright cartels like Visa MasterCard, are much more
| fruitful mechanisms for this sort of civil liberties abuse.
| guywithahat wrote:
| I cannot think of anything worse than an official post office
| email I have to maintain. Do you not remember how many
| government sites would simply shut down after business hours
| because they couldn't figure out how to do on-call? Have you
| ever used US-treasury direct?
|
| This site would be slow, the code base would be unmaintained,
| it'd get enormous amounts of spam you _have_ to sort through
| to get some important tax document, and it would be down all
| the time. Think the line at the post office but for server
| up-times.
|
| Similarly if the mint maintained a payment processor then
| they'd just create a legal monopoly (like the USPS did) and
| ban new processors. Not only would they be worse than VISA
| and MasterCard, but they'd make paypal and venmo illegal.
| Don't forget the USPS bans competitors from being cheaper
| than itself, and this is exactly what would happen if the
| Mint had its own payment processor.
| monkeyelite wrote:
| > US-treasury direct
|
| Ok but this one is good. And it works because it's a tool
| they need to generate revenue
| coredog64 wrote:
| It's better now, but during the era of the on-screen
| keyboard it was atrocious.
| guywithahat wrote:
| I thought they still had the on-screen keyboard? They had
| it as of 6 months ago at least.
|
| But still, atrocious site. I can't use the back button or
| it logs you out; logging in is like a 5 step chore, it's
| unintuitive and looks like it's from 2005. I can only
| assume it's unsafe and doing simple things like checking
| your balance take 20 minutes. There will never be an app
| and I'm sure they will continue to do no innovation on
| the customer service side.
| monkeyelite wrote:
| > looks like it's from 2005
|
| Fantastic. Really fast pages, simple forms, no Js. trendy
| is not what I want from my government service site.
|
| > There will never be an app
|
| Good. I want more websites and less apps on my phone.
| That also helps me trust the security more.
| nullstyle wrote:
| Further invalidating the original objection that the site
| would be unmaintained.
| rafterydj wrote:
| Hard disagree on every point. Just because implementations
| aren't always perfect does not mean you should not have
| public services.
|
| I know a librarian who spends an inordinate amount of time
| helping the elderly and tech illiterate members of the
| public with creating emails, because they're necessary.
| However, you can't create emails anywhere without a phone
| number these days - a post office option would fix that.
|
| Email already gets enormous amounts of spam, and the only
| reason most don't see it is because private service
| providers like Google expend resources filtering them out.
| Why would a business not be able to charge for premium
| filter services on an email they don't host? Not to mention
| that private email services send you ads.
|
| To be clear, I'm not saying we should shut down Gmail
| tomorrow, but having a free public email service option
| would allow many people to use internet infrastructure they
| don't have. It's an accessibility problem that should be
| addressed in the public's interest as well as shareholders.
| wcarss wrote:
| My local city runs a water heater rental company. It
| provides water heaters more or less at cost to residents
| because we have exceptionally hard water here and they need
| to be replaced every ten years or so. It's a well run,
| valuable public program, and its cost is minimal.
|
| The US Digital Service made a number of good web services
| for the US federal government while it lasted. They didn't
| close at night.
|
| There are many times where governments do a bad job of
| things, and times where they do a good job. They're just
| institutions made of people, but they have no other default
| orientation. Describing faults in some non-existent service
| you're just imagining, as though they would obviously
| happen, is frankly a bizarre thing to do.
|
| May I suggest: consider getting involved in the governance
| of your world. You could meet the many humans who are
| already doing so, working to improve it, and learning
| something. You can actually do that! It might surprise you
| how much good work is being done.
|
| You might also then be able to help prevent others from
| implementing your worst dreams, instead of treating them as
| obvious or foregone conclusions.
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| Largely opinion here, but the glaring issue with many
| modern governments is that they _don 't_ do. They get
| some consultants to come in, make some requirements, then
| shop for a contractor. IMO, governments should do a lot
| more themselves, should own infrastructure/utilities
| outright & ongoingly.
|
| Particularly hard in today's climate where so so many
| people are empowered to say no, or to come in and add
| their own pet complications/expenses to a project. The
| meta-governance of staying to mission, to relentlessly
| caring about value optimization (in the pursuit of public
| good) is fraught with failure modes. Yet still it feels
| vastly less dangerous and expensive than shopping the
| work out, than governments perpetually seeking to do
| things it itself doesn't know much about & can't do.
|
| We've had decades of nihilism that sees this juncture of
| difficulty & says: maybe we shouldn't have a government.
| But some day, I hope, maybe, possibly, we'll redisocver
| the spirit of makers and doers, and the eternal jibing
| critically can give way to a some will & make happen.
| strbean wrote:
| It's telling that in order to interact in many ways with
| the IRS online, you have to verify your identity using a
| private company (ID.me). Identification of citizens and
| residents has to be on the short list for core
| competencies of any government, but we outsource even
| that.
| clarionbell wrote:
| I hate this approach so much. Something doesn't work very
| well, so instead of putting pressure on making it work
| better, let us abandon it!
|
| Don't get me wrong. There are cases when it makes sense,
| but only when it is certain that there is no way to make it
| better, or when making it better would be a waste of
| resources. And neither is case here.
|
| In my country, we have, what is essentially, a centralized
| email for communication with authorities. Taxes, permits,
| trials, it all goes there. There is no spam, you can set it
| up so that reminders about unread go to your normal email.
| It's not perfect, but it saves me hours of time I would
| otherwise have to waste in line.
|
| So try for something like this. Instead of just giving up.
| ethersteeds wrote:
| I was under the impression that government sites having
| "business hours" had as much or more to do with their
| backends dating from the mainframe era, with nightly batch
| jobs that take all cpu time or prohibit database writes.
|
| Anyway, I agree that government provided services
| functioning as you described would be intolerable, but
| disagree that's somehow inevitable. Rather than expecting
| government services to be unaccountable monopolies of the
| "line at the DMV" archetype, what if we expected effective
| and valuable baseline services of the IRS FreeFile
| archetype? Or models like unemployment benefits and FDIC
| insurance, where the government quietly provides citizens
| an umbrella without limiting access to alternatives?
|
| I strongly resonate with gp's sentiment that when services
| like email or payment processing become requirements for
| modern life, ensuring access to them becomes a government
| prerogative. We're in agreement that it must be a net
| improvement, not trading one monopoly for another.
| tr_user wrote:
| None of what you say is inherent in a public service.
|
| The DMV often gets singled out as an inefficient system
| that is emblematic of the failure of public option, but I
| assure you as someone who's had to deal with a privatized
| version, you're not getting better service and in fact the
| fees are much more expensive without recourse or oversight.
|
| The answer to a bad system is a good system. Adding a
| middleman who is only interested in extracting as much
| money as possible is rarely the improvement the consultants
| would have you believe.
| IcyWindows wrote:
| Washington state has privatized much of the DMV, and it's
| much better then what I've experienced in other states.
| digitalPhonix wrote:
| > Don't forget the USPS bans competitors from being cheaper
| than itself
|
| That's a disingenuous take. USPS legally cannot be undercut
| on certain types of postal services but in exchange they
| must serve EVERY permanent address without price
| discrimination.
|
| No private company has to do that, nor would any sane
| profit maximising company want to.
| strbean wrote:
| It's also a necessary protection because, for some ass-
| backward reason, we force the USPS to operate in the
| black instead of funding it with taxpayer money.
| kansface wrote:
| What would the post office do with spam? Their existing
| business model is chiefly predicated on delivering junk mail.
|
| I'm not sure how the federal government would deal with fraud
| on the payment side, either. The US does not have a strong
| system of identity.
| wombatpm wrote:
| Junk mail is advertising mail that someone paid to send to
| you. You what it is not? Illegal. Scams, fraud, and other
| illegal things get shut down because of postal inspectors.
| And there is no anonymity. The USPS knows both ends of the
| transaction.
| toast0 wrote:
| > the post office should maintain an official email address
| for everyone.
|
| Assuming this is a good idea, what is my email address going
| to look like?
|
| Am I going to have to be xx_toast_xx@postalcustomer like at
| yahoo? or will it be my address ... if so, what about the
| other three adults who get mail at my address; do I have to
| change my email address when I move? Will it be my real name,
| but if so, what about the other hundred people with the same
| name as me? (Which isn't that bad, I know lots of people with
| a way larger highlander list) Will it just be my social
| security number and we can pretend duplicates don't exist?
|
| What qualifies someone to be an everyone for this purpose?
| agent327 wrote:
| Just thinking out loud here, but if the government operated a
| bank they could apply some common sense to the whole system:
|
| * Allow any legal transaction (so if another payment
| processor refuses you, you have a backup)
|
| * Allow an account for any legal entity (so no more
| debanking)
|
| * By setting rates for savings and mortgages, it would
| provide a soft range for other banks to move within
|
| * The state would only have to guarantee its own bank. If
| other banks crash and burn it won't take down civilisation
| anabab wrote:
| Post office offering emails is an interesting idea if you
| extend it further in the physical world. As in, using this
| identifier to deliver correspondence/parcels as well.
|
| pros:
|
| - privacy. Senders have zero idea where you actually are.
| mapping to physical addresses is performed by the post.
|
| - no need to update addresses in a million accounts when you
| move, your email points to the new physical address
| automatically (no idea how that works in other countries, but
| here you can set automatic forwarding for at most 1.5 years
| after you move).
|
| cons:
|
| - goods being sent to gmail addresses
| EliasWatson wrote:
| This is the kind of problem that Bitcoin was designed to solve.
| tdb7893 wrote:
| Isn't Bitcoin impractical for these sorts of transactions
| (slow, high fees, no privacy, etc)? People always say Bitcoin
| was designed to solve this sort of thing but whenever I've
| looked into it it's been fairly impractical for use in most
| day-to-day transactions.
| hahn-kev wrote:
| Honestly buying a digital game is perfect. Steam can just
| give it to you right away, and if the transaction doesn't
| clear they can just revoke the game later.
| messe wrote:
| Only in the presence of DRM--an evil I'd prefer to do
| without when possible.
| tdb7893 wrote:
| That's only addressing one issue with Bitcoin but the
| issues abound. I don't know all the issues that would
| happen but even my rudimentary understanding of payments
| can see that the high transaction costs are a problem
| when most of the games I buy are less than 5$.
|
| There are ways to design around these glaring issues but
| Bitcoin is just a worse product for many transactions
| (and it's not like payment processors are a particularly
| good product to begin with).
| switknee wrote:
| Bitcoin is so much faster than a credit card transaction
| that it's not even close. A lightning transaction is near
| instant, regular bitcoin transfers take in the order of 10
| minutes. Credit card transactions take weeks before you get
| the money, and after that the money can be yoinked back for
| a multitude of reasons beyond your control as a merchant.
| The fees are often lower, too. Bitcoiners are for some
| reason opposed to solving that last issue (no privacy)
| despite the technology existing in monero. NIH syndrome, I
| guess.
|
| The real unsolved issue for cryptocurrency is between chair
| and keyboard. People make mistakes, people are afraid of
| being robbed. Your average person does not want to be their
| own bank. You can have a bank or payment processor manage
| your money for you, but then we're back to the regulated
| world where Visa and Mastercard can determine what games
| you're allowed to buy.
| tdb7893 wrote:
| I'll have to look at the lightning transactions. My
| problems with crypto are generally less philosophical
| (I've known people who ran legal businesses that had
| trouble getting access to banks so I'm sympathetic to
| having ways around traditional banks/payment processors)
| but more practical, the times I've tried it in the past
| the experience just hasn't been good.
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| You will want to look into Lightning which fixes that
| issue.
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| Yes. Thankfully 15 years later we do have crypto solutions
| addressing previous crypto problems
| aussieguy1234 wrote:
| Yes, Mastercard didn't pressure valve and itch.io. They had an
| intermediary do it for them.
| rs186 wrote:
| Dumb question: what if Steam only takes cash or crypto payment
| for these games, and leave them on the market? Cash is loaded
| from debit card and can be used for buying any games, while
| crypto apparently always works for everything. Would they still
| be on the hook?
| unsigner wrote:
| how do you "take cash" over the Internet?
| v5v3 wrote:
| Mullvad VPN takes cash, you post it to them.
| Shank wrote:
| This realistically doesn't work that well above anything
| like a micro scale. It's also a crime to mail cash across
| many borders, so it only really works domestically.
| goopypoop wrote:
| What about a system of agents who locally take cash then
| bulk transfer to Steam? Like some kind of middleman: a
| processor, if you will, of payments.
|
| Cash handling isn't really the problem with this
| suggestion
| roblabla wrote:
| I doubt Mullvad has anywhere near the volume of transaction
| Valve does. And mullvad has plenty of other payment
| methods, so only a tiny, tiny fraction of their userbase
| likely pays in mail-in cash.
|
| I don't think Valve could feasibly implement this at their
| scale - especially if this method was the _only_ way to
| acquire the games in question.
| TehCorwiz wrote:
| Steam sells physical gift cards. You can buy them at
| convenience stores, Walmart, etc. you can pay cash for them.
| mattnewton wrote:
| those stores would absolutely stop carrying the gift cards
| if customers could not pay with visa/mastercard for them.
| forgotoldacc wrote:
| Japan lets you make payments for online content at
| convenience stores.
|
| How it works is you purchase a product online and it gives
| you a barcode that can be scanned at any major convenience
| store. You go to the store, scan the code, hand over cash,
| and the content you bought is instantly unlocked once the
| payment is confirmed.
| cubefox wrote:
| The closest thing is via an instant bank transfer, like the
| new FedNow protocol in the US.
| reginald78 wrote:
| IIRC the rule Mastercard cited was so vague that trying to
| workaround it almost seemed potentially pointless. It was
| basically a blanket "we think it makes MasterCard look bad so
| we end our relationship". Anyway, debit cards are still
| Visa/mastercard so using them as cash has the same problem. I
| was thinking they could just use Steam gift cards but since
| those are often themselves purchased in stores or with credit
| cards it seems to just push the problem a little further away.
|
| I believe Steam did support bitcoin at one point but decided to
| end usage over because the price fluctuations made it to
| unpredictable on their end. Maybe the landscape has changed
| though.
| creer wrote:
| That bitcoin decision was a long time ago. Long enough that
| it can be reversed. Other sites take bitcoin and manage it.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| It's not about gaining a way to handle transactions without
| MasterCard. It's about losing MasterCard (or any other
| third party intermediary that follows their rules), and all
| of the accompanying customers who are accustomed to paying
| online with a credit card instead of going to a corner
| store and buying a Steam Card using cash.
| FatalLogic wrote:
| >Steam did support bitcoin at one point but decided to end
| usage because the price fluctuations made it to unpredictable
| on their end.
|
| Valve knew that there would be price fluctuations. Everyone
| knew that, and knew how to deal with it. They just priced the
| games in dollars, with a conversion to the Bitcoin value at
| the moment of sale.
|
| But what Valve did NOT expect was that the Bitcoin blockchain
| would suddenly grow so popular and congested (which was a
| result of massive publicity from events such as Steam
| accepting Bitcoin). So suddenly, to Valve's surprise, the
| average fees to be sure that a payment would soon be
| processed on the blockchain fluctuated wildly upwards during
| that period, up to tens of dollars. The Blockchain congestion
| and high fees were exacerbated by technical and ideological
| arguments about how the Bitcoin network should function. The
| "small block" faction won, but Bitcoin quickly became a
| laughing stock as a method of payment, because second layer
| solutions to the network congestion weren't ready.
|
| The high fees were a huge problem in themselves for Steam
| customers, and there were other support issues caused by
| Steam customer difficulty understanding how to use Bitcoin
| (and who can blame them?). Customers were angry because they
| had paid for a game, but their payments were delayed for days
| unless they paid an indeterminate Blockchain transaction fee
| which might be more than cost of the game they were trying to
| buy.
|
| After a few months of that chaos, Steam dropped Bitcoin. So
| did many other retailers.
|
| Ironic, Bitcoin payments work much better now and fees are
| lower, but it lost of a lot of goodwill from retailers like
| Steam during that period, and most of them have not come
| back.
| philistine wrote:
| Are you sure that Bitcoin payments work much better because
| the amount of payments has dissipated?
| udev4096 wrote:
| bitcoin lightning has been the solution for it
| uyzstvqs wrote:
| It would take a lot of effort for Mastercard/Visa to stop
| physical retailers from selling Steam gift cards. Beyond gift
| cards, there's also systems such as PaySafeCard, which lets
| you pay with cash at a physical store and spend it online at
| any merchant who accepts it using a code.
|
| And for crypto they can just accept Monero. Steam accepted
| Bitcoin years ago, but stopped due to high fees and network
| congestion. Monero fixes that + makes it private like cash,
| and has been the de facto crypto _currency_ for years now.[1]
|
| [1] Random example
| https://xcancel.com/NanoGPTcom/status/1951300996329537625#m
| rs186 wrote:
| What about just using checking account numbers like with your
| utility bills?
| ascagnel_ wrote:
| Debit cards still go through MasterCard and/or Visa. They could
| take crypto, but crypto is far too volatile for the types of
| transactions Valve wants to be handling.
| wiseowise wrote:
| What they mean is that you top up your Steam credit and rest
| is between you and Steam.
| alexvitkov wrote:
| Volatility isn't an issue for the merchant - prices can be
| adjusted in real-time based on the cryptocurrency's value at
| the time of purchase, and if they don't want to be exposed,
| they can sell it immediately on purchase.
|
| Whether or not Valve would want to encourage people to pay
| with crypto and expose their customer base to its volatility
| is another matter.
| ascagnel_ wrote:
| In a world where people need both fiat and crypto, the
| volatility of crypto precludes returns.
| creer wrote:
| Besides being able to change prices (whether USD or bitcoin)
| in real time, Valve is also selling bits and global data
| center activity. Their prices are very disconnected from
| other prices to begin with. Not like if they were selling
| tomatoes at cost plus living wages. Plus or minus 10% from
| one day to the next is not necessarily relevant on a sale to
| sale basis.
| krainboltgreene wrote:
| Yes, but also the crypto option has been tried and absolutely
| doesn't work.
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| Can you elaborate? If crypto is the only viable option to pay
| for something, I would agree due to the low amount of people
| familar in dealing with crypto. If it is an _additional_
| option, what part of it is not working?
| krainboltgreene wrote:
| https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detai
| l...
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| Well that was before Lightning was invented - that
| elimnates the high fees.
| alexvitkov wrote:
| It really hasn't. Everything has been tried with crypto,
| except actually buying things with it.
| Ruthalas wrote:
| To be fair, in the case of Steam they legitimately did try.
| They supported bitcoin purchases for nearly two years
| before they stopped, citing volatility and processing fees:
|
| https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detai
| l...
| alexvitkov wrote:
| I wouldn't call using Bitcoin legitimately trying. Even
| in 2017 Monero existed, which solves both the fee and
| transaction time problems, and as an added bonus is way
| more private.
| krainboltgreene wrote:
| This is literally wrong. It's even googleable.
| rcxdude wrote:
| It was tried, way back when it started, and it didn't work
| very well. Maybe a modern blockchain can work better, but
| the transaction volumes of credit cards are orders of
| magnitudes above the busiest blockchain today.
| jksflkjl3jk3 wrote:
| Why not? I regularly buy products and services online with
| crypto and it works quite well, usually a better experience
| than with a credit card.
|
| There are plenty of chains that can confirm transactions in a
| couple seconds, and if you're concerned with volatility, just
| use USDC/USDT. There are crypto payment processors that
| handle all of this and allow payment across a range of chains
| and handle the volatility so that the merchant doesn't need
| to worry about anything crypto and just receives fiat.
| krainboltgreene wrote:
| I think I trust Stripe and Steam, probably two of the
| biggest money movers online by volume, to know when
| something doesn't work over just you.
| numpad0 wrote:
| That's where it gets disgusting. They don't tolerate that
| solution, which is a proof that this has nothing to do with
| brand protection or chargeback rates or anything of sorts.
|
| So either those poor games need to be kicked out, or everyone
| has to switch to cash/app overnight. The transition process has
| to be easy enough that the dumbest addict you have seen in
| worst fast food restaurant place can complete in few clicks.
| That has proven difficult for many, and sadly the former
| options are usually taken.
| root_axis wrote:
| Debit cards use the same network. Either way, it's a non-
| starter from a business perspective, even if they accepted
| cryptocurrency, majority of the economy does not use it.
| creer wrote:
| This is a better way to think about it: Valve is in a situation
| where they could maintain two payment regimes on their site:
| some content can be paid through methods X, Y and Z, while
| others cannot be paid by credit or debit cards but accept all
| other methods. That's some programming and payment routing
| change on their site, but might be within the possible. Valve
| can do that because they charge separately for each item. If
| passes or subscriptions, they would need to shift from one to
| two.
|
| This would be harder - it seems - for something like OnlyFans
| where payments and censorship are all one soup shared among all
| content.
| zb3 wrote:
| If there was a law that mandates that payment processors have to
| accept all transactions, then there'd be no reason to cite "brand
| damage" because Mastercard could just point out that they're not
| in control because of the law, and no other processor could
| censor that content either.
|
| Unfortunately, laws like EU AML law go the opposite direction,
| where banks are allowed to close accounts only if they deem them
| "too risky".. this is not good.
| stego-tech wrote:
| The payment processor censorship issue backs up a point I made
| elsewhere about companies being involved in politics: they
| shouldn't be, and shareholders should be screaming with rage that
| these companies have inserted themselves into these discussions
| on purpose.
|
| They're _payment processors_ , for crying out loud. Their entire
| grift is taking a slice of every transaction processed, ergo, the
| _only_ restriction they should _ever_ have in processing payments
| is whether or not the transaction is legal under the law, full
| stop.
|
| If they don't like processing payments for pornography or adult
| content (including games), then don't be a payment processor.
| They're a business, not a person, and therefore their
| "preferences" regarding content are irrelevant.
| 0983736882 wrote:
| > If they don't like processing payments for pornography or
| adult content (including games)
|
| Pornography and adult content is fine--the real issue is that
| gaming storefronts refuse to moderate their platforms for child
| pornography and rape material and would rather kill their
| entire NSFW catalog, all while painting themselves as the
| victims.
|
| > If they don't like processing payments for pornography or
| adult content (including games), then don't be a payment
| processor. They're a business, not a person, and therefore
| their "preferences" regarding content are irrelevant.
|
| Businesses are composed of people whose preferences matter. No
| business should be forced to serve pedophiles and rape
| fetishists.
| nemomarx wrote:
| I'm pretty sure child pornography is actually illegal in all
| jurisdictions valve operates in, and they would be charged
| with real crimes for selling it. Maybe you mean anime
| characters or something?
|
| And is there any law about roleplaying rape? It's common in
| romance novels and online videos so I don't see how it could
| be illegal.
| shagie wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornography_in_Australia#Ille
| g...
|
| > Some types of pornography (both real and fictitious) are
| technically illegal in Australia and if classified would be
| rated RC and therefore banned in Australia. This includes
| any pornography depicting violent BDSM, incest,
| paedophilia, zoophilia, certain extreme fetishes (such as
| golden showers) and/or indicators of youth (such as wearing
| a school uniform).
|
| Fictitious violent fetishes and BSDM would likely be
| illegal in Australia.
| nemomarx wrote:
| Fair enough for the Australian market, but I'm not sure
| why the rest of the world should have to line up with
| that. Just block it for Australian accounts or such?
| shagie wrote:
| And that is what should have been done. Steam and Itch
| should have blocked content that is illegal in Australia
| from being seen or sold in Australia.
|
| The problem is that they didn't properly identify _which_
| content it is. "Does it involve a school girl outfit
| giving the indication of youth?" isn't something that
| they can filter on.
|
| I could see something in the future where when someone
| puts up phonographic, they can't select all for the
| countries it can be sold in and instead need to
| specifically affirm that it is content that is legal in
| each of the checked countries.
|
| However, Steam and Itch don't currently do that. So when
| pressure by Collective Shout was moved from Steam and
| Itch to Mastercard and Visa, Mastercard and Visa almost
| immediately put pressure on their downstream processors
| which in turn put pressure Steam and Itch. Since Steam
| and Itch couldn't filter the "just illegal in Australia
| stuff needs to be removed from being available in
| Australia" they appear to have removed all NSFW content
| until it could be reviewed.
|
| I believe the key thing in this chain is that Visa and
| Mastercard are very risk adverse. While they do make a
| lot of money, on a per transaction basis any merchant
| that is a problem is a _very_ small drop in the bucket
| compared to the legal consequences they could (and have)
| face.
| stego-tech wrote:
| The content is legal, and therefore your entire argument is
| irrelevant, as is your attempt to personify corporations. The
| whole point of being an adult is understanding that your
| personal tastes aren't a mandate on others to comply for your
| comfort; in other words, if you dislike legal content, your
| sole recourse is to simply not engage with that content.
|
| Go proselytize elsewhere.
| 0983736882 wrote:
| > The content is legal
|
| It's not. Look up the PROTECT Act of 2003. It's sad that we
| live in a world where payment processors of all things have
| to do the government's job.
|
| You dislike MasterCard's and Visa's actually legal actions,
| your sole recourse is simply not to engage with them. Best
| of luck!
| nemomarx wrote:
| If you're interested and have any index funds, you could call
| shareholder relations for one of these companies and make that
| argument. "why are you turning down income streams and hurting
| your own profits" is maybe a position they'd listen to?
| stego-tech wrote:
| Quite a few folks already are - it's why MasterCard felt the
| need to issue a statement trying to obfuscate their role in
| things, meanwhile Visa is doubling down in the UK by trying
| to push laws banning content with consenting adults wearing
| "childish clothes", a category so vague that it's designed to
| be abused by the powers in charge.
|
| This is why companies shouldn't be allowed to engage in
| politics or lobbying: a handful of for-profit entities are
| abusing their capture of western finance to push personal
| agendas regardless of popular opinion or actual legality.
| anonymars wrote:
| > companies being involved in politics: they shouldn't be, and
| shareholders should be screaming with rage that these companies
| have inserted themselves into these discussions on purpose.
|
| What, might you say, do these companies (among others) have in
| common? What comes to mind when you see them together?
|
| * IBM
|
| * Volkswagen
|
| * Hugo Boss
|
| * Bayer (IG Farben)
| ufmace wrote:
| It seems like it's difficult to really separate them these
| days.
|
| You can always come up with something horrific enough that it
| seems reasonable, even necessary, for platforms to block it,
| like actual terrorism or child porn.
|
| But then, there's always an activist group out there who really
| wants to ban something that most people feel is only mildly
| distasteful but not worth a platform-level ban and will abuse
| processes to do it.
|
| And there's enough people for each of those cases who have
| incentive to obscure exactly which category things are actually
| in. More than enough for it to be hard for any platform to sort
| it out for sure.
|
| So do we eventually end up with either an actual Government
| takeover, or everything banned that's more edgy than Mr. Rogers
| Neighborhood?
| nottorp wrote:
| By the way:
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Streetcar-Named-Desire-Blu-ray/dp/B07...
|
| Why is Mastercard processing money for this movie that contains a
| rape scene?
| Freak_NL wrote:
| It's not targetted by pressure groups at the moment. MasterCard
| isn't acting out of its own moral convictions here, so don't
| expect these rules to be enforced wherever they might apply.
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| Oh please. As if Mastercard is beholden to some grass roots
| movement from Australia.
| dpoloncsak wrote:
| ...So their quote "we require merchants to have appropriate
| controls to ensure Mastercard cards cannot be used for
| unlawful purchases, including illegal adult content." is just
| a lie?
| nemomarx wrote:
| I mean yes, of course they're lying? the article quotes the
| actual rule here, which is "don't do anything that might
| make us look bad".
| wongarsu wrote:
| Still waiting for Game of Thrones to be removed from all
| streaming services for gratuitous sexual depictions and on-
| screen depictions of rape
| philistine wrote:
| Don't forget the beheading! Mastercard specifically mentions
| beheadings. I guess Ned Stark shouldn't have complained to
| every lord of Westeros that King's Landing didn't accept
| American Express.
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| I really hope Steam will start to accept Bitcoin (via Lightning
| possibly) over this. Due to its decentralization, it is
| censorship free by default. And if Steam accepts Bitcoin, that
| would be a massive boost for the liquidity aspect of BTC: You
| could basically sell your BTC to anyone who wants to make a Steam
| purchase, making it similarly fungible as Amazon gift vouchers.
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| Didn't Steam previously accept Bitcoin and then stop as no-one
| was using that option?
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| I learned that they did, but this was in 2017 before
| Lightning was a thing.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| > making it similarly fungible as Amazon gift vouchers
|
| This isn't as accurate as you might hope. I can pretty much
| only buy hobby-related things on Steam but I can buy just about
| any non-perishable household item on Amazon.
| ranguna wrote:
| Not sure about bitcoin, but maybe a stable coin would be
| interesting.
| cucubeleza wrote:
| "you'll own nothing and be happy"
| khalic wrote:
| Before getting all worked up, I would advise people to look at
| what games exactly were banned, and see if it's a case of power
| abuse or simply a case of "we can all agree that rape and incest
| games are disgusting and have no place in an entertainment web
| site visited by kids".
| makeitdouble wrote:
| You should bark at Steam if you want more curation.
|
| What people are pissed at is a card payment network abused for
| moral regulation.
| aesh2Xa1 wrote:
| Furthermore, there's no public list of exactly which games
| were removed.
| khalic wrote:
| Not sure what side this argument serves
| khalic wrote:
| I don't mean that I agree with the concept of corporate power
| abuse or the hypothesized source of the pressure. But I'm not
| spending one second of my life protecting this kind of
| content, and the fact that it's being euphemistically called
| "Adult Content", a very approximate description, shows that
| the source of the current outcry _knows_ it's very bad looks
| to be defending any of the games that have been confirmed
| banned by steam.
| braiamp wrote:
| It doesn't matter because it is up to Steam what products they
| list to sell, not to MC/Visa.
| khalic wrote:
| If I had a business, I wouldn't touch that kind of media with
| a ten foot pole. Why should these be forced to provide their
| service?
| f6v wrote:
| > we can all agree that rape and incest games are disgusting
| and have no place in an entertainment web site visited by kids
|
| We can then also agree that a game where you beat someone into
| a bloody pulp with a bat is equally disgusting. Why do we treat
| rape and murder differently?
| khalic wrote:
| So you disagree that these games are disgusting?
| jksflkjl3jk3 wrote:
| Unless there is actual real-word harm to someone (which is hard
| to imagine happening from a video game), no, I don't agree with
| you.
|
| What your kids are exposed to is your responsibility. Don't
| burden the rest of society because you can't be bothered to set
| your own boundaries.
| khalic wrote:
| Removing incest games is not a burden to society
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| We should ban GTA for promoting all sorts of crime including
| murder and have no place in an entertainment web site visited
| by kids.
| khalic wrote:
| Your point being? We can't treat different content
| differently? Do you not agree this is insane content?
| makeitdouble wrote:
| > Mastercard's Rule 5.12.7 relates to "illegal or brand-damaging
| transactions," and states:
|
| > A Merchant must not submit to its Acquirer, and a Customer must
| not submit to the Interchange System, any Transaction that is
| illegal, or in the sole discretion of the Corporation, may damage
| the goodwill of the Corporation or reflect negatively on the
| Marks.
|
| I didn't expect they had such clear rules expliciting they can
| ban any kind of transactions they don't like or would make them
| look bad, regardless of the legality of it.
| Hamuko wrote:
| I called MasterCard twice and both times they a) guessed that I
| was calling about content on Steam without ever mentioning
| Steam b) said that they only restricted "illegal adult content"
| and have "standards based on rule of law". Said absolutely
| nothing about protecting the brand. Also couldn't say if said
| "standards" were actual laws or MasterCard's own (legal)
| standards.
| loa_in_ wrote:
| Good argument to record any calls with them and submit the
| recordings to the press
| Hamuko wrote:
| You don't really have to record the phone call. If anyone
| in the press wants to hear them saying that they don't
| block legal content, call them and ask about Steam. They
| have a ready-made PR response that they will read to you.
| harvie wrote:
| There already was a time when Steam managed to free people from
| need to use funny pieces of plastic in their lifes... They've
| done that with CDs, they can do it again with Cards.
| master-lincoln wrote:
| Yeah, that was when Steam freed the users from actually owning
| any game and instead gave the users limited licenses for using
| games.
|
| I am looking forward to the day when they shutdown and
| everybody realizes this.
| dpoloncsak wrote:
| Can't I still just run the .exe of the game? Or DRM
| nightmares?
| hexmiles wrote:
| All (most?) Steam games have a very simple DRM that is
| extremely easy to bypass, and you can find examples on
| github.
|
| However, a lot of games add their own DRM and/or protection
| scheme that complicates things.
|
| EDIT: technically there are two distinct component: the
| actual DRM, called steamstub, and the steamwork library,
| that does not work without steam but it is not considered
| drm. Both can be easily bypassed/emulated.
| dpoloncsak wrote:
| I see, but there _is_ Steam DRM there. So, I guess as the
| other commenter was alluding to, if Steam goes belly up
| so does your collection, regardless of the dev studio 's
| intention (Or atleast, locked behind a DRM bypass).
|
| I understood this in terms of Live Service games, but did
| not consider Steam's ability to shut down _their own_
| platform and kill my locally installed single player
| games with it (Again, I 'm seeing its possible and seems
| easy to bypass usually, but the principle of the matter)
| skeaker wrote:
| Definitely not all games, and for games that do have it
| cracking it is in most cases as simple as swapping out a
| Steam .dll (so very easy). It's primarily there as
| appeasement for devs who would be reluctant to engage
| with a platform with no copy protection, or in otherwords
| is mostly theater.
| zamadatix wrote:
| The real loss was in the inability to sell the 90% of titles
| I no longer care about owning, but that's already true
| immediately after purchase.
|
| Steam shutting down and taking your library with it really
| doesn't change much except you lose that nice delivery
| platform with good integrations (achievements, workshop mods,
| multiplayer integration, automatic updates) for games you're
| active in. For the 90% you were never going to touch again it
| wouldn't be noticeable, outside the annoying reminder you
| were never able to resell them. The other 10% just reverts
| back to "pirate it" which is about here on my scale:
|
| "find that legal physical copy to play with" < "pirate it" <
| "click button on Steam"
| MarioMan wrote:
| Steam has famously gone on record that they will provide a
| DRM removal patch for everything they're legally allowed to,
| if/when they go under.
|
| If they don't do this and it's all just lip service, then it
| makes a strong argument for ethical piracy at that time.
| shoxidizer wrote:
| This is a very persistent rumor. I forget the details but
| it comes from a customer support email, not some official
| statement or promise from Gabe, and even that was
| originally posted on a long gone forum which you can only
| find quotes of. Even if there was first hand proof of an
| official statement, I wouldn't expect it to be upheld.
| Minecraft's website used to have a line from Notch saying
| he would make it open-source in the future.
| infecto wrote:
| I am again going to be the outlier here and state that I don't
| think this is an issue with Visa or Mastercard. As public
| companies I suspect they would love to be processing as much as
| possible and unfortunately they have to walk a balance in some
| categories, like Adult content, where they are overly careful to
| make sure they are 1) not antagonizing regulators with extreme
| content and 2) try to keep on the positive side from a PR
| perspective.
|
| I definitely wish there were more option in payment processing
| and this is a good example of how crypto has failed, it should be
| a seamless drop-in imo. I also don't believe this is a matter of
| free speech. It surprising to see so many folks wave the free
| speech flag where I don't follow the logic. The government under
| any administration is not going to come to the rescue of free
| speech laws.
| TimorousBestie wrote:
| It's not credible that Collective Shout actually caused some
| change in policy. They're being used to deflect blame from
| Visa/MC, who in any case have done rolling purges of adult
| content creators' accounts for decades.
| braiamp wrote:
| They should be allowing all lawful transactions, and if they
| can't, they should get broken up.
| infecto wrote:
| People keep saying this but I don't see any reason any
| administration would do this. It is that type of argument
| that feels good to think about but has no legal basis.
| notnullorvoid wrote:
| It seems to me like Visa and MasterCard controlling the
| payment processing market, and restricting the sale of
| legal goods would fall under existing antitrust laws.
|
| I don't think the current US administration has any desire
| to enforce antitrust laws though.
| shagie wrote:
| That would be a change from preventing illegal transactions.
|
| As it stands currently, the risk associated to the company
| for allowing illegal transactions is what drives their policy
| since they get brought into lawsuits for allowing
| monetization of illegal content in some jurisdiction.
|
| Changing it (world wide) so that payment processors are not
| subject to money laundering laws and cannot be held liable
| when a merchant sells something illegal would allow them to
| change their model to allow all lawful transactions and not
| have false negatives.
|
| Until false positives (allowing an illegal transaction) is
| not a risk for them, their policies are unlikely to change.
| jasonlotito wrote:
| They do allow lawful transactions. However, they do require
| that these transactions be properly coded. If you are
| processing for certain types of products (adult in nature) it
| has to be coded as such. If Itch and Steam aren't coding
| these properly, or don't have the appropriate relation and
| accounts to process these transactions, you run into issues
| like this.
| jksflkjl3jk3 wrote:
| > 1) not antagonizing regulators with extreme content
|
| Who is this regulator that's going to care that Visa and
| Mastercard are processing payments for porn?
| infecto wrote:
| You make it sound a lot easier than what is really happening.
| It's not that it's porn, it's what type of porn. This applies
| globally but let's say we are only focused on the US only,
| it's possible depending on how extreme of the material to
| have oversight by local or federal governments. This is a
| definite consideration when Visa is making their guidelines,
| you think they has a business care? Nope, it's purely to
| satiate the external parties.
| numpad0 wrote:
| I kind of wonder if there had been misinterpretations as to the
| results of previous campaigns against Japan.
|
| English in Japan is more of a customer support tool than a
| language. Proficiency is improving in some places, but on decline
| at large, below already atrocious status quo. This means the size
| of English-speaking audiences for actually Japan-centric news is
| small and not the first priority, not small && more important.
| Extremely little of whatever happening in Japan appear on
| mainstream English _social_ media, let alone _regular_ mainstream
| media.
|
| If that much was not obvious to whoever pulling strings on this
| ongoing thing, I think there may be a chance that lack of
| _observable_ responses after their earlier actions led to a
| misplaced confidence that gaming is a tiny top-down market and
| consumer resistance is nonexistent.
|
| The responses were significant enough that it elected an
| equivalent of senate for third term and got former PM Kishida
| make a hand-wavy assurance on video even just few days before
| this one. It was almost certainly just a lip service, but also
| not nothing. How would anyone interpret that as a situation safe
| to escalate further?
| polytely wrote:
| I wonder if Valve could (threaten to) become their own payment
| processor if this becomes too big of a threat. They are one of
| the few companies on earth with enough money to attempt it.
|
| If I remember correctly a big part of Valves heavy investment
| into linux was Microsoft wanting to lock windows down more, and
| now in 2025 gaming on linux is a viable alternative to windows.
| master-lincoln wrote:
| What would that change? The assumption here is that payment
| processors need to comply with MasterCards rules. So would
| Valve if they would become a payment processor, no?
| Null-Set wrote:
| It would allow them to negotiate directly with Mastercard,
| making the deflection in TFA impossible.
| 8n4vidtmkvmk wrote:
| I don't know how that helps. PayPal and stripe are the payment
| processors, no? Visa and MasterCard are the payment network.
| Steam can build their own Stripe probably, but are they going
| to make their own credit card network too? Probably not. They
| can maybe try taking money directly from your bank though, like
| Wise. But if you've ever tried it, that looks like such a shit
| show. Every bank and every country does it a little
| differently, has its own limits and fees, and the
| authentication is really ghetto.
| f6v wrote:
| Well, you can buy Steam gift cards for cash in underdeveloped
| markets like Germany. Can't imagine how else would it work.
| ranguna wrote:
| You can't buy gift cards in other underdeveloped markets like
| Japan, Camboja, the US, Mexico, etc?
| xbar wrote:
| MC/Visa wield a great deal of market power, which is bad because
| they become directly controllable entities.
|
| I can't believe I am about to say this: Bitcoin fixes this.
| TJTorola wrote:
| Some other cryptocurrency fixes this, maybe (big maybe). But as
| long as _Bitcoin_ is seen primarily as an investment
| opportunity it can't really function as a means of exchange.
| For the same reason that we expect and need USD to lose value
| over time, people need to be encouraged to exchange their
| currency, not sit on it forever.
| nullc wrote:
| Something doesn't need to be perfect to be an escape valve.
|
| So for example, when backpage's speech was unlawfully
| suppressed by the US government via payment processors
| cutting them off in Operation Chokepoint, they successfully
| adopted Bitcoin.
|
| ... and then Kamala Harris aggressively prosecuted them for
| 'money laundering' for the evading the payment processor
| blockade, even though her own internal staff report said they
| were guilty of no crime and were a treasured asset of law
| enforcement in the fight against human trafficking (
| https://reason.com/2019/08/26/secret-memos-show-the-
| governme... ). So aggressive was the prosecution that they
| caused a mistrial by flagrantly disregard of the court's
| orders, then prosecuted again leading the the suicide of one
| of the founders following a decade of vicious harassment by
| the state.
|
| uh ... so maybe not the best example.
|
| Or maybe it is the best example: The root cause in the abuse
| by payment processors is the US government leaning on them to
| abuse their subjective discretion to suppress lawful activity
| that the government is constitutionally prohibited in
| interfering with. This is both what underlies the
| schizophrenic response by mastercard, which likes money and
| would generally just prefer to process everything profitable,
| and is also why Steam would be taking a huge risk to route
| around them with alternate payment means.
| yupyupyups wrote:
| >rape, incest and child abuse games
|
| Wake me up when something of value is lost.
| godshatter wrote:
| If someone has inclinations toward such things, I'd rather they
| get their release through playing a video game.
| o11c wrote:
| Okay, but if so, let's be explicit about making that
| tradeoff. Also, let's not pretend that "ban all NSFW games"
| either was asked for or would be acted upon.
|
| It's quite telling that there's a grand total of one (1)
| specific game people keep suggesting be unbanned. Given the
| number of games affected, a rare false positive is only to
| expected.
|
| (Apparently itch.io temporarily took steps against all NSFW
| games, which is only to be expected if they have no way to
| immediately _know_ which games are pedo /incest/rape games
| since they've chosen to let them flourish for so long.)
| gs17 wrote:
| The same group was targeting Detroit: Become Human and GTA.
| Will the card companies go down that path? Maybe, maybe not,
| but going after the easy targets is the first step.
| 0983736882 wrote:
| This whole debacle is making a _lot_ of people show their true
| colors. Grim.
| khalic wrote:
| I think some are really afraid of the fabled slippery slope,
| but yeah, the gaming world is home to a very dubious bread of
| pro CP, sex obsessed (as in "every media I consume must make
| me horny") and misogynistic punks. Edit: not making any
| claims regarding the size of that population, most gamers are
| just regular people enjoying some escape, like me
| yupyupyups wrote:
| To prove your point:
|
| https://www.collectiveshout.org/gamers-threats-and-abuse
| YurgenJurgensen wrote:
| It sure is. Mainly bootlickers and bookburners though.
| russelg wrote:
| First they came for etc
| yupyupyups wrote:
| This issue should not be brought up on the basis of them
| denying service to selling, not just porn, but some of the
| most extreme types of porn. Because this content is something
| harmful and immoral, there is not any moral obligation even
| for a duopoly to serve their sale.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| Have you ever read fundamentalist christian reviews of films or
| books? They will absolutely go for the stuff you value. It is
| not actually possible to make them happy. They invented graham
| crackers because they thought normal foods were too sexually
| evocative.
| lesuorac wrote:
| Do people think USD being accepted at kink stores gives the USA a
| reputation risk?
|
| I just don't see the argument that a payment processor being able
| to process payments legitimately gives them reputation risk. I
| don't doubt that people write in to MasterCard to claim it does
| but people write about everything.
| shoxidizer wrote:
| While I don't think MC's or Visa's reputation is at all close
| to being fragile enough to be harmed by use on any Steam game,
| the idea that these companies are almost like public utilities
| that shouldn't have a say in their deals _is_ their reputation.
|
| And carrying large amounts of USD cash does have a negative
| reputation, even to the US government. Nevermind the reputation
| of cryptocurrency.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| If there were a law that MC had to be an impartial utility,
| like a phone or electricity provider, then it wouldn't hurt
| their reputation. But since there is no such law, they have the
| choice to deny transactions, which also means they can be
| blamed (by puritans) for allowing them.
| lesuorac wrote:
| I'm not sure you need MC to be an impartial utility.
|
| IIUC, the problem here is the colluding behavior. Steam can't
| just "drop" MC and use Visa for the transactions as the banks
| must abide by MC's rules even when MC isn't the payment
| processor just to be eligible to be a bank for MC.
| revlolz wrote:
| I believe the issue is Visa PayPal, and Mastercard are
| capitualating to interest groups bombarding them with
| complaints and then celebrating censorship on social media
| posts. I agree with your sentiment, it's ridiculous.
| cubefox wrote:
| There are so many middle men involved, it gets confusing.
| Apparently the payment goes like this:
|
| Game Buyer (Steam) -> Stripe/PayPal -> MasterCard/Visa -> Valve
| -> Game publisher
|
| That's at least three middle men, and presumably all of them
| collect fees. I wonder why in the year 2025 there isn't a more
| direct way to pay for things.
| jug wrote:
| > Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down, but
| Valve says payment processors 'specifically cited' a Mastercard
| rule about damaging the brand
|
| Who in heaven's name associates a credit card company with the
| image/ethics of the transactions it's processing as long as the
| businesses are legal??
|
| What I think of when I hear Mastercard? A plastic card with
| numbers on it, connected to my bank account and offering me some
| added protections/insurance.
| nick486 wrote:
| I mean, to be a bit of a devil's advocate, its not impossible.
| Bitcoin sort of has the reputation of being used to buy "shady
| stuff". Its not unreasonable for MasterCard to not want to be
| "That card company people buy edgy porn with".
|
| Which is why we need them to be legally required to process all
| lawful transactions, so that they cannot be singled out for it.
| aranelsurion wrote:
| > Bitcoin sort of has the reputation of being used to buy
| "shady stuff".
|
| That's because practically no one gets gas and buys groceries
| with it.
|
| All the porn of the world wouldn't be a drop in the sea that
| is MasterCard.
| anonymars wrote:
| Heh, ironically we do now, don't we?
| rob74 wrote:
| So... Mastercard's statement is very clear:
|
| > _Put simply, we allow all lawful purchases on our network._
|
| But their "Rule 5.12.7" is... not so clear:
|
| > _A Merchant must not submit to its Acquirer, and a Customer
| must not submit to the Interchange System, any Transaction that
| is illegal, or in the sole discretion of the Corporation, may
| damage the goodwill of the Corporation or reflect negatively on
| the Marks._
|
| Well, which one is it now? All lawful purchases (pretty clear-
| cut) or only lawful purchases that will not "reflect negatively"
| on Mastercard in Mastercard's opinion (vague as hell)?
| efitz wrote:
| We need Congress to make a law here in the US that businesses
| involved in facilitating financial transactions in the United
| States are considered "common carriers" and must not
| discriminate against, cancel or disadvantage any customer or
| legal transaction, without a court order.
|
| We can write language to allow booting people for fraud,
| hacking, etc if "legal" + "court order" are insufficient.
| shagie wrote:
| How would that work with international money laundering
| regulations?
|
| Would that apply to Australian courts?
| alphager wrote:
| If the regulation is legally binding by an act of Congress,
| it falls under the legal umbrella.
|
| Same thing in AUS: If there's a AUS law, they have to
| follow it.
| shagie wrote:
| In those cases, what would a law...
| "that businesses involved in facilitating financial
| transactions in the United States are considered "common
| carriers" and must not discriminate against, cancel or
| disadvantage any customer or legal transaction, without a
| court order"
|
| provide? It might have prevented Visa and Mastercard from
| being brought into the PornHub lawsuit... in the US. It
| wouldn't have protected them from Australian laws
| weaponized by organizations such as Collective Shout.
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| Yes, the US is not the world police and that's okay. Let
| Australians deal with Australian laws and Australian
| lobbying groups.
| shagie wrote:
| ... and risk adverse international companies (like Visa
| and Mastercard) need to follow the laws _everywhere_
| despite what various jurisdictions shield them from in
| those jurisdictions.
| altairprime wrote:
| No: it's _cheaper_ for them to follow the minimum common
| compliance across all countries, but Mastercard-sized
| firms absolutely can and often do vary compliance per
| country ( _gestures at Google, Facebook_ ) when it's
| profitable to do so. Mastercard could have simply
| enforced Australia-specific rules on Itch if they'd
| wanted to, but they're anxious about being labeled as
| smutty due to domestic U.S., and apparently exported
| Australian, puritanism. The solution is to ensure that
| cowardice does more lasting harm to their brand than they
| feel that their strategy prevents -- which requires both
| loud and immediate response, as well as sustained
| pressure over time.
| shagie wrote:
| Mastercard and Visa have rather corse information about
| the transactions.
|
| They've got the credit card number, the merchant name,
| the time, and the total amount of the transaction.
|
| They do not have line item level filtering of a
| transaction. Remember those old carbon paper credit card
| thingies?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_card_imprinter -
| that's all that's needed and all they get. Similarly, the
| credit card terminals where the merchant enters the
| amount, swipes the card (or reads the chip) and that's it
| is sufficient.
|
| Mastercard and Visa would only be able to say "that
| merchant" not "that product." Filtering based on products
| and if it's legal there needs to be done by the merchant.
| Mastercard cannot check to see if someone is selling
| liquor to an underage customer... but if a merchant _is_
| doing that, Mastercard may drop that merchant as one of
| their clients.
|
| If Itch and Valve are unable to enforce Australia
| specific laws on their own storefront, Mastercard and
| Visa can only enforce it at the "this merchant isn't
| allowed to transact with our network."
| altairprime wrote:
| Mastercard can deny all transactions from Australia-
| billed cards to one merchant if they wish to. They are
| absolutely wired up for "Area of Use" internally and have
| this data available to their transaction approval
| processes. That they chose not to use it, instead
| pressuring merchants to remove content disliked by an
| Australian puritanical fringe group, is the corporate
| laziness I describe. Why respond with their own effort
| when they can just externalize the problem onto their
| customers, etc.
| shagie wrote:
| Mastercard does not have that information. Mastercard
| doesn't do the billing. The bank does the billing.
|
| Mastercard does not know the location where a given card
| holder is (or for that matter, any demographic
| information about the card holder). They know where the
| merchant is, but that's less useful for digital goods.
| altairprime wrote:
| Per section 7 here -- https://www.mastercard.us/content/d
| am/public/mastercardcom/n... -- MasterCard could simply
| remove Australia from Itch's Area of Use, at which point
| they would not be permitted to accepted MasterCard from
| Australian customers, which the merchant could trivially
| enforce by country filter on the billing address.
|
| I suspect we're going to find out that _Stripe_ is
| unwilling to risk losing Mastercard in Australia and also
| unwilling to implement passthrough AoU restrictions to
| their sublicensees, and _Mastercard_ isn't willing to act
| against any single customer of Stripe or else they don't
| profit from the "not our problem" discount rate they
| issue Stripe to make it their problem.
| crooked-v wrote:
| There's a bill for almost exactly that currently pending in
| committee: https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-
| congress/senate-bill/401 If you like the idea, read the text
| on there and call your senators to support it.
| weberer wrote:
| The relevant part is section 5b.
|
| >(b) Prohibition.--No payment card network, including a
| subsidiary of a payment card network, may, directly or
| through any agent, processor, or licensed member of the
| network, by contract, requirement, condition, penalty, or
| otherwise, prohibit or inhibit the ability of any person
| who is in compliance with the law, including section 8 of
| this Act, to obtain access to services or products of the
| payment card network because of political or reputational
| risk considerations.
| btown wrote:
| 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.
| notatoad wrote:
| 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.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Exactly. If they are misapplying their fraud criteria,
| companies start suing and winning and Mastercard stops
| misapplying their criteria.
| docmars wrote:
| 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.
| efitz wrote:
| 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.
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| I won't trust the Congress. Far left and far right are both
| pushing for more censorship
| nso wrote:
| The US barely has any genuinely left-wing politicians
| (Bernie Sanders, AOC, DSA). There are no one who
| realistically could be called far left in any significant
| position of governing power.
| mullingitover wrote:
| Even these are not far left, they're just basic liberal
| left.
|
| Which groups or media that are commonly labeled 'far
| left' that are calling for nationalizing all land. Or
| eliminating all inheritances. Or nationalizing all
| communications and transportation industries. Or
| nationalizing the Federal Reserve (that one's really gone
| horseshoe theory, and is a republican plan now).
|
| The only thing 'far left' people want to nationalize is
| health care, and that's simply the _fiscally responsible_
| policy. The thing that is crushing the federal budget is
| the obscene level of graft occurring in that industry,
| and the only way out is to nationalize or otherwise burn
| the existing system to the ground via government policy.
| zdragnar wrote:
| The meaning of words can change over time and across
| space.
|
| The meaning of left and right in US politics encompasses
| more topics than the matter of who may legally own
| things.
|
| Pretending that those referred to as left and right are
| all the same because the only true scottsman is Karl Marx
| is silly.
| stuaxo wrote:
| There's a whole bunch of socialism to the right of *!=)
| Marx and the left of classic liberalism.
|
| Words have meaning, trying to characterise "far left" as
| some sort of US caricature of Blue haired liberal types
| is less than useful and only serves right wing outlets.
|
| There is very little left wing discourse in the US.
| rambojohnson wrote:
| what far left are you talking about exactly?
| pembrook wrote:
| Everybody from the 2010s is mostly still alive. They may
| not be in the zeitgeist anymore but they would still love
| to ruin your life & career for not doing a land
| acknowledgement and pronoun announcement before stepping
| into public spaces.
| chimeracoder wrote:
| > They may not be in the zeitgeist anymore but they would
| still love to ruin your life & career for not doing a
| land acknowledgement before you step into every public
| space.
|
| Complaining about land acknowledgements as an example of
| the "far left" tells me that you don't actually have a
| handle on what the left actually looks like, as opposed
| to how it's portrayed through right-wing outlets.
|
| First, there is literally nobody who would "ruin your
| life" for not doing a land acknowledgement, but also, the
| people doing land acknowledgements in 2025 are not the
| "far left". They're not even the left. Most leftist
| organizations don't do land acknowledgements at all!
|
| _EDIT_ : Since you updated your comment to include
| another favorite whipping boy:
|
| > they would still love to ruin your life & career for
| not doing a land acknowledgement and pronoun announcement
| before stepping into public spaces
|
| Again, "the left" is not ruining your life for not doing
| a "pronoun announcement", because they don't want pronoun
| announcements to be required in the first place, and in
| fact voice serious complaints whenever they are.
|
| Both of the things you mention as examples of the "far
| left" - mandatory land acknowledgements and pronoun
| announcements - are things which you will find in very
| few actual leftist spaces. Where you will find them,
| however, is in mainstream spaces run by centrist or
| small-c "conservative" people, like corporate HR
| meetings. You will also, incidentally, see them on far-
| right media, which happens to be extremely obsessed with
| the concept of these things representing the left,
| despite the fact that actual leftists rejected them years
| ago.
| pembrook wrote:
| No true scotsman fallacy.
|
| Just because you consider yourself left and never cared
| about those things doesn't mean there aren't leftists who
| do.
|
| There's about 50 different far left interest groups who
| care about different pet issues to varying degrees of
| insanity, just as there are on the far right.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| who's life has been ruined? be specific
|
| meanwhile the other side of the "both sides are the same"
| coin is literally building open air prison camps and
| _selling merchandise_ for them
|
| you are buying it hook line and sinker
| pembrook wrote:
| I worked in Silicon Valley in the 2010s, I'm not "buying"
| anything. I'm speaking from lived experience from sitting
| in actual meetings with these people.
|
| Also, it appears I made a massive mistake trying to
| support a centrist "both far left and far right are bad"
| comment from OP, as this is now a flame war.
|
| We're kinda proving my point.
| eastbound wrote:
| James Damore.
|
| *Skud incoming* - and that is exactly what destroying a
| life means. Criticizing to no end while the guy wrote a
| perfectly scientific paper, to the point that he cannot
| work with his potential.
| seangrogg wrote:
| You assume people are buying something because "both
| sides" are doing it. But what about those who aren't
| ideologically aligned with either end and instead exist
| in the space between?
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| Just pass the law yourself I guess? (imagine a muscly arm
| emoji here)
| krunck wrote:
| Far left not needed. The center left will gladly do it.
| jibe wrote:
| This is a case where left and right can work together for
| totally different reasons. The left is fighting for rape
| porn in video games, and the right doesn't want gun stores
| definanced. Both win with credit platform neutrality.
| seangrogg wrote:
| Center shit, not censorship.
| tzs wrote:
| Careful. That could backfire.
|
| Right now there are things that a significant majority think
| are terrible and shouldn't exist but aren't a high enough
| priority to actually make illegal because they are small
| because most mainstream service providers don't want to serve
| them.
|
| Take that away an those things might grow enough that they do
| become a priority for legally banning.
| stinkbeetle wrote:
| What kinds of things?
| eviks wrote:
| > Well, which one is it now?
|
| Obviously the more complicated option with arbitrary criteria
| khalic wrote:
| Public announcement are in no way bound by truth, terms of
| service are, to a degree
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| This problem is upstream of the credit card companies. How far
| upstream? Not much. It's their investors. Like Bill Ackman [1]
| and Blackrock. These companies live in a fantasy world where
| everything can be "Disney-ized" and made family-friendly. They
| see how negative press campaigns like Collective Shout can damage
| a brand's image. And their "solution" is to turn the world into a
| big Disney theme park where there's no sex, drugs, or rock 'n
| roll. You may not mind that world, hell, you may even WANT that
| world, but it's completely impractical and these investors are
| too stupid to realize that their initial success (pressuring
| Steam to remove incest-themed games) won't translate into long-
| term success. (I mean what do you expect, they are MBAs and CFAs.
| They've been trained to see the world as a series of clinical
| abstract charts, which is why anyone who can apply a sociological
| filter to the world runs rings around them.)
|
| [1] - https://archive.ph/zXKuD
| calibas wrote:
| Mastercard's rule is that they can ban whatever they want,
| whenever they want.
|
| > A Merchant must not submit to its Acquirer, and a Customer must
| not submit to the Interchange System, any Transaction that is
| illegal, or _in the sole discretion of the Corporation, may
| damage the goodwill of the Corporation_ or reflect negatively on
| the Marks.
|
| Create amorphous rules, enforce them as you feel like, then blame
| others for breaking the rules...
| unstatusthequo wrote:
| I realize the strong anti cryptocurrency sentiment on HN for
| reasons unclear to me, but this would be a great time for Steam
| and itch to accept cryptocurrency.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Some discussion on source 3 days ago:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44760843
| udev4096 wrote:
| Why are we surprised? A centralized payment system, especially a
| banking one, is bound to do something like this. Crypto solves
| this but the average normie is still stupid enough to rely on
| them
| carabiner wrote:
| I wonder if valve could just become a bank or create its own
| credit card without these rules.
| jajuuka wrote:
| Classic passing the buck. "Well WE didn't say they had to take
| those games down. We just pointed some problematic games and that
| we might not want to do business with them if they weren't
| removed. We didn't take them down."
|
| Unfortunately until some regulation is created to solve this
| problem Visa/Mastercard will continue throwing around their
| weight at the whims of whoever.
| gethly wrote:
| As a internet user on the business side of things, words cannot
| describe my hatred for payment card companies(ie. visa and
| mastercard).
| dang wrote:
| Related. Others?
|
| _Clarifying recent headlines on gaming content_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44760843 - Aug 2025 (24
| comments)
|
| _Visa and Mastercard are getting overwhelmed by gamer fury over
| censorship_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44713414 -
| July 2025 (586 comments)
|
| _Steam, Itch.io are pulling 'porn' games. Critics say it 's a
| slippery slope_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44685011 -
| July 2025 (890 comments)
|
| _Against the censorship of adult content by payment processors_
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44679406 - July 2025 (250
| comments)
|
| _Games: No sex, please. we 're credit card companies_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44675697 - July 2025 (52
| comments)
|
| _Itch.io: Update on NSFW Content_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44667667 - July 2025 (323
| comments)
|
| _Australian anti-porn group claims responsibility for Steams new
| censorship rules_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44636369
| - July 2025 (162 comments)
|
| _Valve confirms credit card companies pressured it to delist
| certain adult games_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44606184 - July 2025 (905
| comments)
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