I think this is one of those "works, but not at scale" situations. The law around protected classes is proof of this: if there's a racist business that won't serve you, startups could gain an advantage by serving you. But if every business around you is racist such that a startup couldn't gain a foothold, there's a market failure that regulation was added to address.

If you don't like what telephone companies do, making your own phone company that doesn't inter-operate with the current ones would clearly not go very well.

Likewise, if you don't like the current banks or payment processors, you have a steep hill to climb in that all the operative tissue is built around the current model.

As an analogy:

Your ability to make calls on a cell phone is not a right.

Nothing is stopping you from setting up a cell tower, but it's quite possible AT&T does not want their brand tied with your calls.

This absolutely works... until, and when network effects kick in.

Payment processors have major network effects in that infra setup is expensive, banks need to be onboarded one-by-one, and whichever network has the most consumers, businesses will gravitate towards it. Iterate this over 20 years, and this always results in natural monopolies / duopolies. This creates a natural chokepoint/linchpin over which millions of people's mutually exclusive needs are getting banged at; including consumers at large, govs at large, and special-interest groups at large.

Absent crystal clear legislation -and porn is anything, but- this will always be arbitrary, and leave one side in the dust.

I suspect if there was clear rules for the government this would be cut and dry. The fact of the matter is it’s not and that’s why companies like Visa may restrict certain things. There is chargeback risk, risk from the underwriting bank, risk from a state government and risk from the federal government. This is not some free speech problem but rather an issue where a company is having to balance issues from many different parties and weigh the risk.

Great, then what we should do is just nationalize these companies like we should've done 30 years ago. Now it is a free speech problem, and we can solve it.

We'll all probably save a little bit of money too when we don't have to forfeit a portion of every transaction ever to someone's profit margins.

Thanks for invalidating any point you may have had that was valid. Why do conversations degrade into such rubbish so quickly?

It's not rubbish, it's a real solution.

The only reason this isn't a free speech problem is because it's monopolized in the private sector. Well, if it's already centrally planned and controlled, then we can just put it in the public sector.

Now, we have some guarantee of rights. We can even use our voting powers to influence the payment processor. Because, right now, we essentially have this same exact scenario - except, it's opaque, we can't vote, and they're allowed to completely trample over the US constitution, because it doesn't apply to them.

What's the actual drawback here? I mean, it's not like things can get more consolidated. I understand not wanting to disturb a market, but there's no market to disturb.

We can also go the other direction and split Visa up. But that's bad in different ways.

I don't want 50 payment processors, you don't want that, and certainly Visa doesn't want that. So who wins? Nobody, it's all losers. If you think it's expensive now, just wait until you're paying for the integration and complexity costs of all those payment processors.

IMO, payment processors are public infrastructure. That's an opinion of course, but it's really hard to argue otherwise. It is to the benefit of everyone that we have good payment processors. We already pay for Visa via taxes - that's what that 2% charge on all transactions is.

Given that, we should treat it like a public asset.

It’s not. It’s a fairy tale solution that sounds good to you but has no shot in the real world. I like discussing real solutions even if I don’t agree with them.

This is simply an underwriting risk problem. Get the government to draw boundaries of what’s ok or not and it’s less of a problem.

Okay. But this isn't an argument.

They're already acting as a public good - so why can't we just make them a public good? That's not a rhetorical question.

We're already paying taxes for this public good. So why can't we pay actual taxes for this public good? Again, not rhetorical.

> Get the government to draw boundaries of what’s ok or not and it’s less of a problem.

Yes, we can do this. But we have already done this. It's our common laws and the US constitution.

If we want free speech, we don't need to go out here and write a super special law to target Visa. If they were just part of the public sector that would already apply to them - no new laws required.

You can't just say something is a fairy-tale because you're ideologically opposed to it. We already run many, many public services and do it successfully. It's not a fairy-tale, it's real life and we've been doing it for hundreds of years. Yes, even in the US.

Not to mention, we'd get a lot of extra benefits for free. Don't want your payment history leaked? Great, now the police require a search warrant to invade your privacy. Don't want to be debanked? Great, now we have more stringent discrimination protections. Want to pay less? Great, we don't have to turn a profit anymore.

You write a lot but you still have not gotten over the fact that what your solution is not a solution because there is simply no way for it to happen. Glad it sounds good in your head though.

And to be clear, no the US and Australia have not done a good job of drawing a clear line here. You must be new to the space, this has constantly been an issue for the Adult industry there are very few banks that will underwrite Adult content and there are blurred lines. From the perspective of Visa or Mastercard the risk from the public or the government is too great so they have to police it. It’s unfortunate but it’s also been a constant theme for at least two decades.

> You write a lot but you still have not gotten over the fact that what your solution is not a solution because there is simply no way for it to happen.

Okay but why isn't it possible? You can't just say thing and then pretend they're true.

You've had like 3 comments now to explain why you think it isn't possible and you've decided not to, presumably because you can't.

I think it's possible. We've done it before. I've already explained the benefits.

Okay, so what now? I have an argument, you don't. Feel free to provide one, or don't, I don't really care because I'm starting to think you're not acting in good faith.

You’re asking why it’s not possible like it’s some big mystery, but it’s not ideology. It’s basic political and economic reality. You’re proposing nationalizing a private financial network in a country that can’t even pass basic data privacy laws or agree on net neutrality.

Visa and Mastercard aren’t some low-friction government acquisition target. They’re entrenched public companies with deep lobbying arms, international dependencies, and systemic importance. This isn’t turning the post office into USPS. It’s unpicking decades of privatized infrastructure and assuming the government can suddenly become a nimble tech operator. That’s the fairy tale.

And yes, laws exist, but enforcement is uneven, regulators are captured, and the ambiguity around “obscenity,” “adult,” and “high-risk” content is exactly why these companies over-police. You keep asserting benefits of a public solution as if that’s evidence it could happen. It’s not. It just shows you’re imagining a world that doesn’t resemble the one we live in.

You’re free to dream. I’m just pointing out the bridge you’re missing between vision and implementation.

Someone owns the electricity wire going to your house. Would you feel the same if they cut it because you watched porn?

It's not a problem when there is true and healthy competition. It is a problem when there is not and what they provide is critical infrastructure.

Either antitrust the shit out of them so there is healthy competition or regulate them so they have to allow payment for legal goods and services.

This has been an issue since the birth of porn online. This is nothing new and there have never been clear lines drawn. The regulation shape shifts over the years of what is acceptable and unfortunately the visas of the world have to underwrite that risk. It’s simple as that, nothing to do with electric grid analogies.

Works if Businesses don't have monopoly/duopoly. Also, some sectors are utilities, they should have stronger regulations.

>They are in a difficult position as they need to be mindful of the government coming at them as well as chargebacks

Poor visa, I feel so bad about them :'( Maybe pressure from the another side will give them motivation to push back against government lobbying

Why do you feel so sorry for Visa? They are in a very lucrative position. That said I think there is a risk assessment on what types of content they are allowing and the possibility of government oversight and chargebacks.

I think this is valid, but the wrong part is preventing the use of doing business in another way. In this case it is not necessarily the issue of the credit card company (it is a different issue, although the credit card company does affect it because they are currently how the payment is handled), although sometimes credit card companies do such things too, such as requiring the price that the customer pays to be the same if you pay by cash or by credit cards, which they also should not do since it can interfere with other ways of accepting payment.

Except that government is not coming at them for this. The government places very little constraint on their business unless it's for demonstrably illegal purposes: CSAM, money laundering, etc.

It’s a fine line with more extreme forms of content if you go and lookup past issues.

One might argue, however, that a payment processor should be treated more like a medical or utilities company, rather than a private business. It's one thing for a coffee shop to tell people "We don't want to serve you."--it's quite a different thing for a hospital to tell someone, "We don't want to serve you."

Being able to take credit cards is not exactly life-and-death, but it certainly can be for a business. Especially since the average Joe can't exactly go start their own Credit Card company to make a pornography-friendly payment processor. The CC oligarchy is firmly entrenched.

I don’t agree. They are underwriting risk and unfortunately adult is one of the hardest categories.

Think about why protected classes need to exist in the first place, given free market reasoning about how discrimination logically ought to affect the bottom line.

Then consider how that applies to the current situation.

Yeah nothing alike. This is an underwriting problem. The risk to underwrite these businesses are too great sometimes.

That's the best-case scenario here - Visa and Mastercard take on a much smaller percentage of the world's commerce and some actual competition comes in and picks up the pieces.