That they do, but perhaps the relevant context is that while porn is globally unregulatable, but the one entity that has proven its ability to regulate it (or at least exercise some control over it) have been payment processors like Visa and Mastercard.
FT had a fantastic podcast on the porn industry and the guy behind Mindgeek. Like many stories about multinational entities, you constantly hear the usual refrains - noone can regulate this, the entities keep changing their name and face, there is no accountability, etc. But when Visa and Mastercard threaten to pull their payments, the companies have to listen.
Visa and mastercard are the de facto regulators of porn today, and mostly do so to prevent nonconsentual and extreme fetish stuff from being displayed on mainstream platform.
From what I gathered from the podcast, they're not super keen on being the regulator - but it's a dirty job and somebody has to do it.
They don't care about the content, they care about the correlation with customers who have an exceptional rate of chargebacks or other payment avoidance on legitimate purchases.
Cryptocurrency and the like may offer a way out of that problem by allowing direct purchases, but only for companies willing to deal with the support burden of making everything nonrefundable.
I don't think this is the case - because then we'd see them pull card services for porn websites altogether. This clearly didn't happen, nor was it the intention. They never did anything that would reduce revenue.
Instead, it was more a case of regulation to avoid looking like their services were financing illegal or illicit content.
And also the recessive policies come out in the open in front of the world from people like the ones who created "operation chokepoint", who are perhaps not help us as being super 'socially conservative'.
Your choice of entertainment, information and tools is under attack from all sides when they can get away with it.
cryptocurrency doesn't offer credit card chargebacks, but why can't you refund customers by sending them the same amount of crypto back from where it came from? I've gotten merchants to give me refunds to a different credit card before.
I can't find anything to support your claim about weapons. Seems pretty much all online arms dealers I can find selling anything from grenades, machine guns, and even rocket launchers take credit cards and I'm fairly certain stores also accept them too.
> grenades, machine guns, and even rocket launchers
Umm, yeah - what country are you buying live grenadesor working rocket launcher online with a Mastercard? Cuz it’s not the US or Canada. And if it’s not a live grenade or working rocket launcher, it’s no different than any hunk of metal.
uh. yeah... us and canada are a tiny fraction of the world, also what is really buying using visa or mastercard? if i use visa to byy crypto and then get explosives (which can be transparently done) there is nothing they can or will do about it... - buying things online has nothing to do with countries or borders, nor is it always clear, to payment providers or even customers, what kind of scheme enables a payment..
I am not sure what the current state of the issue is, but there was an initial effort to restrict gun sales in various devious and deceptive ways since it is illegal to overtly do so because it is legal trade and economic activity.
I would not be surprised though if the clear illegality of the violation of the Constitution of such efforts were brought to the attention of the payment processors, and they were reminded that they would severely regret hastening attention on an effort that still needs to happen, a public electronic payment processing capacity.
In general I think payment processor are not required to associate with anybody. The government (in the US at least) is limited in their ability to prevent you from buying guns and making porn (a form of speech), but they can’t make people do the transactions with you; the right to have somebody process payments for you is not constitutionally protected.
But I’d be at least curious (as a non-lawyer) if there could be issues around discriminating against pregnant women in the US, since abortion is a service that is only used by them.
The payment processors interpret the networks’ rules, you do understand that right? If they’re banning something, it’s because the networks either outright are banning it too or have put enough restrictions and constraints in place that the liability for the transaction doesn’t make sense.
The payment processors are doing what the networks tell them to do.
It’s not like the processors are actively looking for ways to turn down money; they want as many transactions going through them so they can earn their share of it.
There were several efforts to restrict the people’s right ability to marshal resistance to tyranny and Visa/MC was very much involved with that even though they were not the only ones.
