Itch.io: Update on NSFW Content

> I really struggle reading these threads because the "it's a private company that can do what they want and if you don't like it build your own" argument is seared into my memory from when this started happening years ago.

My answer to that has always been - if a "private company" is so important and critical to a nation or economy, like a payment processor, then that company has lost the right to be private and needs to be nationalized and become a public service. Had this argument all the time back in '08; if a company needs bailed out by the government or the nation/economy will collapse, its clearly too important to be a private for profit enterprise and should be nationalized and become a public service

Not everything needs, nor should be, a private enterprise for profit. Payment processors, utilities, etc. should just be public services, available to all equally and for all legal purposes.

Visa/Master collect higher fees from merchants with high chargeback rates, so I'm pretty sure the CFO is still happy. I agree with the fact that they are all about money, but don't see how they lose money on adult content. This still seems very suspicious to me.

I'd love to see this problem solved too, but let's not do it by nerfing people's ability to charge back. Chargeback is pretty much the only tool consumers have to fight a merchant's fraud and abuse against them, and it's already an opaque, flimsy tool. Also, it only exists by the grace of Visa, MasterCard and American Express. I don't think there is any law that compels them to even allow a customer to dispute a charge (although hopefully I'm wrong about that).

>the CFO whispering in the board's ear about chargebacks.

Lies: these transactions don't get charged back at a higher rate.

Eh, possibly, but I suspect it's not just money.

https://apnews.com/article/gun-violence-shootings-new-york-c...

Visa and Mastercard were getting pressure from New York officials to put firearm purchases into their own category, something that the gun control advocates say could help stop potential mass shooters by red flagging large gun purchases. The initiative was stopped by Republican politicians and other lobbyists.

https://apnews.com/article/mastercard-visa-guns-second-amend...

Paypal IIRC also won't process payments for anything firearm related.

I guess the real question to me is why does/would Visa even want a censorship operation?

It makes no sense. They're a Fortune 500 company. They don't give a shit about the morality of nudie magazines.

Valve is also quite big. It is shady deals with Visa.

The issue with bank to bank is that consumers don’t have an intermediary willing to fight (read: chargeback) on their behalf, no?

I imagine few banks are staffed and teched to replicate payment processors’ anti-fraud systems.

The principle should be that it shifts the problem to payment providers who can be switched out for other payment providers seamlessly. The providers are motivated to behave ethically because you have the option of going elsewhere.

Paying with crypto is still not very usable but you can still do it directly which limits the degree of extortion that can be applied. I think it will get better as it ceases to be 'interesting' and people develop tools that just work rather than try to revolutionize your life.

But you CAN use Bitcoin without being scammed. It's just new (to common people) and there are new things to learn.

(I hate to defend the crypto space. I don't want the crypto bros to win. I really hope it doesn't come that far and it's the only option left...)

Crypto didn't do that. Investment bros did. Pretty much everything created after 2015 is a scam and hardly related to cryptocurrency at all. Just traditional investment/scam types moving in and adopting the name/language for popularity.

But you're right about the outcome from this. Most people don't know the difference, were only exposed to the post-2015 scams, and just assume all cryptocurrency is a scam.

These examples aren't quite apples-to-apples. Yes, I can e-transfer money to other people in Canada I know or even pay small businesses for their services. But that only applies to one country. When I buy something on Steam or Itch, I must send money abroad, and the same is true for countless other things. And what options do you have for that besides the Visa/MC duopoly or crypto? I'm not a crypto user, but I see it as the only realistic future way of moving money to buy anything that the holy payment processors deem icky, barring the near-zero chance of them being regulated in the US or a popular competitor suddenly appearing.

Those aren’t clearing houses, those are fintech services built on top of clearing houses. They still rely on credit card duopoly or ACH reconciliation between banking institutions. Don’t kid yourself.

Deflation has been fixed by stablecoins but a lot of other problems remain.

Both Visa and Mastercard are American companies. What do you think the likelihood is that the US in its current situation regulates them? As for other countries, I'm not even sure they have the leverage when faced with an 'essential' duopoly that everyone already relies on.

It's not clear to me from the post what level this is happening on.

I assume by "payment processor" that they are not talking about Visa et al themselves but their merchant services provider.

The alternative to this is to find a merchant services company that specializes in adult industry. Something like https://ccbill.com/ which is going to end up costing you (or your customers) somewhere around 30% on all payments on your entire platform.

It's likely easier to strong arm these providers as they are typically pretty risk averse.

Then you charge an additional fee in exchange for the MCC risk. This is easy.

Sure, yeah. There are niche payment processors who specialize in such things. They charge exorbitant rates, like 20-30+%. I suspect that itch.io may consider working with somebody like CCBill to allow payments for adult content, and use a "normal" processor for everything else. That is what I would do, or at least attempt to do.

    What we're really seeing is moral policing.

But I would hope that anybody bothered by the problem would also want to understand the root causes. It's a little bit more complex than credit card companies being a bunch of prudes who think you shouldn't be playing weirdo dating sims.

You have to understand the economics of the payment processing industry, at least in broad strokes. Then you can understand why mainstream processors stay away from adult content.

- Profits are obviously large, but margins on any individual transaction are miniscule

- Disputes and chargebacks involve humans, which blows away the basic economical model there. The cost of 15 minutes of labor from a human being wipes out the profit on the next zillion transactions

- Adult content, while a big business in absolute terms, is a tiny drop in the bucket overall for these companies. They do not want to devote a bunch of resources for something that is, overall, probably like 0.1% or less of their overall revenue

I'm not a lawyer and wasn't familiar with the bill until it was brought up in this thread. Looking at the text of the bill I'd guess that it's because the bill specifically calls for making risk determination on an individual basis[1] rather than for broad categories. The worry would be that despite the bill calling for banks to make these determinations based on "quantitative, impartial risk-based standards", this would actually give them more leeway to discriminate in a much more targeted way.

[1] §2.10 https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/401...

> Read the legislation for yourself.

I tried. My brain isn't very good at understanding the effects of law, only the literal and logical structure of its changes.

> I don't see a basis for the assertion by the resistbot letter that it could "force banks to cut off services to" "marginalized communities". It actually appears to do the opposite - banks that cut off services to law-abiding people would lose their access to the Fed lending window.

I'm inclined to agree, but I'm not a lawyer. I would be a rather awful one if I tried to become one.

Not quite. The First Amendment applies to everyone within U.S. jurisdiction, not just residents or citizens.

The first, third, fourth, fifth, and ninth amendments have all been historically used to establish various rights of privacy.

That's not to say that one agrees with or disagrees with the outcome here, just that this argument isn't based in an understanding of the law.

If we've learned anything from the current US administration, it's should be that defacto is only as stable as consensus is, and takes unacceptably little to subvert.

It really does not, considering all the wiggle room ISPs and websites abuse.

It's difficult to track down threats, which is the primary means of jawboning, and courts often okay with them, despite the significant conflict with the first amendment. There are many cases of it becoming public though, showing how prevalent it is. It was the primary concern in the Twitter Files (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files) and in the Backpage.com, LLC v. Dart case, (https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca7/15...) the Sheriff in Cook County Illinois tried to follow through with the threat, but was overturned by the courts, who tend to have a much stronger response to follow-through than threat itself, despite most of the effectiveness coming from threats.

Also, politicians are constantly threatening to revoke section 230 of the communications decency act, without which hosting any kind of user-generated content, from forums to video streaming to social media, would be effectively impossible in the US, because everything posted would need to be censored before ever being displayed.

There is a lot of paranoia and conspiracy thinking here. Itch in the article says that the main group is Collective Shout which is against violence against women and girls: https://www.collectiveshout.org/open-letter-to-payment-proce...

The pressure against Valve came from Collective Shout, a non-religious feminist NGO.

Even if an informed majority wants to ban something, it should not be illegal without actual evidence of actual harm. And all legal enterprises should be able to access the infrastructure necessary to conduct business.

> informed majority

It's relative, though. As cash and cards become more impractical by the day, they will eventually be less practical than even crypto.

It’s very practical if it’s stablecoins

For your information, there's stable coin for EUR as well[1]

[1]: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/euro-coin/

CB in France, Bancontact in Belgium, iDEAL in the Netherlands.

Those are all nationwide networks that allow online payments (online in this case, but they also handle most non-cash payments offline) inside these countries. I think most countries have such a network (under various legal forms, for example CB is a consortium but Bancontact is for-profit, while I think Interac in Canada is a non-profit, etc) but the US doesn't have an equivalent as far as I know.

In the end, the power of everyday people to control what the law wants to ban is limited.

In some countries, content in favor of certain minority groups is banned. For sure those groups ability to take payment is impacted.

Sometimes those minorities are denied citizenship and can't open a bank account e.g. the Rohingya in Myanmar.

I think you are underestimating the social dynamics of a centralized vs decentralized systems.