alt Hacker NewsThe leverage is that the activists will potentially be able to draw the ire of the government. Visa and MC get away with absolute murder in terms of the size of the fees that they charge in the US. Most developed countries don't allow that. The US government could easily regulate them (as they already do with debit card fees) or use anti-trust law against the obvious duopoly charging exorbitant prices. Because of this situation, Visa and MC have a very strong incentive to crack down on things the government doesn't like.
The unspoken arrangement is that the government allows them to keep charging a de facto sales tax on a massive portion of the economy as long as they cooperate and de facto ban things that the government wants banned but can't ban themselves due to that pesky constitution.
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The Durbin amendment (regulating debit interchange in the US) and its EU equivalent aren't regulating Visa and Mastercard scheme fees, but rather interchange fees, which Visa and Mastercard set, but issuing banks earn.
Of course scheme fees are ultimately at least partially paid from interchange, but lower interchange is primarily a problem for issuing banks, not the networks.
The Durbin amendment in particular was also supposed to foster competition between networks (by mandating each debit issuer to support at least two unaffiliated networks per card), but given that only very few places accept only debit cards, that didn't work out quite as well as intended in terms of bringing down both interchange and scheme fees via market forces.
Yes - and Japanese gay porn games are an easy soft target before they go on to ban things they really want to ban. We've been through this before in the 70s-90s.
I always found this principle odd because it offends across the political spectrum.
Every hassle the porn industry gets, the gun industry gets too, and that obviously has a very different political footprint. I'd also expect some industries with politically powerful friends (supplements, MLMs in general) to be offended by policies that put some merchants into higher risk/higher cost/higher rejection categories.
I had hoped something like FedNow would take off-- a government-backed payment rail with a formal mandate to service any legal business, so neither side could complain about being deplatformed.
sounds like the fix is counter activism to remove the leverage these interest groups have
Tbh that's quite alarming what you've just said, and I'm not saying about government. I'm saying about an additional huge sales tax. I understand that wiring money or sending them in an envelope is the thing of past, but e.g. in my country and in whole EU the digital payment is promoted as the only righteous, because "cash is only used by gangsters and human traffickers" etc. And this is really playing against us and pushing us to the duopoly you've mentioned