LogFAQs > #948398410

Revelation34 posted...

There has to be some way somebody can sue the companies for not allowing you to spend your money that way.

Visa/Mastercard aren't prohibiting you from spending your money. They're just not enabling you to do so. Hypothetically, there's no reason you couldn't stick $20 into an envelope and mail it to Mindgeek if you really want to spend money on PH, provided they give you the option of processing your payment that way (which they likely would, if given no other choice). Visa/Mastercard provide a service that makes spending money - particularly online - much more convenient than that, which is why they're overwhelmingly people's preferred means of conducting business, but they are far from being the only possible option. As autonomous businesses, they do have the right to refuse to do business with whoever they want. If that means dissociating themselves from a site with a reputation for hosting child porn, that's fair game, and you'll just have to find some other way to pay that site if you want to do so.

Really, the issue is less a question of whether or not Visa and Mastercard should be allowed to make decisions on who they do business with and more a question of whether or not their monopoly (well, bipoly, I guess, but that's not a word) should be allowed to continue. Being the only game in town means decisions like that carry a lot more weight than they otherwise would.

Smarkil posted...

I also find it odd that Visa, Mastercard, and Discover appear to be in lockstep with each other.

It's not all that odd. They all know that if only one of them cuts ties with a business, the others will near-seamlessly take over and mitigate any effect their decision might have had while also taking all of the revenue, so none of them are going to make such a decision unless they can be fairly certain the others will follow suit. In this case, it reflects really poorly on Mastercard if Visa says "we're not doing business with rape peddlers anymore" and Mastercard says "but we will!," so as soon as one declares they're pulling out, the other can be expected to follow suit immediately.

I'd be surprised if there's truly no collusion at all, but I'm guessing it's more in the sense of "we're thinking of pulling out, how about you guys?" to limit the risk of being left out in the cold, rather than in the sense of "let's conspire to hurt this one business."

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