Dreamwidth Banned by PayPal in 2008 for Refusing to Censor Users
dw-news.dreamwidth.org
dw-news.dreamwidth.org
Worse, the detail that was cherry-picked (presumably because censorship issues are a hot topic) refers to something which the article makes clear happened years ago. Making it sound like it happened today ("Dreamwidth Banned by PayPal for Refusing to Censor Users") was egregiously misleading. We take story submission privileges away from users who do this kind of thing, so please don't do it. I've added 2008 to the title above as a fire extinguisher.
Submitters: If you want to say what you think is important about an article, you're welcome to do so by posting a comment to the thread. Then your view is on a level field with everyone else's.
Seems reasonable to me.
I think it's much more viable to translate some of these privately owned aspects of the internet to publicly owned institutions. Then you obtain the free-speech allowances you desire without burdening a private company with further regulation and restrictions.
This isn't the only solution of course though. But just claiming that these goods are so important doesn't necessarily mean they should be treated like government entities. They're not - that's not how the laws here work.
Actually, that profit incentive thing is debatable, I take that back. A for-profit government could be quite horrifying.
So tired of this argument. The fact that Constitution does not prohibit them from doing it does not mean what they are doing is a good thing. "It's not unconstitutional" is a very low bar to clear, and clearing it doesn't mean you are doing everything right - it only means you are not directly violating the law, which you should be doing anyway. Nobody should get any praise for just not violating the law. And paranoid panicky reaction to literature that mentions sexual relationships is idiotic on the paypal side, is just wrong. I can see how dealing with certain kinds of shady sites in adult industry may be a burden, but dreamwidth is clearly not one of them, and it can be seen very easily if somebody at paypal was willing to spend 10 seconds on it. They just don't care.
> They can choose who to partner with by whatever metrics they want.
And, of course, this is not true for a long time - there's a number of non-discrimination and social-engineering regulations that substantially limit by which metrics you can choose your customers.
That's not people's point. Sorry but you're taking the wrong idea from the argument. The point is that there are no laws in the United States that demand private forums have any semblance of "free speech". It's not that it's "not illegal". It's just simply not a concept that has any laws backing it up.
People bring this up because if you have any background in constitutional law, you know that free speech is something that took a long time to define (and most people don't even know what it is...). It's a legal concept, not a societal one. So when you complain that Paypal isn't respecting your free speech, anyone with a background in law goes "???"
Free speech is a legal term. When you say "Free Speech" you're referring to a very specific set of laws and rules that apply to public entities in the U.S. - not private ones. If you're actually talking about a sociological concept, then preface it as such. And if you feel that the laws don't match up in the United States to our perceived values, then say that as well.
But as is, Paypal has nothing to do with free speech. If you want to talk about some other idea, that's not the legal concept of free speech, but how you want Internet companies to operate in the U.S. you need to preface your statement as such.
Otherwise it just comes across as if you don't know what free speech is, so people respond with the tried and true "Paypal isn't the government". They're not trying to shut down any possibility of Paypal being regulated in a way that matches our current definition of free speech, just correcting your improper use of the term (is it pompous? I would say it could be framed better.) In other words, ya'll are arguing circles around each other.
Since when the only requirement from people to behave decently is that they are forced to do it by the threat of violence from the government? Can't we ask people not to be jerks without threatening them with jail?
> It's a legal concept, not a societal one
Nope, it is a societal one. Legal one follows from that. Laws are created by society, they are not some independent reality that exists by itself. Laws about free speech exist because society values free speech, if it didn't, such laws won't exist - and indeed, societies that do not value such concepts don't have such laws.
> Free speech is a legal term.
Nope again. There is a legal term "free speech", but claiming that's all there is is switching the cause and effect. We value free speech not because we are forced by the laws, given us by Gods. We create laws valuing free speech because we think free speech is a good idea, required for well-functioning society.
> But as is, Paypal has nothing to do with free speech
They have tons to do with free speech - they try to use their power as a major payment provider in order to limit it and suppress people that speak in ways they do not approve of. Of course, their power is not absolute and is no match for the vast powers of the government - but that does not make such use of their power, whatever they have, any less despicable. Maybe less dangerous, yes, but there's no rule that we should only address the very largest threat and completely ignore the lesser ones.
> Otherwise it just comes across as if you don't know what free speech is
No, I know what "free speech" is. That's exactly why I am tired of reducing the concept to bare legalese. It never was that, it is not that, and it will never be that.
> just correcting your improper use of the term
By that revealing that they do not understand the term and have faulty understanding of why we have all these laws at all.
Thus we must change our legal one. Therefore, I claim that our conversation is implicitly and inherently about the legal definition of free speech and what that should be. Paypal has no obligation, no requirement to do anything unless the law is changed accordingly. Otherwise they will continue to operate in the way that benefits them and their shareholders the most.
My point was simply that you're not explictly asking to change the law when you should be. As the law is currently written Paypal is doing everything right. If that is still wrong for a moral and societal perspective, how do we change the laws to match? Specifically, how do you change the laws in a way that upholds our previous decisions and court cases because these have served as bedrock principles.
I wasn't attacking you mate, my bad - just trying to get you to be more specific.
That's what is being asked from paypal now. And the response is "they are not the government, so by law they can be jerks". Well, duh. That's not the point!
> In the context of This conversation on this subject however, it is a legal one.
Nope, it isn't. It only is because some misguided people want to make it one. That's exactly what I am tired of - of trying to reduce each discussion about norms into "it's legal therefore it's ok". Nope, nope and nope.
> Thus we must change our legal one.
Terrible idea. Enforcing decency by legislation has always backfired, and trying to reduce societal norms to bare "would you get in jail for this?" never worked well. There are more to society than jails, and there is more to improving society than governmental violence.
> My point was simply that you're not explictly asking to change the law when you should be
And my point you are approaching it wrong, and the law is the least of the issues here. That's the whole point. Regulating such things by the law is the worst idea ever. It would backfire and hurt the very people it purports to protect, and all around them too.
> As the law is currently written Paypal is doing everything right.
Paypal is going everything legal, but not right. These are different things, and they always will be. The law only defines what is so egregiously wrong that you deserve to be hurt if you are doing that. It will never define what is right. Its our job, as a society. We can't just put it on a bunch of lawyers and be done with it.
No duder at paypal thinks they're morally responsible for this decision. My point is that because Paypal is a company whose only goal is to make money, lecturing them on morals is pointless. If you want to impose your morals on them, the only way to do so is legislation (impose is a strong word here sorry).
In other words, you're wasting your breath because Paypal doesn't care about morality or norms. We must restrict them via legislation that matches our societal values.
> Enforcing decency by legislation has always backfired
Murder? Rape? These are crimes whose very existence is to enforce decency via legislation. The social norms come first I agree, but you need the law to help prevent morally reprehensible behavior. That's kind of one of its main purposes.
I agree we must have a conversation of morals first and legality later, but the legal conversation needs to actually happen. And until it does, no large corporate entity will care.
Literally every PR message of every large corporation lately says the opposite. Even if they were all liars, why would they all lie about the same things if not because it is aligned with norms and morals?
> lecturing them on morals is pointless
This is not true, companies are regularly lectured on morality, and often successfully. E.g. just recently several providers were induced to sever ties with a nazi website, for moral reasons. There are numerous other cases, of course, and people are getting fired for moral reasons all the time.
> Murder? Rape?
Murder and rape are way beyond just decency. Those are exactly the things that "if you do them, you deserve to be hurt, badly". The government is good at enforcing those. It is not good at enforcing things that needs to be handled in more complicated ways, like finding proper society norms of behavior and enforcing them. As you probably understand, "at least he doesn't murder or rape anyone" is not really a definition of a good person, there's a bit more to it than that.
> The social norms come first I agree, but you need the law to help prevent morally reprehensible behavior
Do you? So, if you leave a small tip or don't smile back when somebody greets you, or don't hold the door for somebody when they walk behind you, you should go to jail? I think even North Korea doesn't go that far. With this approach, your ideal world would out-totalitarian the most totalitarian regimes known to humanity.
> And until it does, no large corporate entity will care.
As I said, this is demonstrably false. Moreover, there exist many successful organizations that has been and continue to demonstrate it being false every day.
The first amendment gives the forum free speech, which means that the forum is free to decide what speech it will relay and what speech it will not.
You are the only person in this thread who has used "free speech" in a comment so far.
> If you want to talk about some other idea, that's not the legal concept of free speech, but how you want Internet companies to operate in the U.S.
The comment you are responding to did just that.
A says that this should be considered "free speech" (not in words but in intention) B says that Paypal isn't a government entity. C says that shouldn't matter.
I'm responding to C, so I say "When you say Free Speech" as a rhetorical technique to recenter our argument on the thing actually being discussed. I apologize if there was confusion or it seemed I was being clever or something.
Let me explain why I think this question is important.
First, we all value freedom and in particular everyone should be allowed to offer business at his own terms.
However, payment providers are essential for online businesses.
This means the freedom of payment providers to refuse business collides with the freedom of other entities to do business /at all/.
IMHO, such situations should be regulated by laws to ensure a balance of forces.
Pretty much the best line ever.
They wouldn't have to be worrying about their seed fund or keeping the doors open at this point.
"Shouldn't a company, regardless of the service they provide, be free to establish their own conditions under which they will act or not act?"
like a restaurant in south refusing to serve blacks? with restaurant you have at least some options, but with businesses with monopoly finding an alternative is very hard or expensive.
Which would be illegal as race is a legally protected status.
That seems like a grey area but it's treading pretty close to discrimination in my mind.
Then again, should Google be forced to put adsense ads on a porn site? Really murky territory.
Nope. As I understand it, sexual orientation is not officially a protected class[0]. Seems like it should be, but it isn't.
It is not protected under federal public accommodation law like race is.
Gender identity and sexual orientation are each protected under minority of state laws (overlapping but not identical minorities, IIRC.)
> That seems like a grey area but it's treading pretty close to discrimination in my mind.
It's absolutely discrimination. The question is whether it is or should be illegal discrimination.
Legislation to make it illegal was an act of society deciding that an otherwise-legal business decision was so unpalatable it must be prevented. -- That's what makes it such a good hypothetical. You can ask yourself "if such business decisions were legal, should they be prevented or discouraged? And what mechanisms would be appropriate?"
So I don't understand your point. Yes, it's illegal now.
Are you arguing for companies to always operate as they see fit, as long as it's legal, and regardless of moral opinions of anyone other than themselves?
Are you arguing that there shouldn't be any moral-based laws to stop discrimination like this one?
Are you making a point that companies should be stopped from making immoral decisions with the force of law beyond the current limitations?
Are you making a point that the current set of groups legislation gives legal protection perfectly overlaps with the set of groups that that morally should have protection from otherwise-legal business decisions?
Are you simply being a pedant about the current boundaries of law without meaningful contribution to clean up the hypothetical or clarify the questions raised by the conversation at hand?
In practice: I'd take the bet that a white person of Muslim faith could get around a "no Muslims" rule most of the time. "No Muslims", then, can be a proxy for "no middle-Eastern looking folks".
Other laws, like the ADA and FHA, have expanded on this, and individual states have broader protections. Look at the case of Sweet Cakes by Melissa in Oregon, which was fined for refusing to bake a cake for a same-sex couple.
For emergency care, look up the EMTLA. There are many other regulations centered on discrimination and health care, that's just one of them.
Thats a lot different than 'allow everything with no judgement'
If the service is important enough that it has to be mandated in some cases then why shouldn't it be mandated in all cases? If it isn't that important, why should it be mandated in any case?
It's not absurd that an essential civil service -- payment processing -- should be regulated to uphold our collective standards of freedom, and not use their privileged position to impose their private moral standards on society.
"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." -John Gilmore
Banks: Whatever legal business you turn away, you basically give away to crypto; and once it's there, it will never come back. Decide carefully.
People need to realize that risk is itself a market. If everyone avoids risk (such as banks avoiding doing business with any remotely-risky business, such as legal marijuana sales), the first person (or entity) who doesn't shy away from risk stands to gain a lot more than if people were generally less fearful of risk. So cryptocurrencies, being completely fearless, will always fill the financial spaces that have been left vacant by more fearful living entities. ;)
Perhaps there is even an entity that has realized this and is working to instill fear in the hearts of everyone in order to reap greater rewards from their own risk-taking. But I'm off into tinfoil-hat territory, there.
Paypal holds all the data and when they ban you for whatever reason, they keep it, so even if there is another option, once you commit to Paypal, you are committed.
Cloudflare didn't kick Daily Stormer off until DS started publicly claiming that the reason CF was continuing to serve them was that CF secretly agreed with DS's politics [0]. That was a lie and might even be cause for a libel suit.
The analogy would be if the gay couple secured the agreement of the baker to bake them a wedding cake, then started announcing publicly that the reason the baker was doing that was because the baker was secretly gay. I don't think anyone would have a problem, at that point, with the baker telling them to take their business elsewhere.
Being a member of an unpopular group doesn't give you carte blanche to abuse the goodwill of the private businesses that would otherwise be required to serve you.
The actions of GoDaddy and Google in this case are less defensible, and indeed, I don't defend them. (If I understand correctly, GoDaddy kicked DS off their DNS service, so they went to Google, who not only refused to serve their domain but put it on hold, so they can't even use it elsewhere. I'm not aware that DS provoked either company they way they did Cloudflare.)
[0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/
I'm not saying CF /should/ be obligated to provide the service to everyone.
I'm just saying if they were, then speculation about any implied agreement would go away.
Assuming someone will ask, "Why do we talk about what is (law) rather than what could be (ideals)", you're perfectly fine to hold the ideal that political beliefs should not be discriminated against. But you probably aren't happy with just believing in an ideal, and so you want to know why political belief is not a legally protected class like age, religion, sex, race, etc. This means we have to include real world considerations, including legal history/precedent and the realistic implementation of law, when arguing whether political beliefs should get legal protections.
To make a quick initial argument, I think political belief is hard to protect because it is nearly indistinguishable from any kind of belief. At that point, how sensical is a legal system after it becomes impossible to discriminate on any kind of assertive opinion?
The line is already difficult and blurred with religion (which is protected because of centuries of prior belief and political situations), as we see in the case of a religious baker refusing to bake for gay customers. I'm not saying there's an easy or happy answer to this and similar disputes, just that protection of political beliefs would make things even worse without much benefit.
The other thing to consider is that as someone who has political beliefs and wants to assert them, you have the entire U.S. political system to participate and effect the change you want. But being political is not necessary when following a religion, and in some religions, it's outright antithetical. These folks would have little recourse to petition politicians and lawmakers.
http://www.cnn.com/2010/LIVING/07/26/ada.history/index.html
The outlawing of discrimination against disabilities is, IMO, very humane, and it's hard to imagine something like it being sponsored by a very liberal Senator and signed by a Republican president. That said, the law has required significant costs from society. California, which I believe has stronger disability laws, still faces big debate about the cost to businesses:
http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert...
As accepted as ADA is by the status quo, that doesn't mean that the definition of disabled, or of the costs needed to fulfill the law, are easily understood. But I do think its issues and conflicts are relatively simple compared to a law that outlawed discrimination against political beliefs.
How would that even work without getting quickly entangled with the First Amendment? Or even in implemented in everyday life. Business owners have no right whatsoever to fire someone for expressing beliefs that run profoundly counter to the business? Or to kick out a trolling customer?
You tell me, you're the one claiming it's unacceptable to refuse to do business with certain kinds of people.
> Business owners have no right whatsoever to fire someone for expressing beliefs that run profoundly counter to the business?
You mean like a Christian business being unable to refuse service to people whose activities run counter to the tenets of Christianity?
Remember, I'm not the one claiming forcing people to do business against their will is acceptable.
If you steal from PayPal we don't say "they're a private company, they knew the risks" do we?
While it's complex (and I don't fully understand it all myself), the simple answer is risk management / fraud. Adult content tends to be extremely risky from a fraud and legal compliance perspective and companies like PayPal (and Stripe, and Google Checkout, among others) choose not to do business in this arena because the risk / reward model just doesn't justify it.
Specifically, subscriptions to sites that offer digital adult content are not allowed per ToS:
Is it maybe more fair to say that small sites that offer adult content are not allowed?
Except VISA won't tolerant a fraud rate that requires 300% fees to cover costs.
People are much less likely to deny that they opened a Netflix subscription.
However, that is what eventually got me into Bitcoin, so maybe I actually owe them some thanks for sucking so badly.
A lot of it has to do with the underlying financial companies.
Overall, given Stripe's constraints, it seems pretty reasonable.
Payments processors like PayPal may just be middlemen between banks, but if the merchant owes the bank money and is suddenly nowhere to be found, the processor is the one who takes the hit.
And yet they are unable to distinguish a legitimate and widely popular blog hosting site which does not intend to defraud anyone but allows people to host erotic fiction, from a shady porn site. Makes you kinda question what those teams are doing the whole day, doesn't it?
Gambling may be illegal under US law, so I can see why you'd avoid that.
In fact, certain types of gambling (horse racing) are explicitly protected by federal law, and generally gambling laws are up to the states (online gambling of all kinds is perfectly legal in NV and NJ).
Betting online on horse races is explicitly legal in 30+ states, and not explicitly illegal in several more. Certain jurisdictions disallow online betting on horse races if you live within some radius of a local horse track.
[Edit: to clarify, some forms of gambling are explicitly disallowed across state lines, but that ban does not have any impact within state lines]