Purely from a payment processing point of view, unless Google wants to fight Visa, MasterCard and other institutions this will never happen. There are a lot of restrictions around content and payment processors that you would assume is covered by freedom of speech that in a practical sense isn't.
There is an obvious hole right there that I'm sure they could fill with a blockchain or anonymous gift cards. Or both! They could be the leading service provider for using the blockchain to verify gift cards in a distributed ledger and use it as middleware to convert gift cards into Google Points. What are Google Points good for? Anything cash is good for! So buying ad placements (on Google), music subscriptions (provided by Google), extra cloud storage (in the Google Cloud of course, 'scuse me, Google One), stock (in GOOG) and groceries (via Google Express).
Or you know, they could just inherit whatever agreements PornHub has with their existing payment processor that covers PornHub Premium on their way to reinventing Prime. That isn't as sexy as making 5 more payment apps though. Definitely not as sticky and not enough blockchain.
For me this makes it incredible useless. I doubt they actually want to build anything intuitive for that problem.
o_O
Why do you think I'm being sarcastic?
Credit card companies don't want to be held responsible if your CC payment is being used for the sexual exploitation of people. They don't want to be associated with revenge porn, etc. I'm sure there's a puritan reasoning in there too somewhere, but TBF I doubt that's the primary reason given how big the porn market would be for companies like that.
Tried to start a site that wasn't for but did allow adult content and every payment processor closed their shutters on us
Visa and MC should be broken up, or at the very least regulated to the extent they can't cough without regulatory oversight.
It does, the same way it covers everyone else: corporations are actors who have freedom of speech, a fundamental component of which is the ability to choose what speech they will and will not participate in, either as initiator or intermediary.
With bank transfers, no one except law regulates what you can pay for. With EC, same. With VISA/MasterCard/PayPal, selling cuban cigars in Germany from a German company to a German customer gets you banned.