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Comment by bootlooped | Hacker News Reader

If you spot your neighbor through the window manufacturing methamphetamine, and you have been selling them the precursor chemicals, would you stop selling those to them, or say to yourself "punishment is for a court to decide".

If a person or firm has a reasonable belief that a business partner is committing crimes or even just behaving unethically, I would say they have an obligation to curb the activity or end the business relationship.

This idea that only the courts should limit or punish crimes pops up here once in a while and I've always found it bizarre.

If child porn was not a crime would you be ok with Visa and MasterCard doing something then? Is it in your view that should they only not do something because it's a crime?

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> This idea that only the courts should limit or punish crimes pops up here once in a while and I've always found it bizarre.

Isn't that the entire point of a court? to have a monopoly on punishing crimes so that people aren't unfairly punished on the basis of gossip or false allegation and so that society doesn't sink into a cycle of vengence where one group punishes the other group for their punishment, and so forth.

That said, punishing a crime is different from refusing to do business with someone because you don't like them. I think the objection is that payment processors are an oligopoly which gives them too much power to behave arbitrarily. If you live in a city and one grocery store doesn't do business with you, that's fine go somewhere else. If there is only one grocery store, then that's akin to starving someone and it should require the evidentiary standard of wrong doing a court would have.

Then isn't the issue actually that payment processors should be more regulated?

The courts do have a monopoly on certain types of punishment, like prison. Other, informal types, such as declining to do business with somebody, are available to individuals and companies. I don't see that as a contradictory or undesirable situation.

If we had a law on the books that PornHub must verify the identities of all the people uploaded in their videos, you might have a point about them knowingly abetting a crime. But, there isn't such a law, as far as I know. And Visa / Mastercard shouldn't be in the business of writing their own "laws".

We do have a law on the books saying porn distributors must do due diligence w.r.t. verifying that the people featured in their material are of age. One of the reasons why is because Traci Lords lied about her age to the production company, and actually appeared underage in all her movies but one. It got the company in a shitton of trouble and the Feds made them remove her tapes from circulation and destroy any extant copies, lest they be slapped with child porn charges.

Are we talking about producers or distributors (platforms) here?

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