Similar to the recent actions by Twitter, Google, Apple and Amazon; Visa and Mastercard are private companies and can do whatever they want.
Anyone who has an issue with what Visa/MC did must also take issue with the others.
Anyone who has an issue with what Visa/MC did must also take issue with the others.
If a company reaches a certain size and has a quasi-monopolistic position so that other people or companies depend on it, it starts to have some degree of responsibility towards society that's beyond value maximization for shareholders.
That said, it's really not equivalent. There are 101 other services if AWS turn you down. You can still access the parler site from an apple/android phone too. On android you can still install the app, just not via the play store.
Censorship is incidious because many people support at least some. So you convince liberals to support banning parler and conservatives to support banning porn payments (or whatever). And they're both poorer for it. We should all be agreeing on this, not being fractional...
We should all be uniting in our call to get Visa , Mastercard, Apple, Google and a dozen others declared utilities. Rather than arguing over which problem is biggest, solve them all.
It's concerning when an alternative no longer just means an alternative of the same service but also the entire infrastructure stack. We've seen similar situations during the digital piracy era of the early 2000s.
If there were no alternatives to Twitter, Android, iOS and AWS then I'd be as unhappy about that as I am about Visa/Mastercard's decision here.
However, it's my judgement that there are alternatives to these technology platforms to do what recently became less easy for some people to do. I don't believe there are any viable alternatives for payment processing.
Show me how I'm wrong.
If you agree that the required ability is "use my portable cell-connected computing device to exchange messages with others on their similar devices", then absolutely, I agree that there's a duopoly there (I'm ignoring the possibility to use alternative app stores on Android, because it doesn't seem particularly central).
But if you instead think the required ability is "be able to exchange messages with others in more or less realtime", then the duopoly in the portable cell-connected computing device world is of much less importance.
For years, because I don't have a cell phone, I was excluded from communications taking place via SMS (there were a few 1-way linux-accessible gateways, but they didn't really change anything there). But I didn't feel that my ability to communicate with others was really particularly impaired, and eventually Telegram (and others came along) that I could use from a desktop, and I was more or less back at parity for "real time communication with others".
So whether or not the android/ios duopoly matters in this sort of instance depends on precisely what functionality it is that you think people have a "right" to ...
That last one, too, is probably a big part of the reason for the classification. There are more Visa/MC debit cards out there than their are credit cards.
2. If you look at transaction, Amex and Discover may have higher processed transaction value of something like 15% in US. But if you look at transition volume, Visa / Master are 90%+.
3. Both are Credit Card only. Debit Card is where the majority are using for Payment.
3. Consider there are no other electronic / digital payment method that is as ubiquitous as Visa / Master payment network ( ignoring Asia ) and they are the baseline method for e-payment, as well as an extreme high level barrier of Entry. The two are considered as Duopoly.
For example my phones use Android, but I do not have a Google account.
There exists no legal action that could be done by Google and that could influence anything that I am using my phone for.
On the other hand, if Visa and Mastercard would decide to not let me buy something, that would be very bad for me, because I buy almost nothing with cash and most things that interest me could not be bought with cash anyway, because they cannot be found in the shops from my close neighborhood.
So the monopoly of Visa and Mastercard really matters and it is very hard to circumvent. That of Apple and Google, much less so.
Society is not math or computer science where existence of one counterexample makes things invalid. Society is a thing of ratios and percentages. If something is almost impossible for most people, we have to treat it as impossible even though it is possible for some - otherwise bad actors get away with terrible stuff on technicalities.
(I for example pay everything with cash or wires which are free and instantaneous in my country - I use card only once in a while to withdraw cash - but it does not invalidate Visa/MC duopoly any more than your special Android that only one in ten thousand people can use either)
I do not need extra apps from the Google Store, because all the phones that I buy do the things that I need, e.g. voice calls, SMS messages, Internet browsing, photo/video recording, document reading, etc., without needing to install anything else. Things like Google Maps can be accessed in the browser, there is no need for an app.
So it is not difficult to avoid Google.
To avoid Visa and MC, one would need exceptional connections, because most online shops do not accept other methods of payment and it would not be easy to convince them to create a special method for you.
I choose wire transfers whenever I can instead of credit cards. For payments within the country there are no fees, but for payments to other countries, the fees are larger than for credit cards and the vendors are less likely to have wire transfers as an alternative method of payment.
This is why personal anecdotes are meaningless for these topics.
Payment is critical infrastructure. It's crazy that most of the world is subject to this duopoly.
That's what everyone's been telling Parler since they started being removed from these platforms.
I also don't know how you can reconcile this comment with the fact that Gab and others were removed from Visa/MC networks, to much fanfare.
To be clear, I'm in favor of Parler going away, but I can't help but notice the double standards.
They just need a hosting service. If they relied heavily on specific services provided by AWS, they would need to either recreate them or reengineer their code to do things differently.
These are on an entirely differently level of "just make your own" from "make your own payment network".
Unless, that is, there is no hosting service that will have them (and maybe no colo facility that will allow them presence). If so, then I would view the situations as essentially equivalent.
I think it’s fair to say you just can’t realistically run a website of the majority of tech corporations are against you.
Yes! It's almost as if Nazis and terrorists are not the same thing as sex workers.
What a puzzling thing.
Furthermore, please review the HN guidelines for posting. Your comment is not substantive nor constructive.
As to your other point, an alternative to Twitter was made. Then it was banned by Google and Apple from devices, and then Amazon from computing infrastructure. It's no longer about an alternative of the primary service but all through the stack and that is much more concerning.
You are right that PayPal/Venmo (same company) may be an alternative for now, although they generally end up applying the same restrictions as Visa/MC.
American Express ... wow, it's been years since I did this but I think it involves actually going to an Amex brick-and-mortar location, and so wouldn't actually count.
Bitcoin is equivalent to paying in a different currency, which while possible, mostly breaks the terms of the comparison, since you could argue for using some other non-crypto-currency to avoid some or all of the limitations of Visa/MC.
Parler failed to meets the ToS set by its chosen platform (picked in all likelihood because its founder was ex-AWS). Had it either met the ToS by providing sufficient moderation, or picked a different hosting service, it would have had a different experience.
As I said in my opening comment, if there is really no alternative hosting service where Parler can allow people to openly discuss violence towards specific individuals, violence towards state actors and generally be as obnoxious and wrong as they feel like, then sure, I'd agree there's a problem.
So now you're moving the goalposts and saying that it being extremely unusual precludes it as an option? Of course any alternative to the Mastercard/VISA duopoly is going to be unusual. By definition, since they are dominant, any other way of payment will have to be outside the norm.
> American Express ... wow, it's been years since I did this but I think it involves actually going to an Amex brick-and-mortar location, and so wouldn't actually count.
It does not require going in person at all. You can get qualified for a card online and they'll ship it to you.
> Bitcoin is equivalent to paying in a different currency, which while possible, mostly breaks the terms of the comparison
Again, by construction of the question, alternative payment schemes will necessarily be different. The other players here are PayPal, Discover, and AMEX.
The alternatives for Parler (going to another hosting provider than AWS, alternate App Store on Android, and no app on iOS) are at least as unusual compared to the alternatives for payment. Just like your Discover card won't be accepted at most places, or Bitcoin or PayPal, most users are not going to accept a modern day service that doesn't have an app. Or even more egregiously, in Stormfront's case, users are absolutely not going to learn how to use Tor just to access a site. Parler isn't there yet, but it may well be soon if their domain registrar drops them. Or even Level3 or BGP providers.
Well, what I should have said was "ACH rarely completes inside 24 hours to a new account", which doesn't move the goalposts.
>(Amex) It does not require going in person at all. You can get qualified for a card online and they'll ship it to you.
Not sure this has anything to do with the ability to pay a 3rd party. They would need to have an Amex merchant account or an equivalent proxy via an intermediate payment processor, and my impression is that when Visa/MC drops you, the 3rd party will too, even if Amex didn't.
> users are absolutely not going to learn how to use Tor just to access a site
Parler had no privacy (and from what I read, very lax security), so I don't think that a Tor-accessed site is a part of the replacement for what they had. They just a hosting site that can run some moderately but not extraordinarily complex backend stack.
The "lack of app" question goes back to a comment I made here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25719115
Anyways my greater point is that illegal actions should be forwarded to the appropriate state department which can investigate and prosecute with appropriate authority and accountability. Private companies are setting a dangerous precedent, especially as they gain superior scale and then collude at multiple layers against the same organization.
As I indicated below, I think it is pretty hard to get paid via Amex if Visa/MC have blocked you (3rd party payment processors such as paypal will likely block you too).
I would agree about the "forward to the government" part if that was part of normal business to find the illegal actions. I read the Visa/MC - Pornhub thing as more as a case of of Visa/MC saying "look, we think its clear that there's illegal stuff happening on your platform; we're not going to play detective here; we don't want to run the risk of being complicit of processing payments for illegal stuff, so we're cutting you off." That is, it's a statement about their desire to (not) take legal risks. They are operating within a legal context where others may do what you are suggesting and then put them in legal jeopardy.
The "we think it's clear" is the dangerous part, especially when applied outside of a few easy targets discussed here. MC/Visa have numerous examples of shutting down completely legitimate businesses, and so do Google and Apple usually with a weekly HN thread highlighting yet another startup/app unceremoniously wiped off the net. Either it's all a problem or none of it is. Do you disagree with this?
If I did care, then perhaps I'd see Google/Apple store bans etc. as more equivalent to Visa/MC payment processing bans.
As it stands, I don't.
Whether you consider an individual decision to be a mistake is entirely subjective and irrelevant.
Why? I can agree that someone has a right while also disagreeing with how they exercise that right. I have no idea why you are labeling the specifics irrelevant.
Visa/MC take the money of their customers, who use their cards, by promising to help them pay for anything they want.
Visa/MC do not have any right to decide unilaterally what their customers might want to buy (as long as no illegal goods are involved), without consulting their customers first.
In most cases the customers are forced to accept these unilateral decisions, because they do not have the power to attempt a legal battle with those companies, e.g. for modifying the fees or the data caps.
Nevertheless, even when we do not want or cannot fight such decisions, we should not say that they are private companies and they can do whatever they want.
Those companies are not independent to do whatever they want, they are in contractual relationships with their paying customers.
They may use their power to unilaterally change the contracts as they want to, but that does not mean that we must accept that might is right.
I would much rather leave such things to the proper authorities instead of massive corporations that control so much without any accountability or transparency.
This rhetorical trick of categorizing all of these as "private companies denying service," is the same one used by those who opposed anti-discrimination laws. Should an ice-cream store be able to kick out a person pissing on the floor? Should they be able to kick out a black person for being black? In each case, it's simply "a private company doing whatever they want." But, obviously, these two cases are not the same.
Personally, I think it's quite a different thing to kick people who incite violence off your social media platform than it is to ban sex-workers from using you as a payment processor. And, because they are different actions, with different intent and effects, it is, of course, possible to think "Hey, it's good that [x] is happening, but bad that [y] is happening."
Your personal opinion on which decision you support is just that, your personal opinion, and only reinforces my point about the subjectivity and inherent hypocrisy of it all and whether private company action over state prosecution is the correct course of action.
Yeah .... no. For a variety of reasons. But for one, it's impossible to do business online if you're not in the good graces of major payment providers (assuming you want to get paid). It might be hard(er) to advertise your business if Twitter bans you, but that's in no way comparable to how essential Visa/MC are to any business.
Providers of critical infrastructure (payments, search, appstores, probably a few other things), when they're big enough to be a monopoly/duopoly, could really use more oversight. If you piss off Google/Apple, your business can be ruined, and you'll have virtually no recourse -- as evidenced by the frequent "google/apple killed my app" threads on HN.
If you feel that monopolistic powers by major tech companies need more oversight then that should apply equally. I don't see why communications networks are any less important than payment networks.
In most cases they are the only existing means for making remote payments. I would have much preferred a world in which the remote payments would not have been done by credit cards, but by wire transfers (with much lower fees than the current fees for wire transfers), but we do not live in such a world.
I am not sure about what weird conditions might be written in the small print of the contracts for credit cards, but certainly when Visa/MC advertise their services, they claim that you should pay for their cards in order to buy anything that you want, they do not invite you to pay them in order to let you buy only what they like.
So I do not believe that it is correct to say that VISA/MC are private companies that can do anything they like.
They have also obligations towards the customers who use their cards and they cannot decide unilaterally to ban some sellers, unless those are selling something illegal, which is not the case with Pornhub (after they took down what was said to be illegal content).
I do not think that making a referendum among Visa/MC customers about whether to ban some vendor or another would be the most appropriate solution, but certainly unilateral decisions taken just by the Visa/MC management are an abuse.
While I have never used Pornhub, so I have no opinion about how correct were their actions, I have paid in the past for a few other sites with erotic content and I would not like to discover one day that Visa or MC has again decided to block such a site without any valid reason.
That doesn't follow. Someone can acknowledge that companies have the right to run itself however it wants but disagree with this particular decision. It is possibly incoherent to argue that Twitter may ban people but Visa may not ban anyone; it is perfectly coherent to argue that Twitter should ban certain people and Visa should not ban these particular businesses.
Also, I don't think it's a contradiction even to say that Visa may not ban anyone. Running a website is a form of speech. Every website absolutely must be moderated beyond what is required to remove spam or what is required by law. Telling them what kind of community they are allowed to run is an excessive infringement on their freedom of speech. This is similar to why I support net neutrality but fervently oppose any sort of mandatory neutrality on websites. It would take a tortured argument to claim that routing packets is a form of speech (particularly when these packets are encrypted), while running a website always requires taking an editorial role.
No one would find it strange if a book store decided not to carry a particular book. People would find it very strange if their credit card company refused to process a payment for a particular book.
I neither support nor oppose banning payments to Pornhub since I don't know much about the website. I have no skin flicks in the game.
Yeah, I totally never did that before at all.
But was it illegal?
Disturbing !== illegal.