Wikileaks & Datacell to sue Visa / MasterCard for 'financial blockade'

Why do you say that? The complaint is being made in Europe, not the USA. Europe has a great many laws about what sort of commercial services need to be offered to all, or, once having been offered, under what circumstances those services could be withdrawn. It doesn't make sense to assume that the businesses has a right to transact freely, or to hire freely, or to fire freely.

The English speaking countries (I mean those whose legal codes descend from English Common Law) tend give more freedom-of-maneuver to businesses. The differences are stark regarding the issue of hiring and firing. In a country like the USA or Canada it might make sense to ask something like "Surely Visa and Mastercard have the right to hire whomever they like?" but in a country like Germany the answer would be "Of course not." (Specifically, Germany has a law for any business with more than 50 employees that gives the union a say in who gets hired.)

Regarding the right to transact freely, even the USA has several limits. For instance, you cannot refuse to do business with someone on the basis of race. But the EU has far more regulations of this sort than the USA does.

Imagine 3 there are 3 restaurants/grocery stores in the world that control the dissemination of 90% of the food in the world. The other food disseminators that control the remaining 10% all exist on top of various mountains.

Now imagine that the 3 restaurants/grocers are run by the KKK, refuse to serve blacks, and you are black. Are they within their rights as private companies to make you climb to the top of a mountain to not starve to death?

To me the treatment of Wikileaks amounts to about the same thing. The few companies that control nearly the whole international infrastructure for payment processing has come out against this organization, effectively making it nearly impossible for them to exist. If this is within their rights their rights need to be drastically curtailed.

At some point credit cards will be treated somewhat like public utilities, because they're effectively becoming money or access to it. You can make a case for the right to do business with whom you please. I doubt if you can make a case for restricting anyone's access to their own and other people's money, and as the relevance of cash falls, credit cards look more like money itself and less like a business that you choose to do business with or not.

Surely restaurants have a right to refuse service to ethnic and religious minorities their owner dislikes?

Part of being in business is the business owner's responsibility to the society that they are a part of. That applies even more so to businesses that handling people's money.

The article talks a lot about EU competition laws and what I got from a brief scan wasn't that Wikileaks was claiming Visa & Mastercard had to do business with them but that they coordinated financial blockade by the two biggest payment processing companies amounted to some sort of collusion. So it's not necessarily what they did, but how they did it.

There's a lot of similarity between their ~censorship of Wikileaks and the censorship performed by ISPs and search engines like Baidu, in China.

Certain members of the government simply make unofficial suggestions, and the private companies _voluntarily_ block things.

Not only that, but it says right in the terms and conditions they can change the terms at any time without notice. It also clearly states if they feel like a party is using their services for illegal activity, they can block any payments or transfers to their accounts.

Most of the stuff they do is borderline criminal activity, and it won't take a judge long to side with the credit card companies.