This is absolutely ridiculous.
What if they decide people can no longer buy dildos or lube or condoms or guns or alcohol or meat on Fridays?
There’s no law with respect to “payment neutrality”??
What if they decide people can no longer buy dildos or lube or condoms or guns or alcohol or meat on Fridays?
There’s no law with respect to “payment neutrality”??
Doing so means that a third party is involved in every transaction you make, and that someone else will always have veto power over your commercial transactions.
Having an electronic alternative to cash would be amazing, but so far there’s nothing close to it with respect to privacy and freedom.
Then PayPal wanted to go big, other virtual currencies were caught in fraud scandals of their own (not their users'), people just lost trust and interest when card processing became more common.
Some are still around but sellers can't be arsed to use them. Maybe they will, once again.
2. Freedom of speech includes choosing who I work with
3. It makes sense to have certain restrictions on freedom of speech, especially as it relates to clearly harmful discrimination (i.e. racial discrimination, gender discrimination)
4. It does not make sense to restrict freedom of speech in the case of pornography, specifically, whether a company can choose to work with pornographers or not
More info is needed to conclude, but it wouldn't surprise me if their upstream providers made demands.
These aren’t explicitly linked in the story but it would make sense IMO
Payment processors provide a utility. They should have the right not to process illegal transactions and illegal activities. But as long as the activity is legal, it shouldn't be up to them to police morality.
They should be treated like utilities. If we go down this path, the city's water and electric utilities can decide to shut down the new hooters, because it is obscene and against god (according to conservaties), or it uses women and is an oppressor (according to some liberals).
Utilities shouldn't be involved in morality policing.
These do not have the high rates of chargeback that adult content does.
However, unless something has changed lately, for decades the issue with adult content + online payment processors is not morality related. It's because of the high fraud/chargeback rates associated with online porn transactions.
Unless it's SESTA/FOSTA related, but I don't think anything's changed on that front for a while.
It seems to absurd to allow companies with an oligopoly on most of the transfer of those notes to pick and choose what sectors are appropriate for citizens to interact with financially.
https://www.quora.com/On-every-US-dollar-bill-the-message-Th...
My point was that you can spend your cash wherever you want, in whatever way the seller will accept.
My point was not that sellers ought to be forced to accept bags of pennies.
Also, that quote on the dollar has nothing to do with your argument. You seem to be projecting a layperson’s interpretation of those words instead of the relevant jurisprudence.
This is an important distinction. Credit card payments are not notes. They are not cash. So these companies have very little to do with the transfer of cash.
The point of "legal tender" is that if you try to pay off a debt in cash, they can't claim you haven't paid it and take you to court. If you try to pay for your meal in a restaurant with cash and they refuse, you can just walk out and they wouldn't have a legal case (probably. in theory. not legal advice).
What's tricky is this has to be a debt, as in past tense. If you try to buy groceries with cash and they refuse, you can walk out but you can't the groceries with you.
Participation in the cash market is mandatory on anyone who is owed money. Everything else on top (credit cards, checks) is essentially voluntary. Merchants can take it or leave it, the processors can come or go.
If you want to make an argument about the outsized effect that Visa has on the US monetary system, that's totally legitimate. It just has little to do with the concept of "legal tender".
If you try to pay a $10K debt in cash, it will likely be seized for no reason whatsoever, on suspicion of criminal activity.
And yes Civil Asset Forfeiture is pure evil, I agree.
I think they would have a case, because you still owe them a debt. But then after you lose the case you can pay in cash. Just how I understand it, could be wrong. Doesn't change your point though.
The pertinent portion of law that applies to your question is the Coinage Act of 1965, specifically Section 31 U.S.C. 5103, entitled "Legal tender," which states: "United States coins and currency (including Federal reserve notes and circulating notes of Federal reserve banks and national banks) are legal tender for all debts, public charges, taxes, and dues."
This statute means that all United States money as identified above are a valid and legal offer of payment for debts when tendered to a creditor. There is, however, no Federal statute mandating that a private business, a person or an organization must accept currency or coins as for payment for goods and/or services.
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The important distinction is payment for goods or services vs payment for a debt. Dine-in restaurants work on debt (you eat the food then pay for it), but grocery stores work on payment for goods (you get the food and pay for it in one transaction).
If I owe you $5, you have to accept my $5 bill as legal tender
But if I want to buy something from your store that doesn't mean you have to accept my $5 bill - that's not a debt
The electrical company is mandated to provide power to Onlyfans' datacenters, so long as they are paying for the service.
Also there's basically only four payment processors: Visa, Mastercard, Discover and Amex. None of them specialize in adult business. There are downstream processors along the lines of PayPal and Stripe, and some of them specialize in adult business, but they're entirely beholden to the big four.
General public agrees that explicit material is bad.
Right now we have in Poland shops closed each Sunday - it is annoying for me. Selling alcohol in Norway is heavily restricted and I see more and more restrictions on alcohol sales in Poland.
Explicit material is tied a lot to money laundering, there is also a lot of scams tied to it and lots of stolen cards are used to pay for explicit material. It is huge cost for payment providers, all the laws for anti-laundering trump any "payment neutrality".
If you want to see naked ladies go to "a place" and risk on your own, pay with cash.
Just like Comcast can't tell me I can't download porn, Visa shouldn't be able to tell me I can't buy it, either.
So you are going to run naked in the city center because public opinion about this does not match what you want.
Laws, democratic or otherwise, can indeed constrain what payment providers will allow themselves to be used for.
Public opinion short of law should not be able to add further constraints.
IMO the question of “what should Visa and MasterCard be allowed to restrict?” is the same category of question as “what category of app should Apple and Google be allowed to restrict?”
Isn't reputational feedback one of the key enablers of the free market? Unless you want to move to a system that is fully centrally planned and noncompetitive, you'll have reputational differences (read: public opinion) affecting the success of a firm. To the extent that reputation affects a firm's success, the firm will make decisions (including "do we carry this unpopular thing") based on its reputation.
Shall we require all firms to do business with all potential partners, regardless of reputational repercussions, or if the partner has an established history of abuse (say, a contractor who repeatedly under-delivers on contracts)?
I don’t think that’s true when asked anonymously.