Funny story: Pre-9/11 the Bush administration was talking about cracking down on internet pornography. The Christian right was saying the same things they had about magazines in decades past. So some industry people got together and founded websites dedicated to the most horrible pornography possible, in full expectation that they would be attacked. They were going to be champions of the first amendment in the same was that Hustler magazine had been a generation previously. But then 9/11. The expected crackdown didn't materialize. Those websites are still around, having evolved into some of the biggest names in the biz.
06-Jan, 2001.
"The conservative queen of syndicated outrage, who happens to be George W. Bush's pick to head the Department of Labor, has repeatedly warned of what she describes as the perils of sexually explicit material online and urged government action against it. If the Senate gives her the nod, Chavez will not have any day-to-day responsibilities dealing with online speech. But her nomination signals the approach that a Bush presidency is likely to take toward sexually explicit material online."
For the rest of the story, you will have to dig into the history of certain websites that I shall not link to here on HN.
We already have enough issues with puritanical people pushing their views on everyone else, but I always felt at least some mild level of safety that I could still mostly do what I want if I was in certain states/cities.
I do realize that Visa was in a really hard place at this point and they likely had to make this decision, so I don't exactly blame Visa here. But it worries me that it could even get to this point that Visa is somehow responsible and I see they are not trying to go over Discover.
112 years later nothing has changed from what she described - fundamentalist churches in supposed campaigns against sex trafficking, yellow journalists printing sensationalist stories - 112 years and nothing has changed whatsoever.
That's never going to happen. All it would do is drive regular porn to the same corners of the internet where snuff films and child porn live, and nobody wants that as that drives more people to those areas.