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Comment by colordrops | Hacker News Reader

> Credit card companies are anti-porn

Why?

They're not exactly anti-porn, but they're anti-chargeback, and they know that sex work of all kinds has a high chargeback rate. People do things, regret it (or get caught), and insist that the charge is false and must be reversed.

They're also really, really against getting caught having anything to do with anything illegal, and there's a lot of illegal stuff associated with porn. It may be only a small percentage, but the last thing they want is to be sued or criminally charged.

So, they are very, very wary of anything to do with porn. I'm sure they'd be happy to have their cut of that very lucrative industry, but they'd rather forego it than having their entire business destroyed over it.

I guess I don’t quite understand why using something like a debit card doesn’t work. The marijuana companies seem to have effectively figured how to take payments with almost no help from the traditional players (credit card companies, banks).

I don't know, and it's a good question.

I wonder if it has something to do with it being (for now) a local business. I am extremely wary of using my debit card online. The credit card comes with a lot of protection if the information is stolen. A debit card lets them empty my bank account. In theory, I can get it back -- eventually.

If somebody who has stolen a debit card tries to use it in person, they're running a much higher risk. So the marijuana sellers may have an easier time getting access to that network.

That's purely speculation, however. I know effectively nothing about the business.

That’s a fair point, although you can use a debit card for cannabis delivery services too. Maybe a good mitigation for the fraud concern is just using ‘virtual’ or physical prepaid debit cards that have a fixed balance.

> A debit card lets them empty my bank account.

The solution to this is to use a bank (or credit union) that permits you to have multiple bank accounts and to move money between them instantaneously.

With this, you can have an "internet purchases" account that has like a $10 balance that you dump just enough money into to cover your purchase.

It's not that they're "anti-porn" it's that they're anti-risk. Porn sites have been getting in increasingly hot water for years for a variety of legal reasons, and all it takes is one major lawsuit against them trickling up to the payment process for enabling harm to set legal precedent and then they're getting sued for anything and everything on the basis they are enabling almost all kinds of web content.

It's an understandable fear. It's just a sad fact that they are an effective global duopoly so if they chicken out there's no alternative for people to turn to. More competition would help with this, but the threat of the lawsuit floodgates opening would still be there and create a chilling effect on payment processing. That has to be handled by legislation, but that's going down a whole other thorny road with many possible bad outcomes. The legislation we get may introduce new problems even worse than the ones it attempted to solve.

But I think it's still worth trying. The present situation is very bad for the future of an open internet.

My guess is the risk of legal liability. There are laws in many countries that forbid them from (knowingly or unknowingly) financing child pornography or trafficking. The due diligence of verifying every transaction just seems immense and perhaps not worth the risk to them.

They aren't.

Pretty sure if you're a vendor selling mail-order "adult" DVDs/BDs from major publishing houses, that's a business that you'll have no difficulty running with credit card sales.

Where you'll run into a problem is if you're a website that wants to charge subscriptions for access to loosely-sourced, user-generated content.

“Porn” has done a historically awful job of filtering out exploitation and abuse, and made a lot of money from it.

On the one hand, yes. But on the other that's also been true of The Gap and Nike. Fruit companies have toppled governments, and people have been shot suppressing unionization in a host of industries.

I am not convinced that the morality is enough to convince the credit card companies to forgo their cut of that "lot of money."

I suspect that the bigger concern is the higher levels of fraud when many participants in a market are unusually uncomfortable turning to public courts to address disputes.

GAP and Nike abuse poor foreigners in poor countries. No risk there.

> “Porn” has done a historically awful job of filtering out exploitation and abuse,

Has it? Does it have an actual record of abuse* that is better than, for example, the meat packing industry, or janitorial services?

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[*] (I don't know what you mean by exploitation, I'm assuming it's just an expression of disapproval)

Is there a equivalent to something like https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2021/06/21/girlsdopor... when it comes to the meat packing or janitorial industries?

The big European porn companies in the 70s and 80s were involved in trafficking children to countries where CP was not illegal. There's really no comparison, porn companies are run by the scum of the earth.

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