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Comment by citricsquid | Hacker News Reader

Surely it would be backwards to dictate who payment processors can and cannot do business with. There are risks involved with banking, a bank will not give a mortgage to a minimum wage worker and we don't expect them to due to the risks associated with such a mortgage, why should a payment processor be expected to take the risks that banks are not?

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Once a bank does take someone on, there are very strong regulations on what they can and can not do. A bank can't just cut you off and freeeze your money, as PayPal has done here.

Paypal's listed justification has nothing to do with the risk of doing business with the VPN; no previous problems were mentioned.

Dictating what categories are not legitimate reasons for rejecting someone is not the same as "you have to accept everyone!" Obviously, PayPal should be allowed to reject actual criminal enterprises, for example. But there is nothing illegal about VPNs that protect your anonymity.

Besides, I think it's clear that any legislation that disallowed payment processors from discriminating against businesses would also have to give them legal protection in the case that said business end up being sued.

Uh, so it's okay for the US to wink wink at Amazon, Paypal and numerous other financial payment providers when Wikileaks comes to play?

You sound like a true apologist. This stuff matters, it affects people's lives, and it it has NOTHING to do with ROI. That's a bunch of BS.

This has to do with favors and stancing and has absolutely nothing to do with profitability or providing a service.

I'll show myself the door when I hear about how many chargebacks the VPN was getting.

You're conflating 2 unrelated issues here. It's not okay for the United States government to request (secretly) for a private enterprise to engage in acts that are detrimental to an individual or business because the United States is unable to do anything themselves within the law, however I don't see how the action taken against Wikileaks has any relevance to the action taken against this business. What indication is there that the US requested this?

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