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Comment by quotemstr | Hacker News Reader

If there's ever been an industry that needs to be subject to common carrier regulations, it's the payments industry. MasterCard and Visa have no business unilaterally, secretly, and unaccountably policing their idiosyncratic idea of moral righteousness. They need to move money and shut up.

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> MasterCard and Visa have no business unilaterally, secretly, and unaccountably policing their idiosyncratic idea of moral righteousness

That's not why they do it. The reasons are regulatory compliance and risk. Processors would be in big trouble if they facilitate payments when they shouldn't, or broke due to rampant fraud in certain sectors.

I get that you might not like it, but take it up with the US government. The processors would be happy to move as much money as possible to make as much money as possible.

Something that people don’t understand, which your comment sort of indirectly alludes to, is that Visa and MasterCard started as and for most of their existence were essentially a shared services center for financial institutions that wanted to participate in a common payment network.

The legal structure has changed, but the boards of both are still primarily comprised of executives from other major financial services institutions.

Risk averse and sensitive to regulatory pressure by nature, the issue isn’t with Visa and MasterCard directly. They’re just operating in a space.

Yes! The book "One From Many" from Dee Hock, the Visa founder, discusses this formation in depth. For a long time, Visa's governance structure was quite unusual due to it being a consortium of stakeholders, some with very different interests.

Somewhat ironically, Hock's "chaordic" management philosophy has strong parallels with ethos of decentralization held by some crypto idealists.

> MasterCard and Visa have no business unilaterally, secretly, and unaccountably policing their idiosyncratic idea of moral righteousness. They need to move money and shut up.

Mastercard and Visa don't block companies from processing because of morals, they block them because they lose them money. They will happily process your payments for all kinds of shady schemes that are - to them - low risk.

Can't force a company to do business with customers that they don't want to do business with (barring protected class discrimination laws)

No, but you can break up concentrated markets so that being refused by some payment processor is irrelevant because there are a thousand others willing to do it and they're all completely fungible.

Nah. I don't mind businesses that take a moral stance that is intended to de-risk finances. We (well, decent people at least, IMO) need mechanisms to prevent human trafficking, illicit or illegal transactions, etc. That said, the rules should be completely transparent. When a transaction is blocked for a reason, or an account is suspended or terminated, there should be a clear audit trail of the reason why, which rules were broken, and what the steps to remediate are, if possible. There should be an appeals process that is equally as transparent, and countries should impose ombudspersons to oversea the enforcement with significant financial penalties for payment companies that fail to uphold these rules. Some part of this may already exist, I have been out of finance and payments for almost 20 years at this point, but there was and remains a lot of shady stuff going on in the industry :/

> We (well, decent people at least, IMO) need mechanisms to prevent human trafficking, illicit or illegal transactions, etc.

There are already laws (from actual governments) against human trafficking and illegal transactions. The issue is not about credit card companies obeying the law.

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