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Comment by FirmwareBurner | Hacker News Reader

>not passing new laws to compel private behavior.

I have IRL facepalmed reading this. This comment gave me the equivalent exposure to 10 hours on X/Twitter. Mate, the reason you now have clean air, safe to eat food and drinking water is BECAUSE OF government compelling private behavior.

With your logic we should have just waited for free market competition to kick in for Cocal-Cola and McDonalds to decide on their own to stop putting arsenic into our food or for Ford and GM to produce engines with lower emissions.

The reason we have government compelling private behavior is that corporate interests are more likely and more easily to collude to fuck over the consumer together for profit, than consumers can do the same in order to intact desired change on the free market.

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You are correct, I don't think not being able to purchase porn games rises to the same level of danger as unsafe food or climate change, to require the government to tell businesses how they may operate.

> With your logic we should have just waited for free market competition to kick in Cocal cola and McDonalds to deiced on their own to stop putting arsenic into our food.

I don't think that's a fair comparison. No one is dying here. I do think the government should step into this market and perform major intervention by breaking up the big two companies into many little ones who can compete. After that, some payment processors may choose to support these business models despite the hit to their stock price (or whatever Visa's dumb argument is for not allowing these games).

>I don't think not being able to purchase porn games rises to the same level of danger as unsafe food or climate change

Holy cow, so many comments here and you still missed the point by a mile. The point isn't video games, the point is payment processors shouldn't be arbiters on what you buy. Because if they can stop you buying/selling video games, they can do the same for other stuff. Where does their right to censor you begin and end?

> the point is payment processors shouldn't be arbiters on what you buy. Because if they can stop you buying/selling video games, they can do the same for other stuff.

We both agree this is bad. What we are discussing is how best to solve it.

In the scenario where we enforced existing anti-trust law and broke up the big 2 to form many smaller payment processors, one of the newly formed processors could pick up the business that the pickier processors don't want and take that profit, right? So it solves the problem, without having to pass any controversial new laws about compelling private business behavior.

> I have IRL facepalmed reading this. This comment gave me the equivalent exposure to 10 hours on X/Twitter.

I don't know man, jumping into a conversation like this is a great way to get people to NOT listen. I agree with your following point and would add I find these matters more complicated. For example, you wouldn't be typing a comment on this site without the kind of corporate freedom that raised the standard of living for the entire planet resulting in a shared technological advancement. Seems this is always a trade off, how much freedom are you willing to give up for centralized fascist governmental control?

>I don't know man, jumping into a conversation like this is a great way to get people to NOT listen.

Nobody said I was wrong though. You can disagree with the messenger, but you can't disagree with the message.

I'm saying you're wrong because you cannot substantiate your point. Quantify it and I will admit I'm wrong.

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