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Comment by rob74 | Hacker News Reader

So... Mastercard's statement is very clear:

> Put simply, we allow all lawful purchases on our network.

But their "Rule 5.12.7" is... not so clear:

> A Merchant must not submit to its Acquirer, and a Customer must not submit to the Interchange System, any Transaction that is illegal, or in the sole discretion of the Corporation, may damage the goodwill of the Corporation or reflect negatively on the Marks.

Well, which one is it now? All lawful purchases (pretty clear-cut) or only lawful purchases that will not "reflect negatively" on Mastercard in Mastercard's opinion (vague as hell)?

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We need Congress to make a law here in the US that businesses involved in facilitating financial transactions in the United States are considered “common carriers” and must not discriminate against, cancel or disadvantage any customer or legal transaction, without a court order.

We can write language to allow booting people for fraud, hacking, etc if “legal” + “court order” are insufficient.

How would that work with international money laundering regulations?

Would that apply to Australian courts?

If the regulation is legally binding by an act of Congress, it falls under the legal umbrella.

Same thing in AUS: If there's a AUS law, they have to follow it.

In those cases, what would a law...

    "that businesses involved in facilitating financial transactions in the United States are considered “common carriers” and must not discriminate against, cancel or disadvantage any customer or legal transaction, without a court order"

provide? It might have prevented Visa and Mastercard from being brought into the PornHub lawsuit... in the US. It wouldn't have protected them from Australian laws weaponized by organizations such as Collective Shout.

Yes, the US is not the world police and that’s okay. Let Australians deal with Australian laws and Australian lobbying groups.

... and risk adverse international companies (like Visa and Mastercard) need to follow the laws everywhere despite what various jurisdictions shield them from in those jurisdictions.

No: it’s cheaper for them to follow the minimum common compliance across all countries, but Mastercard-sized firms absolutely can and often do vary compliance per country (gestures at Google, Facebook) when it’s profitable to do so. Mastercard could have simply enforced Australia-specific rules on Itch if they’d wanted to, but they’re anxious about being labeled as smutty due to domestic U.S., and apparently exported Australian, puritanism. The solution is to ensure that cowardice does more lasting harm to their brand than they feel that their strategy prevents — which requires both loud and immediate response, as well as sustained pressure over time.

Mastercard and Visa have rather corse information about the transactions.

They've got the credit card number, the merchant name, the time, and the total amount of the transaction.

They do not have line item level filtering of a transaction. Remember those old carbon paper credit card thingies? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_card_imprinter - that's all that's needed and all they get. Similarly, the credit card terminals where the merchant enters the amount, swipes the card (or reads the chip) and that's it is sufficient.

Mastercard and Visa would only be able to say "that merchant" not "that product." Filtering based on products and if it's legal there needs to be done by the merchant. Mastercard cannot check to see if someone is selling liquor to an underage customer... but if a merchant is doing that, Mastercard may drop that merchant as one of their clients.

If Itch and Valve are unable to enforce Australia specific laws on their own storefront, Mastercard and Visa can only enforce it at the "this merchant isn't allowed to transact with our network."

Mastercard can deny all transactions from Australia-billed cards to one merchant if they wish to. They are absolutely wired up for “Area of Use” internally and have this data available to their transaction approval processes. That they chose not to use it, instead pressuring merchants to remove content disliked by an Australian puritanical fringe group, is the corporate laziness I describe. Why respond with their own effort when they can just externalize the problem onto their customers, etc.

Mastercard does not have that information. Mastercard doesn't do the billing. The bank does the billing.

Mastercard does not know the location where a given card holder is (or for that matter, any demographic information about the card holder). They know where the merchant is, but that's less useful for digital goods.

Per section 7 here — https://www.mastercard.us/content/dam/public/mastercardcom/n... — MasterCard could simply remove Australia from Itch’s Area of Use, at which point they would not be permitted to accepted MasterCard from Australian customers, which the merchant could trivially enforce by country filter on the billing address.

I suspect we’re going to find out that Stripe is unwilling to risk losing Mastercard in Australia and also unwilling to implement passthrough AoU restrictions to their sublicensees, and Mastercard isn’t willing to act against any single customer of Stripe or else they don’t profit from the “not our problem” discount rate they issue Stripe to make it their problem.

If an American company chooses to enter a foreign market and do business there, they should be subject to the laws and customs of said market. The complexity that comes with it is their problem to deal with. I echo the earlier sentiment that the U.S. shouldn't be the world's police (although we do behave like that now).

There's a bill for almost exactly that currently pending in committee: https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/401 If you like the idea, read the text on there and call your senators to support it.

The relevant part is section 5b.

>(b) Prohibition.—No payment card network, including a subsidiary of a payment card network, may, directly or through any agent, processor, or licensed member of the network, by contract, requirement, condition, penalty, or otherwise, prohibit or inhibit the ability of any person who is in compliance with the law, including section 8 of this Act, to obtain access to services or products of the payment card network because of political or reputational risk considerations.

Then the goalposts shift to: “This isn’t for reputational risk, it’s because we consider fraud more likely for this type of industry, and we are within our rights to take a proactive approach to fraud.” And there is no requirement that they disclose the reasons for that decision.

Don’t get me wrong: it’s progress. But it’s far from a panacea.

i think that sounds like a perfectly fine compromise - choosing not to provide services that are an especially high risk of fraud should be within their rights.

it just means that they could be forced to defend those decisions in court, which is good and exactly the sort of thing that courts are supposed to decide.

Exactly. If they are misapplying their fraud criteria, companies start suing and winning and Mastercard stops misapplying their criteria.

This sounds great on paper, but what incentive does Valve have fighting for a game listing with only 100 players?

I get the feeling many companies would find it easier to allow payment processors to censor something if the product isn't earning them much anyway.

"That's one of our least popular items we sell so honestly we don't really care..."

Which is within the right for the reseller to decide, but it does nothing for protecting access to a product that's otherwise only available on a select few digital storefronts.

Then it becomes an issue for the game studio, who may not have the funding to fight a case to remain available. And then you have a situation where the game studio has become a victim of a payment processor's conspiracy theory that they're tied to fraud.

For fraud related risk they should still be considered a common carriers but may adjust rates for certain types of transactions or businesses, if, in good faith and backed by empirical data, they can demonstrate the monetary risk to the card processor, and that the increased transaction costs are aligned with the level of risk and are not punitive or discriminatory.

The key point here is ”good faith”.

I don’t want to disadvantage their business or make them absorb fraud costs, but I want all excuses off the table.

OTOH Visa and MasterCard testified in front of Congress a couple of months ago that they have >50% profit margins which indicates to me that there is a regulatory failure in antitrust here.

It would be a hard sell to finger Steam as being at high risk of fraud. Steam has a very generous refund policy, and if you don't consider it generous enough, and chargeback a purchase on your Steam account, they just lock it (and access to all your games) until you pay them.

I don't have insider information about how often Steam gets hit with fraud alleged chargebacks, but I can't imagine it's a significant percentage.

> Don’t get me wrong: it’s progress. But it’s far from a panacea.

Progress in this day and age is great. Progress right now is at least 2 orders of magnitude better than patiently waiting for a panacea.

> Steam has a very generous refund policy

It doesn't.

Can you provide counter examples? I've legitimately never had a refund refused within the terms they outlined.

I bought Path of Exile 2, spent 5 hours just waiting to get access to the servers, something about the movement in the game made me physically ill after just two hours of playing, asked for a refund, was denied.

The section is not without its own flaws, mainly in 5(c):

> (c) Civil penalty.—Any payment card network that violates subsection (b) shall be assessed a civil penalty by the Comptroller of the Currency of not more than 10 percent of the value of the services or products described in that subsection, not to exceed $10,000 per violation.

I see 2 problems as it is currently written: (1) The penalty's too low, & (2) restricting dispense of the law to only the Comptroller renders it ineffective.

(1) is easily solvable with regards to editing the text alone: raise the limit to 50% & $100k respectively.

(2) is also solvable, by striking out "by the Comptroller of the Currency", or adding in ", or by a federal court, whichever penalty is higher, " at the end of that part.

I won't trust the Congress. Far left and far right are both pushing for more censorship

The US barely has any genuinely left-wing politicians (Bernie Sanders, AOC, DSA). There are no one who realistically could be called far left in any significant position of governing power.

Even these are not far left, they're just basic liberal left.

Which groups or media that are commonly labeled 'far left' that are calling for nationalizing all land. Or eliminating all inheritances. Or nationalizing all communications and transportation industries. Or nationalizing the Federal Reserve (that one's really gone horseshoe theory, and is a republican plan now).

The only thing 'far left' people want to nationalize is health care, and that's simply the fiscally responsible policy. The thing that is crushing the federal budget is the obscene level of graft occurring in that industry, and the only way out is to nationalize or otherwise burn the existing system to the ground via government policy.

The meaning of words can change over time and across space.

The meaning of left and right in US politics encompasses more topics than the matter of who may legally own things.

Pretending that those referred to as left and right are all the same because the only true scottsman is Karl Marx is silly.

There's a whole bunch of socialism to the right of *!=) Marx and the left of classic liberalism.

Words have meaning, trying to characterise "far left" as some sort of US caricature of Blue haired liberal types is less than useful and only serves right wing outlets.

There is very little left wing discourse in the US.

GP was saying that there are hardly far left politicians, saying that the few that exist are Sanders/AOC/DSA.

I was just pointing out that even these are not actual socialists, they're Democratic Socialists of the stripe you find in the mainstream in a lot of staunchly capitalist European nations. There are definitely zero literal far-left politicians, objectively speaking.

Socialist/social democrat are two related but distinct concepts are confusing for those not versed in political science, but their definitions have certainly not changed: democratic socialists for example don't advocate for communal ownership or central planning. The actual policies put forward by DSA candidates in the US, viewed through a political science analysis, are vanilla liberal. The only thing making them 'far left' is that actual far right monied interests have systematically dragged the Overton Window into a place where "public figure performing the Nazi salute on the capitol steps" is "controversial, in some circles" rather than "immediately career-ending."

The list i provided was of left wing politicians.

There are zero far left wing politicians in the US Congress. The far left is literally anti capitalist marxists.

Yes - the Overton window in the US has shifted so far right that a Nazi salute is more or less mainstream, whereas democratic socialists like Sanders/AOC are now "far left". And judges who dare block Trump's actions are, of course, "radical left lunatics" (https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/federal-judge...).

what far left are you talking about exactly?

Just pass the law yourself I guess? (imagine a muscly arm emoji here)

Far left not needed. The center left will gladly do it.

This is a case where left and right can work together for totally different reasons. The left is fighting for rape porn in video games, and the right doesn’t want gun stores definanced. Both win with credit platform neutrality.

Center shit, not censorship.

Careful. That could backfire.

Right now there are things that a significant majority think are terrible and shouldn't exist but aren't a high enough priority to actually make illegal because they are small because most mainstream service providers don't want to serve them.

Take that away an those things might grow enough that they do become a priority for legally banning.

What kinds of things?

Nah.. Congress won't. When paypal stopped payments to wiki-leaks Congress was happy as to close their eyes.

> Well, which one is it now?

Obviously the more complicated option with arbitrary criteria

Public announcement are in no way bound by truth, terms of service are, to a degree

PSA is a reputational risk, where ToS is a legal one.

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