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