Fraud? Abuse? Fine, let me put cash onto a card and if that card gets stolen, oh well, my loss. Mastercard should have no say in what what speech is considered acceptable outside of their offices. We don't care what execs at a water company think? Why do we care about the people at Mastercard?
Which is why some merchants get effectively blacklisted if they have too many fraudulent transactions
If it were the case that the payment rail censorship were limited just to cases where there was an obvious elevated fraud risk-- then that would be the whole of the story. -- and there would be an obvious answer: use a payment mechanism where the fraud responsibility is entirely on the user, such as Bitcoin.
But their censorship exists where no such elevated fraud risk exists too, due to abusive conduct by the government to indirectly suppress activity that would be plainly unlawful for them to directly suppress. And the governments out of control abuse of its regulatory power is not limited to fraud-responsible payment rails, and get applied just as or even more extensively on Bitcoin payment processors.
Though i agree with the idea of a debit card that doesn't allow chargebacks, but without so many annoying restrictions.
No company or individual should be denied the right to receive funds digitally without due process.
Companies should be free to transact with or exclude anyone, but there should be neutral infrastructure that facilitates the flow of money, with multiple players each with differing rules and risk profiles setup to help people and companies access it.
No one financial institution should be able to dictate the speech allowed on a platform.
What's the status of FedNow?
Because sadly 80% of people are sheep. Same reason we allow a company to decide what we can and cannot install on our smartphones.
It's an important distinction to make. Credit is very much not something you should feel entitled to and issuer can and should be selective about who and what they issue credit for. Or course the credit industry itself is disgusting, but that's another issue (this was covered almost 20 years ago in a documentary Maxed Out).
This shouldn't be conflated with payments in general which is (imo) a much bigger problem. You should be entitled to spend the money you earn on exactly what you want, and to do it anonymously.
You can fight back: don't spend on credit and refuse to use a card when cash would suffice. We are losing, though. For stuff like Steam you have no other option (as far as I know).
When I buy stuff on Steam I am in no way making a contract with Visa. When Visa strong arms Valve to delist games I lose even if I never had any relation with Visa ever.
It really is not comparable.
That point is not the problem though. They could just pressure Valve to refuse credit cards for all or some games. The financial aspect simply does not make sense, regardless of how you look at it (and many people had different takes in this thread).
The only angles that make sense are an ideological crusade and the risk of being sued. The first is unacceptable and the second is an utter failure on the part of the legal system.
Cards like the Freedom card will never fly with either the Networks or the Issuing Banks as these kinds of payment instruments are immediately used to wash illicit funds.
Visa's stance with Steam is bollocks, and it is another example of the monopoly they hold over payment processing. They shouldn't have the ability to impact a legit merchants catalogue.
But the idea that we can have a Freedom card also doesn't checkout. The less known about what the money is spent on the higher the risk. And cost of complying with Suspicious Activity Reports regulations is really high (as the costs of you breach the requirements), so any attempts to create / run this kind of thing often don't stack up.
I think the general idea is that acquiring banks are hopefully large enough to absorb any single merchant insolvency, but there are obviously limits to that. Airlines and event tickets are notorious example of that, since they usually take payment weeks or months ahead of providing the underlying service but want to get paid immediately.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/01/business/dealbook/pornhub...
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/08/california-court...
>This week, US District Judge Cormac Carney of the US District Court of the Central District of California decided that there's reason to believe that Visa knowingly processed payments that allowed MindGeek to monetize "a substantial amount of child porn." To decide, the court wants to know much more about Visa's involvement, calling for more evidence of legal harms caused during a jurisdictional discovery process extended through December 30, 2022.
According to Court Listener, the case is still ongoing - https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/59992265/serena-fleites...
https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Traitor...
You can never rely on governments or corporations to have reasonable policies. Any payment system that is centrally controlled will inevitably be corrupted.
Steam has its virtual wallet and marketplace as well, so Visa is twice removed from where the money will actually go once it enters Steam ecosystem.
Even as an abundance of caution, this doesn’t make sense to me.
However, I get the eerie feeling that I didn't buy a product even though I paid for it. I subscribed to a service instead! Or maybe something in the middle? I don't even know!