Valve confirms credit card companies pressured it to delist certain adult games

Why do payment processors do stuff like this? Is there some regulation that requires them to? I get that they don't want to process fraudulent transactions, but I'd think the response to a higher percentage of fraud from some industry would be to charge them more. It doesn't make sense to me why they would be concerned about the content of games, as long as everything is legal and the parties concerned aren't subject to sanctions.

Some of these games seem completely abhorrent, and probably illegal in more restrictive jurisdictions, but not the United States. And I've not seen any suggestion they're funding terrorism or something. So I'm perplexed.

I think the biggest issue here is that somewhere down the line we gave payment processors the responsibility of policing for crime and terrorism. Our governments and regulators punish those institutions for "not doing enough" to prevent such things from happening.

You might think I'm defending the multibillion company but here comes the catch: all of this is expensive so when you are doing something funky even though not illegal they just cut you out. You are a small dev or merchant and it's not worth running a whole monitoring apparatus over your activities.

Then we get into this situation where borderline cartel activity like this happens and we have a sort of shadow government enacting their own regulations. This raises some eyebrows dont you think? It will probably continue until governments realize this is happening.

The responsibility ended up with payment processors and other financial institutions because otherwise they would be forced to give access to all their customer / transaction data to governments and law enforcement.

I really wish we had a push for payment neutrality. Financial transactions are infrastructure and infrastructure should be dumb and neutral. Why does everyone have to suffer slow and expensive transfers just to maybe occasionally catch some bad guys (and they're not actually caught, just mildly inconvenienced)? And of course once you're already doing it, there's inevitably overreach, as evidenced by Visa here.

And before someone chimes in about how crypto will solve this: yes, crypto has already solved this for the criminal class. But most of the rest of people still have to suffer all the fincrime policing every time they move money or pay for something.