Alternatively, the failure of government here is not in their failure to regulate porn but in their failure to regulate Visa and Mastercard properly and thus deprive the payment processors of the opportunity or excuse to run "star-chamber-esque" processes. If non-cash payment rails are now a necessity to run a business, then access to them has to be a right. The payment processors need to be required to allow every business to accept money through their service, for the same fee as any other business is charged. Otherwise payment rails become a de-facto government in that they gain the power to license or prohibit businesses at their caprice.
An argument I tend to hear is risk management, since the adult industries deal with a higher level of fraud. (And shameful refunds, perhaps somewhat understandably.) I think what we are likely reacting to is a legitimate desire to curb this sort of fraud that has evolved, over time, into a moral panic because inconveniently legal vices correlate strongly with that fraud.
The solution cannot be to turn Visa/Mastercard into the morality police. Or any payment processor, really. That is not their job, and they are ill equipped to perform it. Hard agree that access to payment processing should be based on legality of the sale and nothing else. If Visa/Mastercard want to then *measure* a business's overall fraud level as it happens in reality, and then adjust their rates accordingly, they can still do that in a fair manner. In other words, the riskier businesses deal with higher fees or something, but we aren't trying to define whether furry art is somehow porn or some other nonsense in the crossfire. Separate the streams please.
The fraud argument doesn’t hold water. Adult sites pay higher transaction fees, and it would be bizarre for a moral outrage campaign to be aimed at ensuring profitability for private companies.
There's an (iirc) several hundred page long document, available only to merchant banks, detailing in excruciating detail what is allowed. It's not a fraud thing; that's controlled by rates. It's a few banks want to deal with the hassle and the audit requirements to work with porn producers. Because the banks themselves must audit per visa/mastercard's requirements.
Outside of US there are lots of payment processors that do not touch Visa/MC rails. And in US one can use ACH/Zelle. Nothing stops a business from avoiding Visa/MC. But that may reduce their customer pool, due to increased checkout friction.
I guess you mean users would need to manually send money to the company's E-mail/Phone on Zelle right? Then it's up to the merchant to know if the payment has been received.
Cause I don't think there is any kind of way to buy things with Zelle and possibly it would be a TOS issue.
