FetLife Announcement

The main evidence is to take these companies at their word instead of assuming they're trying to cover something up. They're willing to allow payments for 90% of fetishes but exclude the other 10%. Are they really drawing the line based on the rates of fraud in each fetish?

Cases like the FetLife are illustrative. You can also look into f-list, a furry website which ultimately had to decide not to take any payments when every major processor rejected them. The key point is that companies are required to distinguish between "pornographic" and "obscene" content using a vague case-by-case smell test. So you sit down with a lawyer and kinda guess what's OK and what isn't and cross your fingers the credit card companies swallow it. That's exactly how this story was resolved. You can learn more about the law yourself by looking at an example ToS from Square and some guides to federal obscenity law.

https://squareup.com/legal/ua

https://www.justice.gov/criminal-ceos/citizens-guide-us-fede...

http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/pornography-obscenity/

> A company which has is CCBill. They sign you up as a "high risk" Visa card merchant (which is an upstream notion supported by Visa), and then are much more hands on in the checkout process than a normal credit card processor, with a website people can use to look up their subscriptions to websites (so like, imagine if all Stripe purchases required you to use their web form and then showed up on the customer statement as only "Stripe", and if the customer could then go directly to stripe.com, enter their credit card details, see they had a subscription with you, and cancel it; to be explicit: PayPal does not have these restrictions, even though they might seem similar to you).

> (To note: it does bother me somewhat that PayPal doesn't go out of their way to support some of this stuff, but as long as the actual credit card processing firms support it and there exist banks willing to allow it, I don't get pissed off about it as it is totally possible for you to do it yourself... it isn't like you are locked out of the actual network effect of credit cards, which is what is important; and given that there even exist easy well-supported full solutions out there like CCBill, it barely seems like a problem.)

http://pandorablake.com/blog/2013/05/censored-by-ccbill/

> CCBill noted, "It is a violation of CCBill's AUP to reference 'force' in this context as it implies a non-consensual situation (fantasy or non-fantasy). In order to be compliant with CCBill's AUP, please ensure all references to forced acts are removed."

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-secret-censorship-of-on...

> The posting or display of any image or wording depicting or related to extreme violence, incest, snuff, scat or the elimination of any bodily waste on another person, mutilation, or rape anywhere on the site in a sexual or erotic manner, including the URL and meta tags.

The censorship guidelines they are applying are literally those of CCBill as per their terms of service:

https://www.ccbill.com/cs/client/policies/ccbill/acceptable_...

You can read that there. Its in section 3.

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> Do you have a large percentage of people who legitimately buy stuff from your website later claim they didn't?

Do you not understand that chargeback rates are a calculable, actionable metric? Or was my reference to the fact I thought worked in comparable businesses not an obvious enough hint that I've worked for both physical goods and ummm digital products of an intimate nature?

There is no real legitimate reason for their behavior not being modeled entirely on actionable metrics visible to both parties. Worse, they know and anyone who has dealt with the credit card processing on the merchant end knows it. Its purely, at this point, little more than a political issue being wielded where laws are unpopular.

> This is not your standard fraud model: with porn you see a remarkably large amount of "oh shit, someone (usually my significant other with whom I share my finances) just saw this charge on my card, which is totally not OK for whatever reason, so I guess my best strategy here is to totally disavow the charge and pretend it was credit card fraud".

You think people don't do this shit with lingerie, sex toys, and anything else along those lines that might indicate an affair. K.

Every other non-credit-card-company pulls the products I've worked with based on return/chargeback metrics that discriminate this problem with perfect ease and shove the full cost on to me. So do credit card companies by the way for anything that don't deem "immoral" in case you were wondering.

The metrics exist, they simply do not use them for this purpose when they target things in this manner.

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> A second issue porn has which most websites do not is related: customers actively do not want their statement to accurately state from whom they purchased the product, lest someone sees exactly what their fetish is simply from reading the credit card report. This drastically increases the chargeback rate from people who legitimately do not remember what they bought (particularly if the service uses subscriptions).

Yeah. that isn't just a porn thing. Its anything potentially sexual, including lingerie. Please let me know when the credit card companies start banning places like Victoria Secret. The difference here is lingerie is too "mainstream" for that to be a viable target. And if you think companies like Amazon doesn't pull lingerie for high rates of returns, claims of "defects", and/or chargebacks, you've never tried to sell the stuff. This stuff has an operational cost but for purely digital goods (porn) its quite a bit cheaper as well.

http://www.bedroomjoys.com/discreet-billing-shipping/

> For your privacy and protection when you place your order with BedroomJoys.com your credit card will be charged by Ryhma LLC and your order will be displayed on your credit card statement as Ryhma LLC.

https://www.girlielingerie.com/help-faq

> We do not include our name on packaging and/or shipping labels, discreet plain package displaying only “GL” and no reference to lingerie anywhere. Discreet billing displaying only “GL” and no reference to lingerie anywhere.

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> If you want to accept payments for porn, you need a fundamentally different fraud model than for a standard website, no matter how weirdly digital or in high demand: this is not about scammers or about black card fraud, this is about basic lies and deceipt. I see no real reason to claim PayPal must go out of their way to support this.

I'm talking about merchant accounts with a real bank and/or dealing directly with credit card companies. The banks aren't the ones that place pressure on these people. Its Visa and Mastercard and so forth. Fetlife wasn't operating through Paypal but through something like you suggest and has used CCBill in the past and the consent/non-consent definition is part of how CCBill operates.

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If this was true, why aren't all the other high-fraud services that get declined simply having a surcharge demanded? Does the moralism of credit card companies extend to horoscopes, debt consolidators, tour operators, and infomercial/information products?

For this explanation to be compelling, it needs to capture the fact that porn sites aren't the only high-risk category for which vendors are routinely denied or evicted from merchant accounts. You haven't done that yet.

Existing free speech rights restrict only the government itself from preventing free speech. They do not apply to private parties. For example, you have no obligation to permit religious or political proselytizing within your home or business.

You are proposing not merely the active enforcement of free speech as such, but removing the existing longstanding right of private entities to determine what forms of speech they permit within privately owned venues, simply because some such venues happen to be large and popular.

This same argument was made 200 years ago when newspapers were the dominant mode of mass information exchange. The country decided then that the government ought not to regulate what newspapers must and must not print, and enshrined this in a constitutional amendment.

How is your proposal to regulate what private sector social media companies are required to publish any different in substance than a (clearly unconstitutional) proposal to regulate what private sector newspapers can and cannot publish?