We can't force PayPal to do anything. They're not breaking the law and law should not be amended to make this behavior illegal. Just don't use PayPal. I don't.
surely freezing thousands of dollars of someone else's money should be made illegal
PayPal Bans BitTorrent Friendly VPN Provider
31–36 of 36 posts
Re: PayPal Bans BitTorrent Friendly VPN Provider
#32I thought this quote was funny, "Most of our clients have been very patient since almost everyone has been wronged by PayPal at some time or another,” he added.
Yep, I can sympathize with that....
Re: PayPal Bans BitTorrent Friendly VPN Provider
#33People have long been worked up over net neutrality. But what about payment neutrality? It seems like it's just as important, if not more. Why don't we hear enough from people demanding laws that prevent payment processors above a certain size from discriminating based on categories of goods and services? Why can't we make it illegal for MasterCard and Visa to stop processing payments destined for Wikileaks, or PayPa…
Good point. And it's not even necessarily about abuse of monopoly, at least its traditional implications. Calling it justice or freedom seems melodramatic, but I don't have better langage for it.
For example, paypal's advantage is (supposedly) in fraud detection. But they aren't picking up on fraud, they are picking up on fraud risk. An individual or business can register as risky for some apparently arbitrary reason and effectively be banned from a big slice of online commerce. Paypal have no mandate to provide a service to everyone, they might be better off banning 10% of the total population as high risk and passing those savings onto the remaining 90%.
Thats completely reasonable as a business decision. Not really different to simply deciding not to open a shop in Eindhoven. But when it's Paypal it becomes a justice/freedom issue. A person is disadvantaged without access to it.
Re: PayPal Bans BitTorrent Friendly VPN Provider
#34People have long been worked up over net neutrality. But what about payment neutrality? It seems like it's just as important, if not more. Why don't we hear enough from people demanding laws that prevent payment processors above a certain size from discriminating based on categories of goods and services? Why can't we make it illegal for MasterCard and Visa to stop processing payments destined for Wikileaks, or PayPa…
Surely it would be backwards to dictate who payment processors can and cannot do business with. There are risks involved with banking, a bank will not give a mortgage to a minimum wage worker and we don't expect them to due to the risks associated with such a mortgage, why should a payment processor be expected to take the risks that banks are not?
Dictating what categories are not legitimate reasons for rejecting someone is not the same as "you have to accept everyone!" Obviously, PayPal should be allowed to reject actual criminal enterprises, for example. But there is nothing illegal about VPNs that protect your anonymity.
Besides, I think it's clear that any legislation that disallowed payment processors from discriminating against businesses would also have to give them legal protection in the case that said business end up being sued.
Re: PayPal Bans BitTorrent Friendly VPN Provider
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If anybody finally does manage to create a transnational money beyond governments, it's going to need to be highly decentralized. ok, but can you explain why Bitcoin is not starting to fill out this shoe already??
Tons of reasons. Here's a few: * Hard to use, you need to exchange "real" money to use it - you can't just link up your bank account like on Paypal and start using it right away. * You either need to totally trust a 3rd party provider with your money (and if they lose/steal it - that's your problem) or run a clunky and slow application on your computer which requires several GBs of HD space (faster, lighter apps are…
These are all solvable problem, therefore reason to be long on bitcoin.
Re: PayPal Bans BitTorrent Friendly VPN Provider
#36We can't force PayPal to do anything. They're not breaking the law and law should not be amended to make this behavior illegal. Just don't use PayPal. I don't.
> " and law should not be amended to make this behavior illegal."
Why not?