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Does someone more versed in the space care to comment? The title seems like link bait, and I'd bet there are some not so absurd reasons for a lot of these.
Maybe by absurd it means the number of prohibited businesses? Otherwise it just looks Stripe does not to be involved with shady/spammy businesses.
I'm not sure these are that spammy: * personal computer technical support * travel agencies * hair-extensions What all of them is the ability to be a scam, but any business can scam you. Surprised fortune tellers aren't on there.
Maybe by absurd it means the number of prohibited businesses? Otherwise it just looks Stripe does not to be involved with shady/spammy businesses.
I'm not sure these are that spammy: * personal computer technical support * travel agencies * hair-extensions What all of them is the ability to be a scam, but any business can scam you. Surprised fortune tellers aren't on there.
They are. #27
There are a few reasons businesses end up on our prohibited list: they're full of fraud (get rich quick schemes), legally regulated (guns, drugs), or regulated by card companies (pornography).
In many ways, I'd prefer a world where Stripe's prohibited business list was no more specific than that of a web hosting service, and didn't prohibit anything beyond what's required by law.
However, there's an essential neutrality in the routing of packets that's absent in the routing of dollars: credit card networks are emphatically not neutral about the businesses they support on their rails. As such, no matter what stance we might intrinsically want, the outcome is largely determined by what Visa, MasterCard, etc., seek to enforce.
This might seem unfair, and the techno-libertarian in me finds the enumeration distasteful and arbitrary. On the other hand, the card networks have accomplished something very hard: billions of people are willing to give online businesses access to arbitrary amounts of money, sight unseen. This is an impressive achievement, and they pulled it off in part by minimizing the number of bad businesses that exist on their network. So there's a trade-off.
Tl;dr: though we have some influence, we mostly don't get to set the rules.
Maybe by absurd it means the number of prohibited businesses? Otherwise it just looks Stripe does not to be involved with shady/spammy businesses.
I'm not sure these are that spammy: * personal computer technical support * travel agencies * hair-extensions What all of them is the ability to be a scam, but any business can scam you. Surprised fortune tellers aren't on there.
I'm one of Stripe's cofounders. There are a few reasons businesses end up on our prohibited list: they're full of fraud (get rich quick schemes), legally regulated (guns, drugs), or regulated by card companies (pornography). In many ways, I'd prefer a world where Stripe's prohibited business list was no more specific than that of a web hosting service, and didn't prohibit anything beyond what's required by law. Howev…
There are a few reasons businesses end up on our
prohibited list: they're full of fraud (get rich quick
schemes), legally regulated (guns, drugs), or regulated
by card companies (pornography).