Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down

This entire situation is badly misunderstood all over the Internet. As the article itself states, alternative payment processors that are used primarily for adult content already exist. CC Bill was the example given. And they accept Visa and Mastercard. They're used by websites with plenty of explicit adult content, including simulated rape, incest, and "teen" porn. It isn't Visa and Mastercard forbidding this. In this case, it's Stripe, though it seems likely they're doing it because of pressure from Mastercard, which in turn received pressure targeting these particular platforms from some advocacy group in Australia. But itch.io and Stream could still use CC Bill, and customers would still be able to pay with Visa and Mastercard.

The reason mainstream websites don't use CC Bill and it is used almost exclusively for porn, is because they charge a lot more than Stripe and the more mainstream payment processors do. There isn't really a ban on this kind of material, provided the platform hosting it is willing to use alternative processors, so much as a price increase.

Even with Pornhub and OnlyFans debacles, they never hosted content that can't be found elsewhere on sites that allow you to pay with Visa and Mastercard. The reason those platforms were targeted was never the content itself, but non-compliance with rules that professional studios have always had to abide by requiring they keep copies of government-issued ID of all performers and provide those to any viewer who asks for it, in order to be able to prove they aren't accidentally hosting content with children or otherwise non-consenting performers.

Ultimately, if a website wants to host content with a guy taking a shit on his twin underage daughters, they can do that, and you can pay for it with Visa and Mastercard, as long as they use something like CC Bill for processing and they keep adequate records enabling them to prove the "underage" characters and not actually played by underage performers, and the people involved aren't actually related. Or, maybe more precisely, you can have real twins in a scene together, but you're then limited by byzantine country-by-country laws I have no personal knowledge of regarding what they are and are not allowed to do together that counts as sex.

The Internet is where nuance goes to die, so this all gets distilled down to "Visa and Mastercard don't allow you to buy porn" by the time most people find out about any of it.

Your distinction is correct as far as it goes, but there is a third observation that must also be taken into account, which is that the tidy division of economic, social, and political matters into private and public domains is uninteresting from the perspective of power. An example of this is how gov'ts, constrained by law, cannot legally engage in widespread surveillance, have found what is morally a loophole by involving private companies who are able to do so more freely. Or, for example, the policing of certain ideas on privately-owned social media which have become de facto public forums. It is completely uninteresting to claim that you aren't forced to use these forums or that you can start your own as jejune free market extremists like to claim. A little intellectual maturity will make plainly obvious why that is the case.

Now, I happen to think that, pace Dershowitz, adult content does not fall within the scope of free speech. The entire purpose of free speech is to allow the truth to be to expressed. Free speech takes an attitude of pragmatic permissiveness toward certain varieties of what are objectively bad speech as the price for that to happen. It's a choice that was made in American political history, but even here, the bounds of what is legally permitted under free speech have not remained fixed for various reasons.

Adult content is nowhere in the vicinity of this notion of free speech, and certainly not its moral purposes. There is no right to produce or to view adult content. There is no right to anything that is objectively unethical, and both the production and consumption of such content is unethical. Gov'ts can choose to take a permissive stance toward such activity for prudential reasons (for example, historically, while prostitution was categorically condemned on moral grounds, gov'ts took a permissive attitude in some respects, because they felt that banning it would cause still greater problems), but they have the authority to criminalize it.

So, given that it isn't a free speech issue, I have no problem, in a free speech context, with private companies banning such content from their platforms or from being the subject of transactions passing through their systems.

I see, but there is Steam DRM there. So, I guess as the other commenter was alluding to, if Steam goes belly up so does your collection, regardless of the dev studio's intention (Or atleast, locked behind a DRM bypass).

I understood this in terms of Live Service games, but did not consider Steam's ability to shut down their own platform and kill my locally installed single player games with it (Again, I'm seeing its possible and seems easy to bypass usually, but the principle of the matter)

We need to break them up solely based on size - if they’re too big on revenue or profit or market cap or employees, break them up. Or at least huge taxes on the largest companies and lower taxes on small ones. Market cap about 500B? Here’s an additional 25% tax on profits. Above 1T? Make that 50%.

Bitcoin is so much faster than a credit card transaction that it's not even close. A lightning transaction is near instant, regular bitcoin transfers take in the order of 10 minutes. Credit card transactions take weeks before you get the money, and after that the money can be yoinked back for a multitude of reasons beyond your control as a merchant. The fees are often lower, too. Bitcoiners are for some reason opposed to solving that last issue (no privacy) despite the technology existing in monero. NIH syndrome, I guess.

The real unsolved issue for cryptocurrency is between chair and keyboard. People make mistakes, people are afraid of being robbed. Your average person does not want to be their own bank. You can have a bank or payment processor manage your money for you, but then we're back to the regulated world where Visa and Mastercard can determine what games you're allowed to buy.