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Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down

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Re: Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down

#471

Post by leafo »

petcat wrote: post #69
kmfrk wrote: post #17

Full title that doesn't fit in the HN headline: "Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down, but Valve says payment processors 'specifically cited' a Mastercard rule about damaging the brand" (For the people who don't click the link to read the article.)

There are definitely a lot of links in this chain. Maybe leafo can chime-in and say exactly what happened with Itch.io. But I suspect that someone downstream of Visa/Mastercard anticipated that the payment card companies would not permit the transactions and relayed that back up to the merchants, and they shut it off preemptively. But it's hard to say. Mastercard is now saying that they never said or did anything. So…

Throughout this our only contacts have been representatives at Stripe and PayPal. They indicated that they got a notice and kicked off their own audit.

As far as I'm aware, the Collective Shout letter caused a "formal card network inquiry" to originate from both Mastercard and Visa. I did not have access to the actual inquiry, but my assumption is that it wasn't "we see this content, take it down" and more like "we saw this letter, look into whats going on before we do our own investigation and fine you"

Re: Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down

#472

Post by somenameforme »

lesuorac wrote: post #316
ambicapter wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's the EO, I don't see where it kills FedNow, it seems like it just mandates electronic payments and disallows paper checks: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/03/mode...

Heh, while I like the idea of using immediate electronic dispursement over the mail. I do find the ending of the EO pretty amusing. You're telling the agencies exactly what to do, how is that not impairing their authority? > Sec. 7. General Provisions. (a) Nothing in this order shall be construed to impair or otherwise affect: > (i) the authority granted by law to an executive department or agency, or the head thereo…

That's boilerplate that's been attached on most of all EO's for decades now.

The point of EOs is that they aren't laws and cannot change laws, but they can provide [mandatory] guidance to entities, under the Executive, on how to implement laws. So imagine there's a law that says some agency can ban whatever widgets they want. An EO requiring that they not ban widgets made in Timbuktu would not contravene that law, but provide guidance on how the law will be implemented. By contrast if the law said that the agency must ban any harmful widgets, an EO would not be able to prevent them from banning harmful widgets, even if they happen to be made in Timbuktu.

Thankfully modern EO's are (contrary to intuition) pretty much weak sauce because of this balancing act. See, for contrast the dictatorial mandate that is executive order 6102. [1]

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102

Re: Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down

#473

Post by altairprime »

shagie wrote: post #427
LudwigNagasena wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the US is not the world police and that’s okay. Let Australians deal with Australian laws and Australian lobbying groups.

... and risk adverse international companies (like Visa and Mastercard) need to follow the laws everywhere despite what various jurisdictions shield them from in those jurisdictions.

No: it’s cheaper for them to follow the minimum common compliance across all countries, but Mastercard-sized firms absolutely can and often do vary compliance per country (gestures at Google, Facebook) when it’s profitable to do so. Mastercard could have simply enforced Australia-specific rules on Itch if they’d wanted to, but they’re anxious about being labeled as smutty due to domestic U.S., and apparently exported Australian, puritanism. The solution is to ensure that cowardice does more lasting harm to their brand than they feel that their strategy prevents — which requires both loud and immediate response, as well as sustained pressure over time.

Re: Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down

#474

Post by nso »

charlieyu1 wrote: post #465
efitz wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need Congress to make a law here in the US that businesses involved in facilitating financial transactions in the United States are considered “common carriers” and must not discriminate against, cancel or disadvantage any customer or legal transaction, without a court order. We can write language to allow booting people for fraud, hacking, etc if “legal” + “court order” are insufficient.

I won't trust the Congress. Far left and far right are both pushing for more censorship

The US barely has any genuinely left-wing politicians (Bernie Sanders, AOC, DSA). There are no one who realistically could be called far left in any significant position of governing power.

Re: Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down

#475

Post by shagie »

carlosjobim wrote: post #416
digitalsushi wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why cant we? are you self-censoring because there's some policy forbidding us to talk about something clandestine here? i dont have access to the joke, or inside club, or inner sanctum, and maybe theres other people like me that want to know more and if the mystery is self-imposed then i might respectfully push back that we cant talk about it

It's a meta discussion, but comments who go against popular opinion amongst HN commenters get increasingly down voted, flagged, [dead]. And it's rarely any extreme or rule-breaking comments. I wrote "against popular opinion", but that might not even be it. It could be that there's a minority of very active users who see it as their job to prune this message board of undesirable opinions. Probably a bunch of them have…

> Probably a bunch of them have opened my submission history in a new tab by now to mass downvote

Two things work against that. First, it requires a sufficiently high karma to downvote something. Not that threshold is that high, but it takes more than a casual person's activity to get quickly.

Secondly, you can't downvote something older than 24 hours. So nothing you said yesterday would be down-voteable.

You can also vouch for something that has been marked dead if you believe that something written contributes. If one believes that it is a minority of highly active users that prune undesirable opinions, then vouching for those would make those comments viewable again.

That said, make sure that vouching for things isn't based on a desire to be contrary. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10298512

Re: Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down

#476

Post by rambojohnson »

charlieyu1 wrote: post #465
efitz wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need Congress to make a law here in the US that businesses involved in facilitating financial transactions in the United States are considered “common carriers” and must not discriminate against, cancel or disadvantage any customer or legal transaction, without a court order. We can write language to allow booting people for fraud, hacking, etc if “legal” + “court order” are insufficient.

I won't trust the Congress. Far left and far right are both pushing for more censorship

what far left are you talking about exactly?

Re: Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down

#477

Post by wombatpm »

kansface wrote: post #396
dec0dedab0de wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the mint should maintain a payment processor, and the post office should maintain an official email address for everyone. these are basic things we need to exist in society, we should not be at the whims of private organizations.

What would the post office do with spam? Their existing business model is chiefly predicated on delivering junk mail. I’m not sure how the federal government would deal with fraud on the payment side, either. The US does not have a strong system of identity.

Junk mail is advertising mail that someone paid to send to you. You what it is not? Illegal. Scams, fraud, and other illegal things get shut down because of postal inspectors. And there is no anonymity. The USPS knows both ends of the transaction.

Re: Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down

#478

Post by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF »

charlieyu1 wrote: post #465
efitz wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need Congress to make a law here in the US that businesses involved in facilitating financial transactions in the United States are considered “common carriers” and must not discriminate against, cancel or disadvantage any customer or legal transaction, without a court order. We can write language to allow booting people for fraud, hacking, etc if “legal” + “court order” are insufficient.

I won't trust the Congress. Far left and far right are both pushing for more censorship

Just pass the law yourself I guess? (imagine a muscly arm emoji here)

Re: Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down

#479

Post by csours »

socalgal2 wrote: post #462
weberer wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was Mastercard's rule, but any one of the companies in the payment network could have brought it up to Valve. The whole system is set up so one transaction has to go through up to 6 different companies, and they all have to abide by each other's rules. The US Internet Preservation Society explained it recently: >Each of these companies maintains its own terms of service and each of them can block a transaction by…

I'd be interesting to know if Valve is big enough to start their own payment system. Yea, I know it would be hard but their customers have libraries of games in their system and Valve has lots of good will. Valve could also offer discounts ($X off if you use ValvePay). It would take years. They'd have to drop the adult games now, start ValvePay, promote it until the majority of their customers used it. Then put the g…

Or even a Plausible Deniability system - you can't buy these games with currency, you have to use tokens. Here's a token store where you can buy tokens with your currency.
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