It's extraordinary that payment processors don't have any regulations that force them to serve businesses in a neutral fashion. It's weird that they're allowed to play morality police with the Internet even though they have no formal governmental role as such.
You'd think that once the government decides what is and isn't acceptable, the processors would follow that lead. But instead they go a different, more restrictive way.
I guess they want to be everyone's prudish uncle, instead of payment processors.
I don't see how common carrier type regulation in the financial services industry could work. You're essentially forcing people to lend out or risk their money with anyone who asks regardless of their financial status or the risk profile of their business. Surely choosing what business risks you are willing to take must be some sort of right?
The only way out of that would be blanket government insurance for payment processors, but that would essentially be a massive subsidy and open to rampant abuses.
You do see that this is specifically an issue with the credit services threatening to refuse the processing of payments and not simply withholding credit. These are two different banking services, and you can support neutral payment processing without supporting neutral (forced in your vocabulary) lending. The reasons that the banks are as regulated as they are everywhere is because of the huge amounts of power that they have by controlling the flow of money. If you deregulated banks you would end up with one bank that controlled the world.
Exactly, I don't believe that payment processors want to play the role of gatekeepers (after all, they lose revenue for every customer they turn down). They probably just want to show that they can self-regulate to give Congress less of a reason to pass something like this[1].
I think people underestimate how much moral regulation in the US actually comes top-down under the guise of anti-trafficking law (remember SESTA/FOSTA and how it killed Craigslist personals?)
You'd think that once the government decides what is and isn't acceptable, the processors would follow that lead. But instead they go a different, more restrictive way.
I guess they want to be everyone's prudish uncle, instead of payment processors.