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Whether or this standard enables banks to do such—I would not expect them to jump on the opportunity. They are businesses, and what’s the motive for shooting themselves in the foot?
Perhaps it would be a different story if the feds were making a coherent push. Finance won’t touch weed money while federal drug laws add all this risk. But any attempt to leverage private providers as a Second-Amendment fig leaf...well, I’d expect it to be plainly unconstitutional for the same reasons speech can’t be compelled. But I don’t actually have evidence of such.
The point is enabling this to empower activists within the credit card companies. No matter what Visa says now, they will fold when the blob uses this as leverage against them.
It's one thing for the CEO to say "this is against our principles, and besides, what would you have me do?" It's another thing entirely for him to resist the entire ESG/LGBTQ-ERG internal party cadre standing in his office screaming "PUSH THE BUTTON OR YOU'RE KILLING BABIES!" This change sets him up for the latter, just like Price at Cloudflare, who swore he would resist the pressure right up until he realized how much they could bring to bear on him, and how many of the people he relied on would stab him in the back.
Although very likely the CEO won't need to make the decision: it'll be done at some lower level and presented to him as a fait accompli that he would have to work against procedural outcomes to overturn.
Notice how on their page about the category code they don't openly say their objective is to prohibit all banks from dealing with firearms companies. They only say that on their other pages because they're good at compartmentalizing their propaganda.
I’m going to try and resist the urge to pick at that poorly-conceived website.
Cloudflare represented a single point of failure for an incredibly unsympathetic community. That made it a target. Gun owners have saintly public relations compared to Kiwifarms; there is no single bank which handles guns. Without a single, obvious lightning rod, activists will not generate adequate charge on one institution.
The existence of a lever is not a guarantee that it has leverage. If the LGBT “cadre” can go shout down CEOs for tangential causes—why haven’t they? What is it about this policy that will signal a revolution?
Nothing. It does not change the calculus of the last ten years. The tide of anti-gun sentiment is no stronger now than it was after Sandy Hook or Columbine. Banks didn’t decide to legislate from the vault back then, and they won’t now. Not without the kind of collective action that happens through government channels.
I would be willing to bet money on this. Apparently, I am, seeing as my main bank rates an F.
You’re not wrong, broadly speaking.
I want to be clear that cloudflare was the single point upon which Kiwifarms depended, and thus an obvious target. Not that kiwifarms was vulnerable because it used cloudflare specifically. Cloudflare definitely isn’t unique in having a gap between moral stance and practical vulnerability.
Banks don’t represent that single point of attack because...well, there’s more than one of them. So even if you get a mass protest, whether in person or extremely-online, that energy doesn’t have a single target. The only way to make a single target is to go through government. The end result is bland lobbying groups rather than toxic vigilantes.
“Is your bank loaded?” doesn’t have grand, symbolic targets. Just a boring scorecard. That puts them somewhere below Greenpeace in impact.
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