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Dispatches from the War on Horny/Payment Processors: the other shoe has dropped for Pixiv.
A year and a half ago, Pixiv made signs that they'd be clamping down on content on some of their services to appease Visa and MasterCard. Today, Pixiv announces that US and UK users will face restrictions on content they can upload. (Specific details here.)
Currently remains to be seen how much this affects the Western artists who are on Pixiv, but it doesn't bode well. Some think this portends a coming era of digital pillarization, and while I won't rule out the possibility that things will get so walled off that VPNs become a necessity, it's hard to say how likely that actually is.
EDIT: This may be the rationale for the change.
It definitely annoys me that "access to the financial system writ large" has become so utterly critical to doing anything useful that it immediately has a totalizing effect on what anybody can do, anywhere in the world, even on the internet.
Maybe there's one bank/payment processor that holds out and willingly acts to handle the 'controversial' transactions, but that just removes things one layer back, as other banks and processors will eventually blacklist that bank. And thus rendering that bank mostly useless for any other purpose. If it doesn't shut down it'll struggle to remain solvent.
Lets say that some pornography company was wealthy enough it could 'become its own bank' and processes payments on behalf of users and extends credit and otherwise runs all its own transactions and only has to interface with the financial system to purchase the services it needs to operate. Once it is known as the 'porn bank' it'll probably be impossible to find any other financial services willing to interface with them unless they comply with all the sames restrictions the other banks are working under... which defeats the purpose of 'self banking' to begin with.
It comes down to the fact that the financial system is a tightly connected web, and the main value any bank or payment process can provide is access to the network, so maintaining that access is their primary concern.
From the moral standpoint, it bugs me when there's very little evidence(indeed, I've seen none) that digital artwork depicting heinous, illegal, or otherwise disgusting acts is actually causing harm to nonconsenting parties. The reasons we find CSAM objectionable and worthy of legally crushing are generally not present when it comes to digital art. One party or group wants some art, the artist produces it and gets paid, nobody else even need be aware of what it contains!
It'd be nice to think of our financial system as mostly as set of dumb tubes that transmit the data representing our money around without caring much about the start and endpoint... with a lot of protections in place to mitigate fraud, theft, and user error. But ultimately a financial company is operated by humans who are subject to legal jurisdiction of some country or other, and have to maintain access to the global finance system if they want to take that money to any other jurisdiction, so in reality the 'rules' are set based on what all participants are willing to tolerate.
Anyhow, this is ultimately the impetus for the protagonists in Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon to create a private, heavily anonymized bank/data haven in a location outside of the U.S.' sphere of influence. And in order for them to pull it off it required a chain of events that seems even more fantastical now than it did then, such as finding an island nation that is independently wealthy yet also politically stable enough to act as a headquarters for such an endeavor.
You're not wrong: despite general libertarian sympathies, I do think there is a role for utility-type regulation in a number of new critical roles that didn't exist a few decades ago. Credit cards and cashless payments are certainly one.
I'd toss out email and online identity infrastructure as another that doesn't get much press: I've come to realize that my dependence on my Gmail account (which I've had since it was an invite-only beta) would be almost impossible to replace. Maybe with a lot of work I could replace it with one provided through Microsoft, but that wouldn't really fix the problem. Practically hosting your own email is basically impossible, from what I can tell, due to spam blocking mechanisms. Given Google's propensity to sunset things (or really, the level of risk of corporate spontaneous failure), I think it'd be a pretty serious crisis if their email and identity servers went down for a day. Or worse, permanently.
I'd point to the common carrier rules for other utilities as a reasonable example of what could be done. I think expanding those to include things like credit card payments and email would be possible. However, those have their own concerns with fraud and such that might prevent applying the existing rules as-is.
Hey, what do you know, I just migrated off Gmail last week, and would love to talk about my experience. I'm now using ProtonMail (https://proton.me/mail) with a Proton Unlimited subscription, and have my own domains through Cloudflare. Here's what I did:
Step 1: Create a free-tier Cloudflare account and transfer/buy a domain or three. I have had (mylastname).tech for a while, which makes my email address firstname@lastname.tech, and I like that. But if you want to buy a .vodka or .christmas domain for your primary email, go for it. I was using Gmail and Google Domains, but with Google Domains shut down I had to migrate, and ultimately Gmail doesn't play nicely with Cloudflare so I needed a new email solution. Domains will generally cost $10/year.
Step 2: Create a Proton account and buy at least Mail Plus so you can add your custom domain. You can do parts of this with a free account, but I decided it was worth paying a little for the extra features, especially the ability to send mail from my domains.
Step 3: Proton has a wizard that guides you through setting everything up to receive email from your domain, and a help center article with pictures specifically for Cloudflare. The steps include setting up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC so your emails don't get sent to spam, and enabling the catchall address so that you get all emails sent to your domain.
Step 3a (optional): You can also configure Cloudflare to receive your emails and forward them to your proton mail address. This gives you Cloudflare's protection and tracking. This is what I did, and this is what you'd do at the Proton free tier.
Step 4: You may experience some pain, because you get to change your email address on all your accounts to point to your new domain. I had already done this a while ago. The nice part about this step is that you can create a new email address for every place you interact with. I use amazon@mydomain.tech for Amazon, themotte@mydomain.tech for here, and linkedin2@mydomain.tech because I was starting to get spam at my old linkedin address and it's easy to set a rule to autodelete them now. But it's not actually that painful: you can change a few of your main accounts and worry about the rest later, because...
Step 5: Forward your Gmail to your ProtonMail. I did this in the Gmail settings, but you can also use ProtonMail's EasySwitch tool to do it for you.
Step 5a (optional): Set up a tag in ProtonMail for emails forwarded from Gmail, then rule to automatically set it. Any time you get an email that's not actually from Google the company telling you about your Google account, that's a reminder for you to update whatever account it is. Or, as I'm discovering, a reminder to unsubscribe because why was I actually subscribed to this shit in the first place?
And that's pretty much all I needed to do. I'm creating occasional filters, folders, and tags to sort things how I want, but it's been a very straightforward and easy process. And now I'm not tied to ANYONE. If Cloudflare and ProtonMail go out of business or decide to blacklist me, I can move my domain to another registrar and pick a different webmail host, and my online accounts will remain mine.
Edit to add additional thoughts: I continue to use a KeePass database for password management, and since it's encrypted at rest I am comfortable using Google Drive to backup and sync it. I'm not planning to switch to Proton's password manager since I like the open source option. I haven't moved my calendar yet, and that might involve moving my wife over to Proton since we share calendar items all the time. I may never do that. For now it's easy enough to just open the Google calendar when I want to see my schedule.
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I keep hearing that, and I keep not knowing what on Earth are people talking about. Are you planning on running a newsletter? Because if not, it's perfectly doable. I wouldn't recommend it because of it's low bang / buck ratio, but it's nowhere near "basically impossible".
I think @gattsuru could dig up the relevant link, but I remember a blogpost from a guy who tried running his own server, only to be sandbagged hard by Gmail and the like.
There's a pretty common issue in the tech community where someone writes a blog post about their experience, and after a long game of telephone a caricatured version of it becomes The Truth. It's been a while since I heard that one, but every once in a while someone still repeats the "98% of programmers can't code FizzBuzz" thing, for example.
I dunno, I played around with self-hosted email, the only time anything landed in spam was when I setup some cronjob that regularly sent mails. Never saw problems with manually sent stuff, and since I almost never send emails as it is, I cannot imagine tripping any spam filters in the course of normal usage.
If you're just trying to receive e-mails, Mail in a Box works pretty well 99% of the time. If you're largely just sending yourself notifications, with an account that's not used anywhere else of significance, it works 98%ish of the time. ((And even that's overkill; a basic postfix relay works.))
If you're trying to send e-mail, it can be messy, and worse unpredictably messy. Mailinabox tries to solve the absolute horror story that mail config turned into, and to be fair a lot of the tedious config-twisting stuff is no longer as frustrating as it once was. You can do it... for a while.
The issue is not that you might send enough e-mail to hit an automated spam filter yourself, or even the risk that you might misconfigure things in a way that a bad actor can abuse -- that's a concern with near-any server, and there's a lot of things like a SIP PBX where you just recognize and mitigate it. With e-mail, however, your domain and/or IP address can end up on sizable DNSBLs because some IP address half an octet away fucked up, or because some sysadmin in Europe had a stick up their ass that day. Surprisingly big-name people can misconfigure their own stuff, and break because you're not big enough to have been made an exception, and not even have reporting turned on: it's happened to me.
E-mail can be done fine for a toy project, or where you're measuring reliability by licking your finger and sticking it in the air rather than by count of nines. If you're going to move the system you use to handle your bank account's verification to it, or how you send bills to customers, you gotta be willing to put a lot of effort in and realize it may not work.
Ok, thank you! That's exactly what I suspected, and not what I'd characterize as "basically impossible".
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If you haven't already done so, look into paying for a domain name and email hosting. There's a bunch of companies which sell these services, and owning the domain lets you change which is providing your email while retaining the same address. It's not all the way to hosting your own email but it sounds like it could be close enough for the problems you're worried about.
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Same. My gmail account at this point is probably more important to my identity than my social security number or driver's license number, at least on a day-to-day basis. It really worries me that this is in the hands of a private company, which could take it away on a whim, or get hacked.
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How far are you willing to take this, though? See what they're talking about in San Francisco relating to preventing grocery store closures due to "food deserts" and "underserved communities". Ensuring access to food is more important than ensuring that porn companies maximize their revenue (after all, they can still sell magazines and DVDs). I don't see how you can set a reasonable standard without opening the door to further regulation.
This is a good point, and I don't really have an answer to the question. Most (but not all) common carrier laws I can think of only require that utilities accept all comers -- AT&T can't deny phone lines to sex ships -- but some also go so far as to define specific performances like service areas -- AT&T doesn't run wire to my house specifically.
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I could perhaps imagine a rule that provides that no payment processor can deny a customer the right to engage in any 'legal' transaction that is <$500 in a single day with a $10,000.00 total limit on a rolling 30 day basis, which is cumulative for the customer in question across any processors they use.
In exchange, the banks/processors get some kind of 'chargeback insurance' up to that $10,000.00 limit, analogous to FDIC insurance on deposits.
So "basic guaranteed processing" is a fundamental 'right' which any regulated bank has to provide.
I'm certain there would be abuses of this system, and second order effects.
But yeah, the idea is to HOPEFULLY prevent average citizens from being 'debanked,' and allow certain 'sketchy but legal' companies to eke out an existence if they have enough customers and not have to worry about an arbitrary policy change from one of like three major companies putting them out of business.
How do you determine this? Is it hooked up to some sort of imagine recognition software that scans the image, determines content (including guessing the apparent age of a fictional 2d character), and then cross-references that with the laws of both the host country and the customer's current location? Sounds complex!
That would be for the government to investigate, ultimately.
But point being if a person isn't breaking the law, then they should not be getting debanked.
I think we all agree on that in principle. But in practice it's not that easy to determine whether someone is breaking the law. The banks all default to safetyism, so they debank someone if there's even the slightest chance that the might be breaking the law, or just causing trouble. Maybe we need some sort of government bank account with a "right to banking" for anyone that hasn't been formally convicted?
It sounds like what Faceh is after is a presumption of innocence when handling transactions. The banks wouldn't need to prove the transaction isn't part of a crime, just process them. Now, how that squares with the normal fraud screening banks do is another question.
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