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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.
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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