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PaperclipPerfector  13d ago (text post)   25338 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024

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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.

What I would like to propose is to regulate payment processors in a similar way as ISPs. Either they become common carriers, which means that they are required to do business with any to-their-best-knowledge legal endeavor (and open themselves up to court cases if they refuse) and are shielded from liability, or they remain free to pick their customers and will remain fully liable for any damages causally downstream from their transactions ("What do you mean, you did not know that the car rental agency would lend a car to someone who might run over some kid? You decided to do business with them.")

Of course, this will not happen because the current state of affairs is not an accident. Remember Wikileaks? I am sure that the US government would have loved to lean on the ISPs to get them to voluntarily stop routing to their website. Fortunately for us, this was not a realistic option without causing a big stink. On the other hand, going to the credit card processors and telling them "Did you notice that you are barely making any money from processing transactions with Wikileaks, but on the other hand irritate us quite a lot by it?" was enough to convince them that it was not worth it.

Of course, this will not happen because the current state of affairs is not an accident. Remember Wikileaks?

Rather more obviously linked would be Operation Chokepoint.

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