Visa, Mastercard suspend payments for ad purchases on PornHub, MindGeek

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/04/visa-suspends-card-payments-for-ad-purchases-on-pornhub-and-mindgeek-amid-controversy.html

by latchkey • 4 years ago

175 200 4 years ago

giarc2• 4 years ago

Bill Ackman has been vocal on this issue and check out his Twitter for more commentary on this. He feels Visa's board is in big trouble here.

sandworm10112• 4 years ago

> He feels Visa's board is in big trouble here.

Visa is too big to ever be in big trouble. They constantly have some class of customers that are "dangerous" to do business with. Once upon a time it was porn websites. Then it was VPNs. Then it was "filesharing" services. Eventually as these thing become normal and better-understood by the general public Visa relents. The only thing Visa really fears is some upstart payment system eating into their territory (paypal).

giarc2• 4 years ago

IANAL but I believe the board can be held criminally liable in this situation, meaning they could serve jail time. I've, admittedly, only skimmed some articles, but I believe the issue is that PornHub (mindgeek) knowingly hosted child porn and even after Visa was made aware, continued to do business with them. I could be wrong though.

elzbardico• 4 years ago

Do we really want private companies to be in the business of law enforcement?

coldtea• 4 years ago

No, but if they could have state power they could.

Private companies after a certain size (which Visa certainly qualifies) have to be forced to be open and neutral - they'd expand their power to anything they can given the chance.

(Same goes for the government, but at least that you get to vote for).

R0b0t1• 4 years ago

but at least that you get to vote for).

Unbridled optimism.

treis• 4 years ago

No, but we probably don't want them profiting off of child pornography either.

quest88• 4 years ago

They're trying to prevent the law from being used against them. From the article:

A federal judge in California on Friday denied Visa’s motion to dismiss a lawsuit by a woman who accuses the payment processor of knowingly facilitating the distribution of child pornography on Pornhub and other sites operated by parent company MindGeek.

nickff• 4 years ago

The real costs here are not from the expected outcome of the lawsuit (which is unlikely to succeed), but from the discovery and other legal costs. When large companies are defendants/respondents in lawsuits like this, the costs of going to trial are astronomical.

I think Visa doesn't mind the law as much as the legal system.

richbell2• 4 years ago

Credit card companies have an incredible amount of influence: they're effectively gate-keepers for monetization on the web.

There's a long history of them blacklisting people and even using their influence to pressure companies from removing them.

sandworm10112• 4 years ago

No, but we also do not want private companies being in the business of facilitating illegal activity. We wouldn't expect UPS to deliver cocaine once they become aware that a particular customer is using UPS to ship drugs. Visa isn't obligated to investigate all of its customers, but once informed of wrongdoing it should take reasonable steps to distance itself.

stickfigure4• 4 years ago

UPS is used to deliver illegal drugs. Visa is aware of this fact. Should they ban UPS?

m00dy2• 4 years ago

why cocaine is illegal ? Seriously, f*ck this world.

jonathan-adly2• 4 years ago

Ok - I run a charity that makes is easier for illegal migrants to find housing and avoid deportation. This is illegal - should VISA cut me off?

duped• 4 years ago

We wouldn't expect UPS to deliver cocaine once they become aware that a particular customer is using UPS to ship drugs.

That's why you ship your drugs with the USPS. But this is more like mailing a check for drugs.

LorenPechtel2• 4 years ago

Note that they're going after Visa over this. Not Mindgeek. That's because it never was about kiddie porn, it's about trying to block payment for porn in general. The case is highly deceptive, what actually happened:

Pornhub used to permit anonymous uploading by amateurs. Yes, plenty of amateur stuff was posted, but with such a system of course some stuff slipped through that shouldn't--copyright, revenge and kiddie porn. When the problem came to light Pornhub deleted all the stuff that didn't have a proven identity. (And the US standards for proof on porn are too high. They're fine for a big studio but impossible for amateurs and they preclude any attempt to keep identities secret.)

Only a sliver of the 80% of their database that got deleted was kiddie porn and note that not all kiddie porn is sexual abuse anyway--some of it is just teens being stupid.

zamadatix• 4 years ago

I don't want companies actively facilitating illegal activity but at the same time I don't want it to be on private entities to determine when someone is too criminal to do generic business with. If Mindgeeks ads are so criminal they shouldn't be allowed then the justice department needs to declare that directly, it shouldn't fall on payment processors to solve.

powerhour• 4 years ago

We want private companies to be in the business of rule enforcement, IMO.

Some want to prevent monopolies from having too much influence over commerce but it's far from the majority (based on all available evidence).

mise_en_place2• 4 years ago

Dropping a customer is not law enforcement. There are other credit card payment processors. This really only affects companies who purchase ads on PornHub. Those companies are usually very shady, run by people like Andrew Tate

dahdum• 4 years ago

There are other credit card payment processors.

No other processors are allowed to take their payments either, it's on the Visa/MC network level.

cush• 4 years ago

It's similar to DMCA takedowns. They aren't responsible for investigations.

pessimizer2• 4 years ago

I think the answer is that we love private companies in the business of law enforcement, because private companies are allowed to do things we pretty consistently tell the government not to do. The government will even blackmail or extort private companies into doing law enforcement, if they can find the leverage.

colpabar• 4 years ago

why don't they just build their own payment processor :^)

commandlinefan3• 4 years ago

Ironically, this move on the part of the payment processors will likely lead to adoption of alternative methods of payment for these sites... which will make it even harder to track down the truly illegal stuff.

sandworm10112• 4 years ago

That's how we got bitcoin. Wikileaks was dropped by Visa and other payment providers. Everyone then looked for an unblockable payment system, which moved bitcoin from a niche tool to the "cool" form of payment.

carrotcarrot4• 4 years ago

And it terrified the federal government.

salawat• 4 years ago

By definition, if you don't do what VISA is doing, the regulatory state will declare you an illegal payment processor.

Like it or not, part of the baggage of doing that service is being an extension of the long arm of the law.

So "rolling your own" minus the regulatory baggage you don't like, isn't per se "making your own payment processor", but something else.

Bit of a Catch-22, but how it works. Everyone just tends to leave the quiet part unsaid.

joyfylbanana2• 4 years ago

Pornhub is committing the crime here. Visa was just processing payments here - and isn't any more, since they stopped it. Why isn't everyone talking about pornhub and demanding them to ban that?

Pornhub essentially is already their own payment processor, as it looks like they are processing cryptocurrency payments from the customers.

wollsmoth10• 4 years ago

I just don't know what that would look like. If they try to take VISA's place, banks might block transfers to them making it impossible for people to pay their tab. They could try switching to crypto but the value of those aren't really stable and somewhat risky in that sense. Onramps like Coinbase have to turn in or block users who are caught using the service to buy drugs or whatever and I don't see why they wouldn't block accounts known to be buying porn or monero too.

ravenstine• 4 years ago

If the only choice becomes to either make money or not, crypto may be the answer.

Yeah, many creators and pr0n companies will tone down their content. But we all know that consumption of pr0n doesn't lead to more vanilla tastes. The more "deviant" acts will find ways to make revenue outside the mainstream and then all it will take is a critical mass for some digital currency to mean something.

0xbadcafebee2• 4 years ago

We need a federal law that indemnifies them from lawsuits as long as they drop a client after they have been convicted of a crime. That puts the onus on the plaintiff to prove that a customer has done wrong, and gives the bank/payment processor enough notice to remove that customer, rather than suing the bank/payment processor because someone might have done something wrong.

toast0• 4 years ago

I would call Visa a card network here. Sure, the card network processes payments, but there's other entities called payment processors.

The whole stack includes the merchant, the payment processor (think CyberCash, Authorize.net, PayPal, Stripe, Verifone, NCR, etc), the merchant bank, the card network, the issuing bank, and the customer.

If the card network won't deal with you, you've got to build your own card network and issue cards or convince customer banks to issue cards, and convince processors to process them and merchants to accept them etc. I don't know how many adverisers PH has, it might be easier to just ask them to write checks.

DaveExeter• 4 years ago

"Visa condemns sex trafficking, sexual exploitation, and child sexual abuse"

What a brave stance. It's nice to see a card network that cares about the children.

joffems• 4 years ago

Do they care about the children or their reputation?

The Financial Times released an 8 episode podcast titled Hot Money on who controls the industry. The podcast isn't appropriate for everyone, but is a great listen.

athammer• 4 years ago

I think they were being sarcastic. At least I’d hope so. Not sure any company that large actually cares

smartbit• 4 years ago

https://www.ft.com/content/762e4648-06d7-4abd-8d1e-ccefb74b3...

Clubber• 4 years ago

"For the children," is often an excuse by organizations to do nefarious things, like the still ongoing and massively destructive drug war.

carrotcarrot4• 4 years ago

Pretty sure he was being sarcastic. Nobody uses the phrase "the children" unironically in current year.

m00dy2• 4 years ago

Another reason that we need a decentralised blockchain and a decentralised stable coin.

jeromegv• 4 years ago

By definition, you can't have a coin be stable while at the same time not having a centralized instance that keep it "stable". Those are oxymorons. It's one, or the other.

We can't just repeat any buzzword without thinking about what exactly does it actually mean in practice.

smitop• 4 years ago

Decentralised stablecoins, such as Dai, do exist, and the price of Dai does manage to maintain its peg pretty well. Not all decentralised stablecoins have done as well (most notably TerraUSD) though, it's definitely hard to design an algorithmic stablecoin that maintains its peg.

MitPitt• 4 years ago

Mind sharing where you got that definition from?

joyfylbanana2• 4 years ago

Though bitcoin volatility has been going down along the years, it might be quite stable after 10 years or so.

ehsankia2• 4 years ago

Another win for the extremist anti-porn group Exodus Cry. They are just using a small handful of cases slipping through the cracks to make it look like PH is doing nothing to moderate this content. Their end goal was never to protect children, their goal is to eliminate all pornography from the internet.

VictorPath• 4 years ago

In 1910, Emma Goldman wrote "The Traffic in Women" about how the supposed efforts against sex traffic in the day had nothing to do with helping women, and were all done for other purposes.

112 years later nothing has changed from what she described - fundamentalist churches in supposed campaigns against sex trafficking, yellow journalists printing sensationalist stories - 112 years and nothing has changed whatsoever.

BasilPH2• 4 years ago

Totally agree. SESTA-FOSTA is just the current instalment of this pattern.

atlasunshrugged• 4 years ago

I think this time it was a win for activist investment given Bill Ackman's investment and tweet thread https://twitter.com/billackman/status/1553510104200351746?s=...

sandworm10112• 4 years ago

> goal is to eliminate all pornography from the internet.

Funny story: Pre-9/11 the Bush administration was talking about cracking down on internet pornography. The Christian right was saying the same things they had about magazines in decades past. So some industry people got together and founded websites dedicated to the most horrible pornography possible, in full expectation that they would be attacked. They were going to be champions of the first amendment in the same was that Hustler magazine had been a generation previously. But then 9/11. The expected crackdown didn't materialize. Those websites are still around, having evolved into some of the biggest names in the biz.

error54• 4 years ago

source?

Dma54rhs• 4 years ago

Right now a lot of socialist parties in Europe want to shut down porn and sex work under the name of feminism as well. As an example Spain where they are also in power. Thinking only about American Christians is short sighted, there's a lot of pressure from people who want nothing to do with Christianity but see the industry as exploitive and anti woman.

iso1631• 4 years ago

Their end goal was never to protect children, their goal is to eliminate all pornography from the internet.

That's never going to happen. All it would do is drive regular porn to the same corners of the internet where snuff films and child porn live, and nobody wants that as that drives more people to those areas.

techdragon2• 4 years ago

They probably know they can’t realistically drive it off the net, so they are likely well aware that it would end up in those corners… and with my cynicism hat firmly on I think that the organised puritanical groups know this and are hoping they can then use the association with more unpleasant things in those corners of the internet to push even harder on their puritanical agendas.

nerdjon• 4 years ago

I am very worried about where this is going.

We already have enough issues with puritanical people pushing their views on everyone else, but I always felt at least some mild level of safety that I could still mostly do what I want if I was in certain states/cities.

I do realize that Visa was in a really hard place at this point and they likely had to make this decision, so I don't exactly blame Visa here. But it worries me that it could even get to this point that Visa is somehow responsible and I see they are not trying to go over Discover.

mise_en_place2• 4 years ago

But I thought we don't need VISA anymore? We can just use the latest crypto /s

auggierose• 4 years ago

Well, cases like that make me think we actually DO need crypto. We do need an equivalent of digital cash, because what some CEOs or board members think and do shouldn't influence whether you can pay your rent or not. It's really as simple as that. If you can learn to drive a car and not kill a massive amount of people in the process, you can probably also learn how to operate a crypto wallet safely.

dangerboysteve• 4 years ago

seriously, if you were Visa what would you do ?

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-62372964

wollsmoth10• 4 years ago

What a mess.

They started requiring age verification for the people in uploaded videos but maybe they should take it a step further and only accept content from approved accounts, like reputable studios that keep records.

knaik946• 4 years ago

One of the reasons why pornhub is popular is that it lets individual users create a professional looking channel for themselves and has subscriptions which it takes a cut of. The approved accounts thing already exists and pornhub has already purged old/unverified content in the name of safety once, in December 2020. It removed removed around 10 million videos. Visa and Mastercard already went through this process with pornhub and other mindgeek-owned websites. https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/14/22173858/pornhub-videos-...

Manuel_D• 4 years ago

They already are: Google for 2257 records keeping requirements.

labrador4• 4 years ago

I believe that recent crackdowns are worse for people in the long run. Lets assume that most sexually active people look at porn now and then, which I think is a safe assumption, and that teens learn about sex from watching porn.

These changes and age verification requirements have eliminated all the normal amateur sex scenes between regular consenting adults (On RedTube for example) and left the age-verified professional porn, which depicts unrealistic sex between adults who don't give a sh*t about each other, but have perfect bodies and big parts. Instead of showing wholesome normal sex, now all we get is porn shop slut/stud sex

wollsmoth10• 4 years ago

Studio shot material is definitely a bit more exaggerated and more selective with their performers. However, I don't really have the impression that amateur shot stuff is "showing wholesome normal sex". Some studios do produce more realistic video but in my experience the amateur stuff is just worse lit and self shot. Still usually made by someone just trying to get a few quick bucks.

GekkePrutser2• 4 years ago

I think the OPs point was that teenagers could start considering this the 'normal'. Personally I give them a little more credit. But it is a good point.

labrador4• 4 years ago

All I'm saying is that amateurs are going to have amateur sex so it's closer to the norm than pro sex and probably better for teens to watch and it's too bad that a lot of it will be gone, leaving mostly pro stuff.

I understand the motivation: let's reduce the trafficking of women and revenge porn, but I'm not sure we're going about it in a good way.

owow123• 4 years ago

The market gets what the market wants.

Unless you believe there's some sinister cabal out there conspiring to hurt 18-25 years with porn, you'll just have to accept what's out there is what people pay to see.

The big hardcore porn scenes aren't cheap they are deliberate and calculated.

depicts unrealistic sex between adults

Doesn't depict the kind of sex you like to watch or partake in but "Middle America" isn't the only view point (no offence if your not American).

There's plenty of bars / clubs / spaces / apps for "kinksters" and the more adventurous. "kink" came before porn and will exist long after it.

Its unfortunate hardcore porn rises to the homepage of these porn sites but its simple economics "ew that's gross, lemme just click it real quick" and there's the advertising space sold - its just "the algorithm" at it again.

Maybe you should make an account and let "the algorithm" do its thing.

ratchetbob• 4 years ago

well the problem is censorship from Visa is distorting the market. i.e., many people like amateur porn but this makes amateur porn have a higher barrier.

labrador4• 4 years ago

I have never paid for porn because there is so much free stuff, so I can only speak to the free stuff. I'm talking about widely available free porn that is supported with advertising. I hear it's softer than the paid stuff.

jwond• 4 years ago

Unless you believe there's some sinister cabal out there conspiring to hurt 18-25 years with porn, you'll just have to accept what's out there is what people pay to see.

I don’t think porn companies are necessarily trying to harm people in the same way I don’t think social media companies, casinos, drug dealers, etc. are necessarily trying to harm people. They are trying to make money, and they don’t care too much if they cause harm in doing so.

sidlls3• 4 years ago

The difference being mainly that these clubs, bars and magazines are all analog and, prior to the wide availability of porn on the internet, were not something the vast majority of people were exposed to. Kinks have existed since sex started. But that doesn’t mean they were (or are) “normal”. “Normal” isn’t meant to be derogatory as I use it: it’s just shorthand for what the 1-sigma group in the distribution considers “typical”

pessimizer2• 4 years ago

This is an eternal contradiction in US attitudes towards porn. Porn was condemned by mainstream consensus in the 80s/90s for creating unrealistic and strange (plastic) bodily standards, but the companies that were closest to the mainstream and in every hotel PPV were Vivid and Wicked, who were the pinnacle of that slick plastic style. The farther you got away from them, the more natural people looked and behaved.

edit: even now, the places where extreme bodily exaggerations, distortions, and surgical interventions dominate are very vanilla and mainstream, like instagram and twitter, or even softcore/non-nude.

seydor3• 4 years ago

It's not even about porn. Nudist websites now also require real ID verification for their members. I can see this extended to fitness websites soon.

pueblito• 4 years ago

As porn star Cherie DeVille explains, the story is, and has been, a lot weirder than that. Because Visa and Mastercard hold effective duopoly status all over the world — controlling 98% of credit transactions in the U.K., 80% in the E.U., and over 70% in the U.S. — no porn performer can afford to cross the rules for acceptable content the two companies have laid down. And those rules are beyond strange.

“Women are allowed to squirt, but we’re not allowed to urinate,” DeVille says. “We can’t insert our panties into our vaginas anymore, because that’s an object. I tried to use a carrot-shaped dildo. That’s a problem because that’s an object, too, but a phallic-shaped dildo is apparently okay.” She shakes her head in amazement. “The rules are completely nonsensical.”

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/meet-the-censored-cherie-devil...

nicbou• 4 years ago

That meeting must have looked like a Monty Python sketch

pixxel• 4 years ago

Forgive me, but I’m sat here wondering what “squirt” is in reference too. I don’t wish to google it. Diarrhoea related? So women can defacate but not urinate?

JamesBarney• 4 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_ejaculation

nsajko2• 4 years ago

Look here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_ejaculation

Note that both male and female ejaculation may be faked in a porn movie.

Mountain_Skies• 4 years ago

Female ejaculation. There doesn't seem to be a consensus on if it is it's own fluid or just spontaneous urination.

nsajko2• 4 years ago

Relevant sub-thread from a previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24297406

"Fantastical" quote from the above:

> Our banking partners recently notified us that they are no longer willing to support the sales of realistic sex toys. I understand that your products were designed to depict the body parts of mythological and fantastical creatures, and we have indicated this to our banking partners in an effort to advocate for continuing to support your business here on Stripe. As a result of these discussions, our banking partners have agreed that they are willing to continue supporting your business as long as you are not selling products that are colored such that they might be mistaken for human flesh.

Ekaros3• 4 years ago

Central Bank currencies are starting to look better and better. At least then it is the government deciding. And that might be controlled by voters. Or violent revolutions.

Nolandforme• 4 years ago

How is that a better option? The people pushing these anti-porn movements by dragging payment processors to court also have massive influence within the government, they would simply forbid any use of their currency on unapproved items.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 4 years ago

Section 230 rocks! I love watching an endless stream of porn with clearly unwitting female subjects. Visa needs to stay in their lane!

BasilPH2• 4 years ago

The relevant law here is called SESTA-FOSTA. It forces companies to ensure they don't host content that facilitates sexual exploitation. This has impacted full-service workers (i.e., prostitutes). Before SESTA-FOSTA, they could put up ads on specialized websites, chat with the clients and then have them come to a room they had rented. This arrangement gave them basic security.

After SESTA-FOSTA, the pages hosting those ads folded, as they couldn't comply with the new rules. Many full-service workers are now walking the streets again and have to have sex in their clients' cars. It's obvious that this makes them much more vulnurable.

It even goes further: Banks will close your account if they think your business has something to do with "sex", even if what you do is legal. If they feel you might be a risk, they freeze your account.

This law has hurt many sex workers, often people already at the very bottom of society. On the other hand, it's unclear how many lives it saved from sexual exploitation.

Sex workers are vulnerable, and many women are being abused. But the way this law was enacted, I can't help but think that pushing sex work further into illegality was a desired side-effect.

Source: I know a couple of sex workers in NYC.

AndyMcConachie• 4 years ago

You're right about SESTA-FOSTA being terrible, but I don't think it's the relevant law here.

The relevant code here is 1591(a)(2).

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1591

The opinion of the court is that the defendents benefit monetarily from a commercial sex act involving someone below 18 years of age.

jcranmer2• 4 years ago

If you want to understand why this happened, read this recent court decision: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cacd.82...

Basically, a court recently ruled that, since Visa is processing payments for ad purchases on Pornhub, Visa is a co-conspirator on all sex trafficking and child porn that Pornhub is involved with. Apparently Pornhub merely being alleged to have engaged in those activities is sufficient knowledge to constitute a "meeting of the minds" for Visa to become a participant in those activities.

(As you might imagine, I vehemently disagree with that ruling. But as it's the ruling that stands, it's the situation that Visa finds itself in, and were I in Visa's shoes, I'd do exactly the same thing they're doing now. They really don't want to be a part of this--and they really shouldn't be a part of this, and dumping Pornhub's ad purchases is the fastest route they can take to not be a part of this, as problematic as it is.)

savant_penguin• 4 years ago

That's an interesting take.

Would other companies that support pornhub/across in any way also be considered participants? Water supply/electricity/ internet providers/whoever sells them dildos/food

happyopossum• 4 years ago

Payments are a pretty specific aspect of trafficking, and while it's feasible some of those other areas you mention could be problematic, Visa has to be much more worried than the caterer.

jcranmer2• 4 years ago

The argument specifically relies on the financial processing role:

MindGeek is being sued for knowingly monetizing child porn. Visa’s act of continuing to recognize MindGeek as a merchant is directly linked to MindGeek’s criminal act, as Visa’s act served to keep open the means through which MindGeek completed its criminal act knowing that that criminal act was being committed. At this early stage of the proceedings, before Plaintiff has had any discovery from which to derive Visa’s state of mind, the Court can comfortably infer that Visa intended to help MindGeek monetize child porn from the very fact that Visa continued to provide MindGeek the means to do so and knew MindGeek was indeed doing so. Put yet another way, Visa is not alleged to have simply created an incentive to commit a crime, it is alleged to have knowingly provided the tool used to complete a crime.

TheDong• 4 years ago

I think a more interesting analogy than water/electricity would be storage.

Selling child porn has a special place in the law in a way that "feeding suspected CP criminals" does not.

But storing is also special. Storing child porn is very illegal, so how far does that extend? Does AWS renting an EC2 instance to pornhub, knowing pornhub may store CP on it, mean AWS is complicit in storing child porn?

Does Western Digital selling an SSD to pornhub for their datacenter make WD complicit in storing child porn?

Does the data-center that leases them a server become complicit in storing and distributing CP?

imperio592• 4 years ago

These utilities likely have laws that shield them from liability for these things, otherwise every illegal grow-op would cause the power company to be criminally liable for having supplied power to the grower's house and that makes no sense.

In this case Visa knows full well what they are enabling, by allowing payments to be processed on PH, especially given the volume of transactions, there's no way they don't know what they are supporting.

krn• 4 years ago

I have two completely different takes on this.

On one hand, if a business generating almost $500M in revenue per year[1] is doing something illegal, it shouldn't be allowed to operate. Simple as that. If it is allowed to operate, then it should have access to the same payment methods as any other business.

On another hand, if I belonged to a group of people who believe that such companies shouldn't exist[2] and had no way of getting them banned completely, that's exactly what I would try to do: force their biggest business partners to cut ties with them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MindGeek

[2] https://exoduscry.com/

colechristensen2• 4 years ago

I think a payment processor has some – but not much – responsibility for the transactions they enable.

But you're right in that if a thing is illegal, it should be targeted directly and not by making private companies responsible for defining and enforcing "law".

pcthrowaway2• 4 years ago

On one hand, if a business generating almost $500M in revenue per year[1] is doing something illegal, it shouldn't be allowed to operate. Simple as that. If it is allowed to operate, then it should have access to the same payment methods as any other business

I suspect if all businesses were held to this standard perfectly, there would be no businesses operating that generated $500M in revenue per year. Every business at that scale is doing something illegal somewhere. Not saying I agree with the state of things, but it seems businesses have decided occasional penalties for getting caught things illegal in jurisdictions that are capable of compelling them to pay the fine, are part of doing business.

marcosdumay• 4 years ago

Yes, that's what anybody would try. And it's up to the government to cut that crap up and punish the people that are harassing innocent third parties due to a personal crusade.

Absent punishment, everybody will just drag all bystanders (from around any scene, there is somebody that disagrees with anything) into a court.

commandlinefan3• 4 years ago

a business generating almost $500M in revenue per year[1] is doing something illegal

But this is like going after McDonald's because some drug dealers use their parking lots to conduct business.

jagtesh• 4 years ago

I find it quite odd that payment providers are being singled out. They aren’t going after the cloud provider, or the other services helping this company run their operations.

if I belonged to a group of people who believe that such companies shouldn’t exist..

This seems to be the only plausible explanation. Going after them by exploiting a legal technicality (hacking the law). I don’t know if I feel any better about this approach, than I do about the original allegation.

Perhaps, it’s the part of me seeking some order in this world, holding out for a more pure form of justice. An ideal that doesn’t exist in reality.

L6489afSMNLNFDa5• 4 years ago

If you belonged to a group of people who believe that such companies shouldn't exist, then you should lobby for it to be outlawed, not try to rule by (small!) minority.

raxxorraxor• 4 years ago

But it isn't doing something illegal, their users do. They profit from it, but we are back to the problem that platform providers are responsible for user content. Now just if financial transactions are involved luckily.

Not a pornhub fan, but I believe there are far more exploitative companies out there.

bergenty• 4 years ago

So are the internet providers then, and the electricity companies.

throwaway290• 4 years ago

1) For years PH used to do the stuff that should totally, unequivocally never be allowed. Then they did a 180, some damage control and a spring cleaning. You can argue that what PH does now should be allowed, but then one of its victims lawyers up and brings up something from dark past in which PH is totally implicated. Now what?

2) Visa, like any other business, must be allowed to use own judgement when deciding whom it's dealing with. They are no saint, though, because they probably noticed that they were dealing with PH (given its size) long enough ago and ignored what was going on there.

imperio592• 4 years ago

This is a great decision to fight human sex trafficking and child pornography. Pornography is a giant societal scourge which funds a ton of human misery and social problems and anything we can do to make it harder for these businesses to operate is great news IMO.

yorwba• 4 years ago

Visa has not been found guilty of anything in this case yet. The court merely didn't fully grant their motion to dismiss.

That only establishes that Visa is actually being accused of something illegal, i.e. Pornhub allegedly knowingly profiting from child porn and Visa allegedly providing payment services to Pornhub while allegedly knowing that Pornhub was using those payment services to profit from child porn (allegedly) would make Visa a participant in the alleged crime, if those allegiations turn out to be true. Hence Visa is a defendant in the court case where the truth of the allegiations will then be debated.

That's why the document you linked uses the word "allegedly" so often.

jjav• 4 years ago

These are the scenarios to keep in mind whenever people promote cashless societies. Every transaction that needs to go through a gatekeeper means there is a gate that might be closed on you.

Only cash is able to protect the ability to do private transactions withouth any possibility of external dependencies or interference.

knaik946• 4 years ago

The complexity in this situation comes from the fact that Visa rejected Pornhub as a merchant in 2020 due to the same issue, and after Pornhub removed millions of unverified videos, Visa resumed working with the advertising arm of them. Although never officially said, it is clear what the reasoning was for removing the content.

treeman79• 4 years ago

Meanwhile Netflix is hosting soft core child porn.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/net...

devwastaken• 4 years ago

Prime example of "think of the children" laws giving judges the power to legislate from the bench. The closer we try to achieve the fantasy of ultimate safety we destroy freedom in the process, and nobody was protected.

dieselgate• 4 years ago

It’s hilarious to me that ads for porn are just more porn

wollsmoth10• 4 years ago

A fierce competition for the people who might actually pay.

seydor3• 4 years ago

Google does not allow anything that shows tits even if covered. And google gatekeeps advertising. But i remember decades ago, late night shows on TV which were almost soft porn had lots of ads, especially alcohol/cigarettes. We live in neovictorian times.

root_axis• 4 years ago

Visa only cares about money, just like every other megacorp. They will take as much money as they can for whatever they can, the only reason they're suspending payments is because they are facing legal liabilities. What other choice do they have?

ivraatiems• 4 years ago

I think legal porn (e. g. featuring consenting adults) is generally a-okay and shouldn't be illegal or banned... but I also don't need much convincing to believe MindGeek and Pornhub are bad actors. It simply isn't in their financial interest to protect people who need and deserve protecting, and so they didn't/don't. Anti-porn groups couldn't ask for more ideal enemies.

Yes, I know that the vast majority of the content they post is perfectly fine and legal. But enough of it isn't, and they are lax enough in checking, that they kinda deserve punishment at this point.

But I also don't think porn is going away. I hope whoever replaces them (looking at you, OnlyFans) is less scummy, so it is easier to defend them.

cricalix• 4 years ago

A timely podcast about some of this is Hot Money: Who Rules Porn. Pushkin Industries and the Financial Times. Dives into some of the history of the industry, payment processors, and so on.

antonymy• 4 years ago

I don't personally care one whit about the fortunes of Pornhub but this sets a very bad precedent for the internet. The payment processing duopoly is a huge problem, they are able to dictate way too much of what is allowed to exist on the internet. Today it's illegal pornography that everybody agrees is terrible, but that's how it always starts. The safe targets, the stuff nobody objects to, to establish precedent. Once they have this power to censor it is extremely hard to walk it back.

markdown• 4 years ago

These card companies have too much power. Companies engaged in the kava trade (vendors, kava bars, etc) have a very hard time with payments processors and banks due to the strict rules of Visa and Mastercard despite kava being a legal dietary supplement in the US.

simoneau• 4 years ago

I recommend this podcast-miniseries "Hot Money: porn, power and profit" by the Financial Times:

https://www.ft.com/content/762e4648-06d7-4abd-8d1e-ccefb74b3...

It spends quite a bit of time explaining how the credit card companies became the de-facto regulators of porn on the Internet.

seydor3• 4 years ago

Awaiting for when they will suspend payments to facebook , where a lot more child porn is uploaded. I hope visa is forced to expand this on all adult websites and even further. Maybe some of the cryptocurrencies will finally do what they were designed to do

mrkramer• 4 years ago

Leaving porn aside....Bitcoin FTW

This is what Satoshi was talking about; "Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments. While the system works well enough for most transactions, it still suffers from the inherent weaknesses of the trust based model[0]."

So I need to trust and rely on Visa, MasterCard and other credit card companies not to cut me off their network? And they can do it anytime because they might not like my business, my business model or my business practices. If business is legal and up and running just let it be.

[0] https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

vlod• 4 years ago

I've been thinking of what happened with the Canadian truckers. Irrespective of whether you believe their cause, the ability for the state (Canada) to freeze bank accounts is disturbing.

With the general use of centralized crypto exchange, we just swapped two masters (Visa/Mastercard) with another (Coinbase).

Of course with private wallets, we could technically avoid centralized exchanges, but the on/off ramps to crypto (fiat in/out) with the state KYC requirements, an authoritarian state could still go after the linked bank accounts.

Welcome suggestions on the way forward. Maybe decentralized exchanges?

LatteLazy• 4 years ago

These companies need to be regulated like any other utility. But no one will because they're hoping to use private companies to at morality police in a way governments are not allowed to.

badrabbit• 4 years ago

It should be a law to require human approval before any porn content is posted. I mean for obvious hints of minor presence. They can require government id for account creation as well. Moreover, "Teen (18+)", "barely legal" and similar content should not be allowed.

You would think DRM would have been all about enforcing this instead of corporate greed.

stereoradonc• 4 years ago

I find it hard to believe Visa and Mastercard were unaware of what MindGeek does. Why reach to a situation which can be a PR disaster and avoid these companies altogether?

erenyeager• 4 years ago

Welcome to hear from. The damages of widespread available pornography and the child exploitation rings around them are outraging. These websites are a gateway into cam sites and shady kik group chats where adult men sext minors. This is my perspective, being a victim myself.

zxcvbn4038• 4 years ago

I think the trick here will ultimately be to add a layer of indirection. Mindgeek could launch a bazillion internet bodegas that sell gift certificates that happened to be redeemable at Pornhub and their other properties. They could operate their ad business over regular banking networks. Basically anything and everything ti make it more complicated for Visa and Mastercard to simply look up Mindgeek and block the account. It would also provide some relief to Visa/Mastercard since they could say truthfully that they don't do business with Mindgeek. You can also counter the bad propaganda by pointing out that Visa/Mastercard are still very active selling alcohol, tobacco, narcotics, gambling (half the US states allow you to buy lottery tickets with credit cards, all the casinos take credit cards), guns, and pretty much every other vice. Though I don't think their role in purchasing guns makes them accomplices to murder anymore then processing a payment for a porn site makes them an co-conspirator to anything related to that. But if they want to make the case that they are then that sets precedent they are co-conspirators for everything else as well.

hda2• 4 years ago

Wow, finally a legitimate use case for cryptocurrencies!

In all seriousness, this nonsense is exactly why I continue to support crypto to this day. Visa, Mastercard and some random court jurisdiction in some random country should not have a say in whom I transact with.