Visa and MasterCard Are Trying to Dictate What You Can Watch on Pornhub
This illustrates an issue that I’ve noticed for a while (separate from the discussion about porn websites)- we can either have truly free markets everywhere or we can have strong regulation everywhere, but trying to mix both causes conflicts.  In a free market, Pornhub could just use a different payment processor.  But because of the strict regulation in the financial market, there are very few payment options, and Visa and Mastercard can abuse their oligopoly.  To fix this, we can either lower the bar to entry in the financial markets, which would mean that Visa and Mastercard couldn’t  be gatekeepers to payments.  Or we could force stronger regulations on the financial market and force them to do business with everyone unless given an offer by the government to stop, and probably cap their rates so they can’t abuse their oligopoly with pricing schemes either.<p>What’s funny is that most people would disagree with one of my proposed solutions and agree with the other, depending on who the affected parties are.  Blocking payments to a porn website? A lot of people applaud this on a moral stance.  Refusing to make a cake for a gay couple?  A lot of those same people condemn this action.  But they are very similar actions once you take away the emotional pleas.<p>I guess what I’m trying to get at is that we can’t have one solution on day one and then switch to another solution on day two.  Trying a mix is how we created these problems.  I could expand but I think I’ll leave it here before I get to political.<p>Edit: I guess I should acknowledge that a fully regulated market is inefficient and slow, and that’s part of the reason communism&#x2F;socialism ended in the collapse of the USSR.  A fully deregulated financial market would probably mean some shady payment processors would pop up and take advantage of people.  But what we have right now allows a small group of unelected people to make decisions for us by taking advantage of the situation they’ve lobbied for.  I guess you have to decide whether you like this status quo or if you want to try an alternative.