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Itch.io apologise for "frustration and confusion" after delisting thousands of NSFW projects (www.rockpapershotgun.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/games@lemmy.world
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[–] 345 points 1 year ago (95 children)

We can blame the religious organisation as much as we want, but the fundamental problem here is payment processors. They should be common carriers. Content-neutral middlemen who facilitate payment to anything that isn't literally unlawful. This is no different to an ISP throttling access to Netflix because they operate their own streaming platform. If the storefront, the developer, and the buyer are all ok with a transaction, there's no good reason for a fourth party to stand in the way of that.

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  • [–] 119 points 1 year ago (58 children)

    Yeah, payment processing is among the many many many industries that ought to be nationalized so they can be administered in a transparent and democratic manner (see also, healthcare education housing electricity internet etc.)

    There's just too much opportunity to use it to manipulate markets and oppress minority viewpoints for it to remain in private hands imo

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  • [–] 17 points 1 year ago* (2 children)

    Putting the ridicoulous idea that governments are fair and transparent aside, payment processors need to be international. Otherwise, most countries will not be able to access services because their local payment processor is not supported by smaller websites.

    However, the payment processors should be regulated with something similar to net neutrality so they can't discriminate payments. And EU could probably launch a government run competitor to dilute their duopoly.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (13 children)

    So you want Trump and MAGA politicians to be able to deny your payments instead?

    The problem with "just let the government do it" is when the government is run by people like this.

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  • [–] 25 points 1 year ago (15 children)

    Maybe the idea of BTC was fine. What wasn't fine is the idea of mining.

    And maybe payments over the Internet or over PSTN are fundamentally different from messaging, conferencing, downloading files, all that stuff.

    But what's important is the ability to pay for a service with something resembling cash IRL in the sense that an ATM machine from which you took that cash can't take it back because you are paying for an adult journal with it.

    But at the same time how can there be so few payment processors that they can affect a platform's decision to do a kind of business?

    That's where we should look. Why is it hard to be a payment processor.

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  • [–] 17 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Payment processing should be treated like a utility.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    That "treated like a utility" approach involves reliance upon the state, which is sometimes controlled by the hostile parties. This is what I don't like in Internet political discussions, such solutions feel as if they assumed that you make it good once and it remains good.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (8 children)

    That’s where we should look. Why is it hard to be a payment processor.

    Because you essentially need a global presence to at all be worth using. That is why it is a joke that NOBODY accepts American Express and only the shadiest of international ATMs accept Discover (saved my ass in Germany back in the 10s though)

    You are literally saying that we need to look at why there aren't more global mega corporations.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    GNU Taler is supposed to be a solution. Sort of a federated one. If I understand it correctly.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago*

    I am not particularly familiar with that but it will have an uphill battle. Replacing online transactions is a challenge but is feasible. And while I will always clown on cryptocurrency, I do wish at least one had actually taken off to fulfill that role without focusing on To Da Moon scamming.

    Getting to the point that you can pay for food on holiday is a much less feasible one for a purely software project run without the backing of Special Interests.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    I'm going to be really dumb

    Why does a payment processor need to exist?

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  • [–] 13 points 1 year ago* (3 children)

    I am an artist in OtherCountry. You want to buy art from me. How do you do it?

    Physical money? Okay. You now need a way to track that YOU sent 40 bucks in the mail and that I received 40 bucks in the mail and that is (at least) two different national postal services involved. And now I need a way to convert 40 YourLandia dollars into OtherCountry pounds. AND we need to make sure all of that happened quickly enough that exchange rates didn't meaningfully change

    Digital money? Who is running the site? How many different sites do I need to have accounts on to accept payment from all the countries I want to sell to?

    At the end of the day: For any transaction that is not face to face transfer of hard currency (and even then but...), you need an intermediary that both parties trust. Payment processors are that intermediary. Sometimes they are the person taking my IOU and turning it into money so that you can give me a hamburger. Sometimes that is effectively a courier making sure your money gets to me no matter where on the planet we are.

    It is what lets us have transactions that aren't "Okay, you drop your armor and I'll drop my money and then we'll slowly change places and... who the fuck just ran out of the bushes to steal the money I put down while waiting for you to put down your armor? And why are you now both doing the Carlton?"

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago* (13 children)

    No grasshopper, the blame falls squarely on the former. The latter was fine with things before

    But we DO need to solve the payment processor issue as well, ever heard of GNU-Taler ??

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    The reason for a "fourth party" is because so many of these are fully international.

    The dream of cryptocurrency as actual currency (rather than just reinventing stocks) was the idea that you could use your bitcoin wallet to pay for a pizza in Kansas, London, other London, Shanghai, or Timbuktu with no perceived difference. That IS what visa/mastercard provide.

    Get rid of that "fourth party" and now every single online service needs to have office space in every single country so that they can accept and convert purchases on their own. And the end result will just be dropping the majority of the world.

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