This right here is the law that congress would have to pass to make that a reality. A sort of "common carrier" law for money.

Otherwise, they are under no obligation (or protection!).

We don't need a new law for this. We need to enforce monopoly law.

We just had a demonstration that the two biggest payment processors, together controlling the vast majority of credit card payments, made the same policy change at the same time and in the process completely suppressed many people's businesses.

Treat them as an anti-consumer oligopoly and regulate accordingly.

Maybe in 2029 we can dream of proper trust busting. Probably sooner given current events. But this administration definitely isn't the one to deal with this.

And especially, they'd be negatively inclined to do anything based on this motivation. If anything, they'd cheer the payment processors on.

Legislators are more often chipping away common carrier protections on communications with various age and id laws than they are extending common carrier type protections into other areas. The fact that it seems to be happening around the globe makes me think its a coordinated campaign.

it's definitely the result of lobbying; i've experienced it firsthand in a former job. a private dark fiber provider successfully sued the county to prevent expansion of a previously-laid tax-funded municipal fiber project on anticompetitive grounds - he used every trick in the book including lobbying and it worked. and that was just one asshole who didn't want to compete with a small public project. scale that up to ILEC levels with billions in revenue and a revolving door economy and... yeah, i don't see this sort of thing playing out in the peoples' favor any time soon.

The other side of this is the US Government imposes strict requirements around KYC and AML/CTF. Banks have effectively been deputised by the US government to enforce and regulate payments.

A bank can't merely process any transaction that comes its way. You need to know who the parties are, you need to check they aren't on a prohibited list, or in a prohibited country/region. You need to know the purpose of the transaction (to pick up money laundering, or drug/terrorism financing).

Sort of. Any company is free to boycott goods or services it doesn't approve of, however consumers also are free to boycott payment processors by paying with crypto made through ACH or wire transfers, or some other P2P payment method. I really think that credit card processors as predatory loan enablers and oligopolies need to be abolished and replaced by nonprofit credit unions with an electronic payment system that is universal, low cost, and non-discriminatory.

The problem is those other options aren't very common and crypto is pretty useless as a payment method these days due to slow processing and high value fluctuations. Wore transfer is also slow.

It's indeed ridiculous that you need to get a loan just to be able to pay with your own money. At least here in Europe most "credit cards" are actually debit cards. Because we really frown on loans (the best credit rating is for the person who has never even needed to take out a loan)

Agree, except:

> ...and crypto is pretty useless as a payment method these days due to slow processing and high value fluctuations.

That is not true. For example using USDT on Polygon is cheap (~0.00 USD fee), fast (a few seconds) and not volatile (because its value is tied to USD). There are other options too, with a slightly different set of tradeoffs.

The main problems of crypto are actually scams and illiteracy of the masses on how to use it. The situation is IMHO improving on both counts, but slowly.

>crypto is pretty useless as a payment method these days due to slow processing and high value fluctuations

Crypto != Bitcoin. Monero for example is relatively fast and stable with the additional benefit of full privacy and anonymity.

Governments have not promissed they won't go after them for things that are 'near the line' but it isn't clear over. So they must stay far away as they have money.

Ideally, they should be able disallow whatever they want, and give up that business if they don't want it.

What they can't do is create a monopoly situation and continue to be that selective---because there is no other game in town, due to their own actions.

They already have a monopoly situation, so either they must be forced to allow all transactions or they must be forced to allow those that will to use their networks.

Tell ya what. When the postal service runs a card network to compete with them, that charges lower interest, and doesn't monetize by selling transaction sets, then we can talk about CC companies being able to be picky about transactions. Til then? Nah...

Not when the systems in place have made these tools as the “de facto”, safe method of money transfer throughout the globe.

All credit card companies collectively have made themselves “the way” to do it; and they all moralize.

While this is ideaologically motivated, there are business reasons to not want to deal with porn. Porn has traditionally had disproportionately high charge-back rates, and it does waver on legal lines in several regions, even for US laws. It's a large cost center that I'm sure the business side won't miss dealing with.

100% - in the face of regulatory capture and monopolies - it's the exact same reason that net neutrality should be upheld.