Visa and Mastercard have been sued in various jurisdictions for facilitating the monetization of illegal content by some merchant in that jurisdiction before. They've been made party to the defendants and the court refused their "we have no part in this, we only move money around" and have failed at their motions to be removed from those cases.
Collective Shout has tried to get Steam and Itch to remove the content they don't like / is illegal in Australia.
From the article:
> “We raised our objection to rape and incest games on Steam for months, and they ignored us for months,” reads a blog post from Collective Shout. “We approached payment processors because Steam did not respond to us.”
So after they didn't succeed with Steam and Itch, they likely said to Visa and Mastercard "we tried to get your merchants to follow the law, they haven't. If we sue them, we're suing you too."
As Visa and Mastercard have lost that court case before, the payment processors then went to their merchants and likely said something along the lines of "If you get sued, we're getting sued too - so we're going to not process payments for you until you are not in danger of getting sued."
Could Visa and Mastercard rebuffed Collective Shout? Possibly... but then we'd be reading about how Itch, Steam, Visa, and Mastercard got sued in an Australian court and lost the case on illegal Australian porn.
It's Australia's fault that while they can handle a phallus on TV (as insinuated in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44717254 ), they can't handle a fur lined handcuff, schoolgirl uniform, or shaven anatomy.
Trying to blame the United States for this misplaced.
Visa and Mastercard (and all payment processors) are risk adverse and the risk of being included in another PR damaging and expensive lawsuit that they can't get out of despite having the limited role of moving money from customer to merchant.
If you want to blame someone for this fiasco, one should be looking instead at the laws in the country where this originated from and the courts that mandate the involvement of the payment processor as a defendant.
Collective Shout has tried to get Steam and Itch to remove the content they don't like / is illegal in Australia.
From the article:
> “We raised our objection to rape and incest games on Steam for months, and they ignored us for months,” reads a blog post from Collective Shout. “We approached payment processors because Steam did not respond to us.”
So after they didn't succeed with Steam and Itch, they likely said to Visa and Mastercard "we tried to get your merchants to follow the law, they haven't. If we sue them, we're suing you too."
As Visa and Mastercard have lost that court case before, the payment processors then went to their merchants and likely said something along the lines of "If you get sued, we're getting sued too - so we're going to not process payments for you until you are not in danger of getting sued."
Could Visa and Mastercard rebuffed Collective Shout? Possibly... but then we'd be reading about how Itch, Steam, Visa, and Mastercard got sued in an Australian court and lost the case on illegal Australian porn.
It's Australia's fault that while they can handle a phallus on TV (as insinuated in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44717254 ), they can't handle a fur lined handcuff, schoolgirl uniform, or shaven anatomy.
Trying to blame the United States for this misplaced.
Visa and Mastercard (and all payment processors) are risk adverse and the risk of being included in another PR damaging and expensive lawsuit that they can't get out of despite having the limited role of moving money from customer to merchant.
If you want to blame someone for this fiasco, one should be looking instead at the laws in the country where this originated from and the courts that mandate the involvement of the payment processor as a defendant.