Comment by tavavex
1 day ago
It's problematic because the ability to conveniently and send and receive money without using cash is vital in modern society. It effectively acts as a utility. Utilities don't get to pick and choose based on their execs' valuable opinions. The bar should be at refusing illegal transactions and always allowing everything else. Their purpose needs to be serving people and businesses, not dispensing moral judgements by banning businesses they don't like from participating in the cashless economy.
These kind of rights are something which only physical persons should have, and card networks aren't infringing on the rights of real humans. Businesses aren't people, and they shouldn't have any inherent right to be provided with utilities or payment solutions. And as it stands today they don't.
You as a real human should have a right to have a bank account and to send and receive money. Just as you as you as a real human should have a right to access any other basic utility.
Your business should not have any such rights. If the power company doesn't want to provide your data center or steel factory with electricity, then your business shall have no right to it.
If a card payment company doesn't want to provide their services to your brothel or your weapons factory or your weed shop, then your business shall have no right to it.
First of all, payment processors don't grant this 'right' to individuals either, so I'm not sure what the point of arguing this is. Lots of payment-related companies will ban you if you do legal, but 'wrong' transactions over them, a lot of which is driven by pressure from the payment processors.
The other thing is, why are we separating businesses and people at all here? I wasn't talking about rights that groups have, this is about the obligations of a provider. If you're in the business of processing payments, you process all legal payments - that's it. It is what you do, it's the business. It is not their job to care about what organizational structure is behind the payment any more that it's their job to care about the gender of the payer. I simply don't see the relevance.
The line you want to draw also doesn't make any sense. So, say I provide services to other individuals. If I do it through my real name and self, it's alright, but if I pay $20 to register a sole proprietorship, I lose my 'rights'? Why?
> If the power company doesn't want to provide your data center or steel factory with electricity, then your business shall have no right to it.
Payment processors are far more egregious than that. They don't create anything like the power or water company does, they are middlemen. It's like if the power company and my business agreed that I will pay them for power and they will supply me with power, but a middleman who handles the transmission lines goes "nuh-uh, I disagree" and cuts my power line. This is how payment processors work. I want to pay someone for a legal good or service, they want to provide me with a legal good or service, payment processor says no.
I can't express enough how much I don't understand wanting to deny businesses the 'right' to financial relevance while going full-steam-ahead on giving businesses the right to pick-and-choose customers based on their whims when they're providing a universal service that society relies on.