A simple solution is to let the government do the blacklisting, and payment providers only need to (1) comply with the blacklist, (2) report suspicious activity, same as today. It would be a serious offense for companies to keep their own moral blacklists.
> Even if there were a million different credit card companies [...], they would still be bound by the same requirements.
Under monopolistic market conditions, there's way less incentive to saturate all corners of the market. Just because it didn't pass VISAs risk/reward calculation doesn't mean that other companies would come to the same conclusion. It's hard to give an exact prediction, but generally when monopolies/oligopolies go away the market situation improves for all other parties.
> What, exactly is the alternative?
A simple solution is to let the government do the blacklisting, and payment providers only need to (1) comply with the blacklist, (2) report suspicious activity, same as today. It would be a serious offense for companies to keep their own moral blacklists.
It would be for the government to do it as well. Your solution is for the government to re-enact McCarthy Era tactics without due process of the law. What makes you think that this blacklist will just be limited to the "bad hombres"?
> Under monopolistic market conditions, there's way less incentive to saturate all corners of the market. Just because it didn't pass VISAs risk/reward calculation doesn't mean that other companies would come to the same conclusion. It's hard to give an exact prediction, but generally when monopolies/oligopolies go away the market situation improves for all other parties.
Your monopolistic analysis is entirely irrelevant as it fails to account the big elephant in the room. It's no longer a free market if the government makes the way people get payed unworkable. By making porn a third rail, the government has imposed a ceiling on growth in the traditional credit card sector. It's regulation that's created a zero-sum game.
A simple solution is to let the government do the blacklisting, and payment providers only need to (1) comply with the blacklist, (2) report suspicious activity, same as today. It would be a serious offense for companies to keep their own moral blacklists.
> Even if there were a million different credit card companies [...], they would still be bound by the same requirements.
Under monopolistic market conditions, there's way less incentive to saturate all corners of the market. Just because it didn't pass VISAs risk/reward calculation doesn't mean that other companies would come to the same conclusion. It's hard to give an exact prediction, but generally when monopolies/oligopolies go away the market situation improves for all other parties.