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It's absurd and dystopian that payment processors get to decide what we can and can't see on the internet. That companies like Visa and Mastercard can use their enormous size to bully companies into taking stuff offline - based on the reactionary politics of a small group.

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Now, understandably, some games should not be made available for sale if they are promoting particularly dangerous or hateful actions. Ban that garbage. But that definition must be up to the store, and then the law to decide, right? Not the arbitrary whims of Visa, Mastercard, or PayPal.

I appreciate that some are disappointed in how Valve and - more pointedly - Itch dealt with this situation. But Itch is a gnat compared to the payment companies. And they're threatening the site with total annihilation if they don't capitulate fast. The site simply cannot fight or protest it.

In Brazil, we have a digital payment system called Pix, which charges absolutely no fees from Brazilians, is instantaneous, and is state-owned. This type of service cannot be in the hands of big tech companies, which only care about profit and have no ethics.

I thought the controls were to prevent children from seeing adult materials before their brains were developed enough for rational thinking. Mind you, I am seeing a dick-a-day pop up on Bluesky. What is wrong with people? Wasn’t PornHub and every other porn site enough. Everything is ruined by men.

Then you simply need to create a well-funded anti-golf action group and pester Visa and MC until they think that the sheer volume of golf-related complaints must mean the whole world is against golf

They won't realise they need to stick up for it until it's too late! We'll brand them as argyll-wearing sickos anyway, so they feel ashamed to stand up, despite pretty much everyone having golfed at least once in their lives

Fun fact! We brazilians have our own free payment processor called Pix which is also being massively targeted by these companies and the lobbying that is going on right now is kind of scary

But it also gives rise to crypto which can easily be used for criminal enterprises. Like all the shit the rich get up to. Like buying people. You’ll notice no government has actually done anything concrete against crypto. They just bitch and moan.

My bank offers me a choice of Visa and Mastercard. It is a very dominant duopoly. They are not obliged to support payments for illegal activities, but any attempt to veto legal content seems to me to be a de facto abuse of a dominant market position. Hopefully at least the EU can rein this in.