More Paypal news that isn't in The News.

[hairyears]

This deserves a wider audience: you can't pay for Dreamwidth (or support the Diaspora project) using Paypal. Or Google Checkout. Here's what Dreamwidth have to say about that:
We've seen a bunch of people questioning why we don't accept payment via PayPal. We used to, but PayPal closed our account with them, after demanding that we censor our users

Comments

[gerald_duck]

I wonder to what extent this problem is US-specific?

And I wonder, if similar happens in Europe, what the European Parliament makes of it…

This is an area in which I have relatively little difficulty sorting out my own thoughts: there is, to me, a clear distinction between curtailing my free speech and merely failing to enable it. A company that won't let me publish on their website, or won't let that website take payment for letting me publish, or whatever to the nth generation, is failing to enable: if they sold noise-cancelling systems for use at political rallies or whatever, that would be curtailment.

However, I don't think something can be a common carrier while being selective about what it carries. And a payment broker should respect a customer's common-carrier status. However, that shouldn't be a legal compulsion, not least because a single common carrier in an environment where censoring content providers are the norm will become statistically more likely to represent a liability, just as Amsterdam is now a cesspool of

[purplecthulhu]

I suspect a lot of Netherlanders and a good few Amsterdamers would object to your suggestion that 'Amsterdam is now a cesspool of iniquity'.

[gerald_duck]

Maybe. But I've been there. The levels of rubbish, panhandling, drug taking and conspicuously tawdry sex were pretty distasteful. If I was wanting to go somewhere vaguely louche, I'd much rather be in Camden, Soho or Montmartre.

Which is a pity, because I'm myself pretty liberal. I wish I couldn't draw a causal link between their commendable liberality and the mess they're in, but I can.

Interestingly, I've subsequently visited Zürich, which seems to do a hugely better job of being liberal while also spotlessly tidy and discreet. I guess the difference is that the deviants in Zürich are rich deviants. /-8

[shermarama]

I live in Amsterdam, and have also lived in London, and my experiences of Amsterdam and Camden really don't match yours. Amsterdam certainly has tawdry sex in the red light district, because that's what it's for. That and drunk/stoned tourists. In terms of rubbish, Camden is far worse; one of the things I regularly notice and appreciate about Amsterdam is how clean it is. I barely saw a leaf on the ground this autumn because there were big hoovery machines collecting them all the time. (I suspect it's something to do with not letting them block the drainage systems.) Panhandling I can't really comment on; I don't see much of it in the rest of Amsterdam, maybe there's more in the Red Light District (if, by Amsterdam, you actually mean the Red Light District, please say so, and if you come here again, try going further than the bit that makes a nice living out of tourists before you judge the whole city), and as for drug taking, I don't see how being able to go to a coffee shop and have a civilised discussion about what sort of weed you

[psych0naut]

I'd be surprised if any gas station had the gumption to refuse to serve Westboro Baptist Church members. The organization is notoriously litigious, and damn good at it, too-Fred Phelps was a noted civil rights lawyer before he became more famous for his outlandish preaching, and though he's presently disbarred, a large proportion of his family are lawyers. They would probably slap the gas station with a lawsuit for illegal religious discrimination which, regardless of its merits, would cost the station a lot of time and money to fight.

[gerald_duck]

Indeed, a lot of people are beginning to suspect the Church was constructed with the specific purpose of generating lawsuits, rather than out of any sincere religious fervour. Commercial-grade trolling, in effect.

[janieluk]

Agreed. Unofficial censorship through restriction of payments has had a big effect on a swathe of the internet, most obviously the porn industry where sites are now unable to find a payment processor unless they adhere to strict rules on type and level of content. Paypal restriction by itself has a large effect as the conversion rate drops if people use a different payment method nowadays.

[naath]

Whether or not PayPal has the free speech right to not provide me with payment services I *certainly* have the free speech right to moan in public about how obnoxious PayPal and their obnoxious policies are...

(I hate it when "free speech" trolls act like complaining about some speech is equivalent to censoring that speech).

[cartesiandaemon]

My response to these supposed-libertarians is that AFAICT, monopolies are an unfortunate failure mode of the free market, not a success. That is, if the free market is supposed to genuinely be transferring abilities to needs (rather than just an excuse for the lucky, powerful or successful to grind everyone else into dust), that works as long as there's competition, which works as long as one company doesn't have a stranglehold on the market