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

[ext_208701]

Being in the position of running a hosting company we discovered early on that chargebacks are expensive and it's just good business sense to avoid any kind of customer that might generate them. For us this involves dropping every shell account application from IRC users or people who can't string a vaguely comprehensible sentence together. All we need is some illiterate moron to not be allowed to host their dubious content site and they'd be proclaiming across the whole internet that we'd censored them rather than the reality which is their application looks just like all the other fraudulent ones we dropped.

[ewx]

So the short answer is that ALL freeform discussion and community sites are subject to pervasive commercial censorship.

Strictly only those that take user payments. How to do it on a large scale without paying users being left as an exercise for the reader; I suspect advertizers are pretty wary too…

[panzerbjrn]

"adult content" services have very high chargeback rates ("goodness! of course I wasn't subscribing to that porn site! someone must have stolen my credit card!")

I see this as the real and genuine problem.
Paypal may have a near monopoly with Google checkout only really being small fry, but they are first and foremost a commercial entity that needs to make money.
And they do have to protect themselves.

I realise that it is annoying that they sometimes don't look at what really goes on on a site before they decide not to provide their services, but until a solution to the problem above has been found, I doubt this will go away.