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Comment on Itch.io deindexes NSFW games after becoming the latest target of skittish credit card companies and anti-porn group Collective Shout, catching an award-winning indie and more in the crossfire

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tal@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

All we gotta do is start a counter movement. Which I guarantee will be easier to grow than Collective Prudes.

My guess — and I haven’t seen anything where payment processors have released any details of what Collective Shout did – is that Collective Shout didn’t just call Visa and say “we don’t like this”. They probably found some sort of law, maybe in Australia, that processing payments for these violates, and had their lawyer send a nastygram to payment processors about it. The payment processors sent their warning letters to the retailer.

Like, the reason payment processors are useful as leverage for countries is because countries can put pressure on them, because payment processors do business all over and are gonna be skittish about violating laws in a bunch of countries, can get cut off from doing business there. And any one retailer just isn’t big enough for them to be worried about cutting off compared to getting cut off from a country.

If you want to put pressure on payment processors, I’d guess that you’re probably going to have to have some kind of law to threaten payment processor with on the grounds that processing payments to Steam and itch.io and other retailers and so forth when they are deindexing games results in some kind of legal violation. I’m not saying that that’s impossible, but it’s probably harder to do than it is for Collective Shout is to pull their shennanigans.

I’d also note that it is not at all clear that the present situation is the final state of affairs. That is, what my guess is that Valve and itch.io and so forth did is that they got their nastygram from the payment processors, then went to talk to their own lawyers. It’s entirely possible that after those lawyers have a look at it, they’re going to say “you can’t sell Game X in Country Z”, and Valve will just restrict the regions where they sell those games. That is, I would not be surprised if the scope on this restriction narrows, and Valve and itch.io are just playing it safe until they’re confident as of their legal position.

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tal@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
Also, relevant:

quoteinvestigator.com/2021/07/12/censor/

The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.

— John Gilmore, founding member Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)

In its original form, it meant that the Usenet software (which moves messages around in discussion newsgroups) was resistant to censorship because, if a node drops certain messages because it doesn’t like their subject, the messages find their way past that node anyway by some other route. This is also a reference to the packet-routing protocols that the Internet uses to direct packets around any broken wires or fiber connections or routers. (They don’t redirect around selective censorship, but they do recover if an entire node is shut down to censor it.)

— also Gilmore

Gilmore also stated that the denotation of the saying has broadened over time:

The meaning of the phrase has grown through the years. Internet users have proven it time after time, by personally and publicly replicating information that is threatened with destruction or censorship. If you now consider the Net to be not only the wires and machines, but the people and their social structures who use the machines, it is more true than ever.

I am generally bearish on the future of Internet censorship. The Internet helps facilitate some things that one might not like, extensive profiling. But it also is very good at distributing information, and I think that in general, the availability of information in the future will be higher than in the past. I do not think it likely that our future will, on the balance, be more-censorious than our past.

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