Mastercard’s New Porn Policies Won’t Help

Mastercard’s New Porn Policies Won’t Help

This week, Mastercard announced new policies that will have profound and unfun implications for creators and sellers of adult content, from porn studios and live cam networks to individual models, content creators and influencers. So , in a break from her usual silliness and absurdity, Calico is going to get serious for a minute here.

Whenever a new, internet-related law, regulation or policy is announced, Calico’s first questions are: “What problem is this trying to solve?” and “Does it do anything to solve the problem?” Actually, given the way most of these changes play out, that question is usually phrased in her head like: “Does it accomplish enough toward solve the problem to be worth the unintended consequences?”

And… well, Spoiler Alert: The title of Calico’s latest post is: “Mastercard’s New Policies Won’t Help.”

by Calico Rudasill, Sssh.com Erotic Movies and More…

mastercard porn

Read On…

If there’s one thing about the internet that hasn’t changed in the 25 years it has been the center of my professional universe, it’s a great many people seem to fundamentally misapprehend what it is.

These people include, but are not limited to, many of the legislators, law enforcement officials, politicians, activists, lobbyists, Fortune 500 companies, attorneys and others who have been part of debating and crafting government regulations and private sector policies that ostensibly govern how the internet operates.

The above probably sounds presumptuous on my part, but right now, I don’t give a shit whether I sound presumptuous, arrogant, elitist, or whatever else one might like to call me. I’m too busy wondering whether Mastercard has really just announced its intention to never again allow a transaction on its network that involves purchasing access to, say, a live adult webcam show, to be overly concerned about my tone today.

As My Grandfather Used to Say: “It’s Clear as Mud”

To be fair, there’s nothing in the Mastercard blog post by John Verdeschi, the company’s Senior VP of Franchise Customer Engagement & Performance, which directly states the company is cutting all transactional ties to live adult content. But, in a way, that’s part of the problem.

What that post describes is a policy that’s nearly as unclear as it is sweeping in scope. For example, the statement says “banks that connect merchants to our network will need to certify that the seller of adult content has effective controls in place to monitor, block and, where necessary, take down all illegal content,” but it does precious little to define what constitutes “effective controls.”

As for why I think this new policy could be more than a bit challenging for banks and “sellers of adult content” to comply with, one of the “updated requirements” is a “content review process prior to publication.”

See the problem there? How does one “review” content “prior to publication” when that content is being produced live, in real-time?

That problem might be partially solvable – maybe for live cams, the review would amount to confirming the identity, age and consent of the performer once, prior to their first show, then be waived later, for example – but the more you think about it, the more problematic the requirement becomes.

In the same statement, Verdeschi asserts “we do not and will not permit merchants to engage in unlawful activity on our network.”

Mr. Verdeschi, please meet the Miller Test for obscenity. As you can see, it’s almost as clear as Mastercard’s new policy!

Now John, ask yourself: How does a bank go about assuring that a seller of adult content hasn’t created something “obscene” when even a fucking judge can’t tell you that without a trial? Wouldn’t they need to be able to do so to avoid running afoul of your professed zero-tolerance stance on “unlawful activity” on your network?

Unlike the ‘Wild West’ the Internet CAN’T be Truly Tamed

At the start of this post, I said something about people not understanding what the internet is. This new Mastercard policy – and just about every internet-aimed law that gets passed by a legislative body – suffer from the same misunderstanding.

At its core, the internet has always been a massive network of computers, connected together. That hasn’t changed over the years; the number, variety and power of the computers so connected has grown immensely, but down there at its core, it’s still just a massive computer network. 

Now, unlike the LAN at your office, the computers on the internet aren’t all the domain of some surly guy named Dave. They’re controlled separately by billions of individual users, admins, etc. As a practical matter, there’s only so much control anyone can exert over a network like that.

In fact, the difficulty of regulating the internet’s global computer network – or maybe more to the point, the total lack of any attempt to regulate it back then – leads a lot of people to compare the early days of the internet with the “wild west” of yore. But the truth is, while we have many more laws and regulations aimed at the internet these days, what we don’t have, and never will have, if the internet is to remain “free and open,” is the ability to control what people upload to the internet at any given moment.

The Road to Hell….

I don’t doubt for a moment that people who want to impose new regulations, laws and policies to tame the internet are doing it for a purpose they believe to be noble, good and sensible. Who doesn’t want children to be better protected, not just online, but everywhere, after all? Who wouldn’t like to see the scourge of human trafficking – real human trafficking, not the repackaging of all sex work as “sex trafficking” even if nobody has coerced or cajoled the sex workers involved – eradicated?

The thing is, we already have laws with which we can target criminals who use the internet to commit crimes. We don’t need to impose a greater burden on people who aren’t criminals – and we really don’t need to do so when the regulations won’t have much impact on the problem we’re trying to solve.

I don’t believe that making it more difficult for adult companies and platforms to accept Mastercard won’t put much of a dent in any illegal activity. Why?

Cyber criminals are nothing if not adaptable. They do things like requiring purchase of a legal product as part of gaining access to an illegal one. To the extent any of them have been using the sort of adult platforms targeted in Mastercard’s new policy in the first place, they’ll just come up with a new means of committing their crimes. It’s just how they do

All Mastercard has accomplished here is making it harder for non-criminals to comply with their rules. That’s not taming the Wild West of the internet, or even putting out a posse to round up its metaphorical cattle rustlers; it’s just making the journey through the Wild West less enjoyable for the legitimate cyber-pioneers.

 

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