A few years ago Visa, MasterCard, PayPal and Bank of America pulled the money plug for Wikileaks. There was no legal way for the US Government to stop Wikileaks from spreading disruptive facts. So they called in some corporate friends to help.
Now, I do believe that companies have the right to decide who they want to engage in business with. Nevertheless, there is a problem when market dominant companies do so to limit free speech. And Government pressing them to do so is clearly a democratic problem.
In the Wikileaks case we (I used to work for the Pirate Party in the European Parliament) fought in the political arena to bring attention to this. And in a moment of clarity the EU Parliament adopted a resolution (opinion) stating that such action is problematic.
The adopted EP text by Engström et al.
32. Considers it likely that there will be a growing number of European companies whose activities are effectively dependent on being able to accept payments by card; considers it to be in the public interest to define objective rules describing the circumstances and procedures under which card payment schemes may unilaterally refuse acceptance;
If this resolution will lead to any actual political action is unclear. But we tried.
(Later an Icelandic court partly repealed the money embargo against Wikileaks.)
But, as it turns out, this was not an isolated incident. Recently PayPal pulled the plug again. This time the target was the end-to-end encrypted NSA-safe email service ProtonMail. The reason stated was that PayPal is in doubt about the legality of encrypted e-mail, according to US law.
This is a huge issue, in so many ways.
Now, ProtonMail is based in Switzerland. And it is developed by some pretty weighty people, such as MIT, Harvard and CERN researchers.
It is highly questionable if US law is applicable in this case. And, anyhow, if in some strange way it is – this issue should be settled in court.
Here lies a major problem with this kind of outsourced execution of political power. There is no rule of law. (There is not even any law to relate to.) There are no prior proper judicial proceedings. And there is no possibility for redress.
In the ProtonMail case PayPal froze some 275,000 USD. And there is apparently nothing to do about it.
On a similar note, payment providers have blocked the payment channels for VPN services in some countries.
And there are some other, smaller examples from my country, Sweden, where payment providers pulled the money plug for clients that they find to be morally questionable. Among others this has happened to a small company selling DVD horror movies (!) and a web based shop for sex toys.
In these cases, it is not even a question about what is legal. Here it is up to corporate policy makers in board rooms to decide. Often they rely on rather dim, square and uneasy “moral” standards. (E.g. not to upset the US christian right.) And these standards are enforced by multinationals on an international, world wide scale by terms of service.
What to do?
Well, you could call for politicians to draft laws stating that dominant payment providers may not refuse clients who provide goods or services not breaching local law. But doing so might be questionable in principle and difficult in practice. And knowing my politicians, I’m not sure exactly what they actually would deliver if asked to regulate in this field.
Then we have the possibility of consumer boycotts. But for boycotts to be successful, there must be some competition for consumers to turn to. And in this field, there is almost none. It is also doubtful if the general public would get on board, to make a boycott effective enough.
The third option is to turn to digital currency, such as BitCoin. This is by far the best option. Or it would be, if it was more widely adopted. We might get there, but we are not there yet.
So… we have some serious problems here, with no perfect or yet functioning solutions.
But there is one thing we can do, right now: We can raise our voices. We can explain the problem. We can get media interested. We can make this a exhausting PR-issue for the industry. We can make this not only an issue of free speech and privacy, but also about free enterprise for the rest of society. We can name and shame Visa, Mastercard, PayPal and others who give them self power over our very civil liberties.
Spread the word.
/HAX
Update: They just did it again… »
