Visa And Mastercard Ban Anonymizing VPNs... Just As They Allow Wikileaks

from the arbitrary dept

This is random. Just as Mastercard and Visa are allowing payments to Wikileaks again after a two year hiatus, those same two companies have started banning VPN providers. If you don't recall, the credit card companies refused to process payments for Wikileaks, following significant pressure from US officials, even as they have no problem processing payments to hate groups like the KKK. After a long legal dispute, an Icelandic court ordered the credit card companies to start processing payments to Wikileaks again.

Given all of that, it's quite bizarre that they're now cutting off various VPN/anonymizing services, as it should be quite obvious that there are tremendous perfectly legal and reasonable uses of such services. Personally, I have two VPN services, which I use when I travel, or am working from outside the office to make sure my data is encrypted and safe. It's really just good computing hygiene to use such a service. However, apparently, Mastercard and Visa would like everyone's data to be exposed.

It now turns out that these policies have carried over to VPN providers and other anonymizing services. Before the weekend customers of the popular Swedish payment service provider Payson received an email stating that VPN services are no longer allowed to accept Visa and Mastercard payments due to a recent policy change.

"Payson has restrictions against anonymization (including VPN services). As a result Payson can unfortunately no longer give your customers the option to finance payments via their cards (VISA or MasterCard)," the email states, adding that they still accept bank transfers as deposits.

The new policy went into effect on Monday, leaving customers with a two-day window to find a solution.

At least one of the VPNs so impacted, iPredator, is apparently looking at its legal options. Given Wikileaks' victory on a nearly identical issue, you'd think that the credit card companies would know better -- but perhaps they think that the VPN providers won't bother with a costly legal battle.

Filed Under: anonymity, encryption, payment processing, payments, vpns
Companies: ipredator, mastercard, visa, wikileaks

Amazon Stops Processing Payments For Crowdfunding Platform For Creative Commons Books

from the weird dept

So this is a bit strange. Unglue.it is a cool crowdfunding platform that focuses on raising money for authors/rightsholders so that they'll release an edition of their books under a Creative Commons license. We've seen a few similar offerings, but Unglue.it seemed really interesting (and to be getting some attention/traction). Basically, they would work with rightsholders, to find out at what price they'd be willing to put their works out under a Creative Commons license, and then try to crowdfund that amount. Neat idea. However, as Jack Allnutt alerts us, despite having already been processing payments for Unglue.it, Amazon has cut the service off, with a bizarre claim about how they don't want to work with any new crowdfunding platforms:

Amazon Payments has informed us that they will no longer process pledge payments for Unglue.it, forcing us to suspend all active ungluing campaigns. According to a Senior Account Manager at Amazon, Amazon has decided against “boarding fresh crowdfunding accounts at this time”. Amazon has been providing payment services for Unglue.it, as it does for the popular crowdfunding site Kickstarter.

Of course, that statement doesn't make much sense, given that it was already processing payments for Unglue.it. In fact, part of this news was that Amazon is requiring Unglue.it to void all payments for existing campaigns (i.e., those not yet funded). So the idea that this is about not "boarding fresh crowdfunding accounts" doesn't make much sense. Amazon has been the only choice for payments on Kickstarter since the beginning, and that seems to have gone well, so it's odd that they're now cutting off others (and, of course, opens up Amazon to wild conspiracy theories). I contacted Amazon to get their side of the story, and they provided the following comment:

We support a wide variety of businesses, but we have regulatory obligations as a licensed money services business for how we operate. Unfortunately, Unglue.it’s model is not the same as some other crowdfunding services and at this time does not allow us to meet those obligations.

That statement makes this all the more... confusing. They're clearly implying that there are regulatory issues preventing them from supporting Unglue.it, though I'm not sure I can think of what the concern here might be. There have been some regulatory issues around equity funding via crowdfunding, but that doesn't seem to be an issue here. If they're just working out deals for licensing books... I'm at a complete loss.

Filed Under: crowdfunding, payment processing
Companies: amazon, kickstarter, unglue.it