This is a proposal, for legislation to be drafted, backed by the Pirate Party. Falkvinge is the founder and leader of the Swedish Pirate Party. Much less has happened than this article implies.
The same thing happened when the US cut non-friendlies (or basically any nation that does business with Iran) with denial of access to the SWIFT system. What use to be a financial transaction highway became a political weapon of choice. This basically backfired when China refused).
<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/15/swift-iran-sanctions_n_1347361.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/15/swift-iran-sanction...</a>
This is important news and I am happy a first step is taken.<p>I am not sure about the accuracy of the title of the submitted post though. The official EU text, as reported in the post,[1] does not scold or name anyone. The scolding comes from a press release of the Pirate Party.<p>1. “[The European Parliament] 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”
Could not anti-competitor laws be expanded to also include depended parties? It sound as an logical approach, since anti-competitor laws always discuss market abuse by parties of an monopolistic nature, and the activities against wikileaks looks to match that exactly. The problem is not VISA, MasterCard, and PayPal per say, but their monopolistic statue as payment systems in regard to access to and by end-users. For companies and organizations depended on online revenue like donations or webb-shops, VISA, MasterCard, and PayPal has complete market control over them.
Didn't Visa & Friends kill WikiLeaks donations two years ago? What good does it do for the EU to "scold" them now, two years later, after it turned out WikiLeaks was able to survive and keep operating without credit card companies?<p>Even if something comes of this, it would have been a helluva lot more useful to have happened in December 2010/early 2011. Doing something now <i>might</i> discourage this kind of behavior in the future, but it seems a lot more like calling the fire department after watching your neighbor's house burn to the ground.
I don't know why EU seems to have so much more common sense for issues like these than US, but whatever they are doing is working, and I love it. Maybe US needs to model its democratic system more after EU.
This is good. Thank you Europe. But what about regulations that favour market diversity? We should regulate the payment interface to encourage the emergence of non-US companies in the system.
Personally I'd rather see the payment card companies nationalized. Make them operate at zero profit, and vastly reduce the friction in the flow of capital. Or, if you prefer not to nationalize, institute a government-operated competing global payment card system that's free for merchants and consumers alike. Watch the payment card companies collapse under their own weight.<p>It makes a lot of sense to me: the governments of the world are in the business of governing currency, and payment card systems are superseding that power. Time to take it back and return the power to citizens.
First, one government uses power to regulate who and how receives money. Than another government uses power to regulate who and how accepts money. Why nobody questions why governments are regulating money flow at all?<p>If nobody was after WikiLeaks, Visa and MasterCard would be happy to provide them with payments. Or, on the other hand, if Visa does not want to provide a service for any reason, why anyone should force them to?
And so it goes. I have a feeling many people on here would be singing a different tune if the EU suddenly decided that it was a "right" for people to use their software no matter who they are. Think of it this way. Would anyone truly benefit if the EU decided that Hacker News was "a valve of free speech" so it must not discriminate who uses it? I think this is a terrible decision and a massive overstep of the state into private affairs. As an aside, I'm not so convinced that wikileaks is as noble an organization as many on here seem to think it is.