Pirate Party MEP Helps Draft New Credit Card Company Controls

Dupple writes with this excerpt: "It has become an increasingly large problem that Visa, MasterCard, and Paypal control the valve to any money flow on the planet. Today, the European Parliament established this as a clear problem, and initiated regulation of the companies, limiting and strictly regulating their right to refuse service. The Pirate Party was the initiator of this regulation, following the damaging cutoff of donations to WikiLeaks, after said organization had performed journalism that was embarrassing to certain governments."

Regulation is problematic

[concealment]

While I like regulation in many cases, like nuclear power plants, in my experience new regulations are like cables.

When you put all the cables on the floor, they're more likely to snag your legs, or get entangled and knotted with each other.

This is why sometimes the solution is fewer regulations, and more direct solutions. If relatively few companies control our banking or money flow, the solution may be to break up some large companies.

I think the feds are about to do this to Google for their near-total-dominance of search results and search-based advertising. Too much power in one set of hands can be destructive, unless that set of hands truly does "do no evil."

Re:Journalism.....!?

[Anonymous Coward]

And who, exactly, gets to determine who the "true" journalists are? Are what "true" journalism is, for that matter?

Re:Regulation is problematic

[Dan667]

regulation is a necessary evil. The financial meltdown under bush/cheney was mostly a result of conservatives removing banking regulations and banks gambling with money they use to not be able to. Even Alan Greenspan commented he thought banks would show some restraint out of self preservation, but he was wrong.

Re:Regulation is problematic

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed.

Power corrupts, etc. By the same token, that which uncontrollable and cannot be regulated is incorruptible.

We can use some incorruptible functions in our infrastructure.

What could possibly go wrong?

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Just government arrogating onto itself more power, in this case, it wants to be the only entity that can cut off CC service to disfavored groups.

This is going in the wrong direction. Learn some history.

Re:Regulation is problematic

[suutar]

I like this, personally; I feel that 'too big to (be allowed to) fail' equates directly to 'too big to be left as a time bomb' and getting bailed out should include getting broken up. But then again I feel that one of the great periods in consumer choice on the internet was when those who owned the wires were forced to allow anyone to use the wires who wanted to (at a reasonable rate), and that it would be lovely to go back to that. (Or better yet, just break up into a wire-owning company, a content-generation company, and a data-shovelling company.)

Re:Money

[IamTheRealMike]

No, we already know what happens in this situation. US law takes precedence. Example: Danish company wires $26k to a German bank and the payment is seized by the USA [b.dk] because it was a payment for Cuban cigars.

The EU has a terrible track record when it comes to stuff like this. SWIFT was the only major payment network that was a European company and the US Treasury completely compromised it by seizing their US datacenter. So they built another datacenter in Europe so they could have multi-homed operations without exposure to the USA and whilst construction was being done, the US put huge pressure on the bureaucrats who then rolled over and said, sure, you can have all the data you want from SWIFT. So if the EU parliament really wants payment networks to stop doing things because the US wouldn't like it, the first step is to cut off the US Treasuries unilateral access to SWIFT data. But they won't.