PayPal To Suspend Business Operations In Turkey Following License Denial (thestack.com) 91
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Stack: PayPal has announced the suspension of its business operations in Turkey as of June 6, citing failure to obtain a new license for its service in the country. Turkey has made recent efforts to promote its own domestic tech sector, advancing censorship laws and other regulation to push large international companies out of the market. PayPal, as the latest victim on this trail, posted a statement on its local Turkish website today: "PayPal's priority has always been its customers. However, a local financial regulator has denied our Turkish payments license and we have had to regretfully comply with its instruction to discontinue our activities in Turkey." The denial of PayPal's license, by local financial regulator BDDK, comes following the introduction of new national rules in Turkey which require IT systems to be based within the country itself. PayPal runs its global business from a large portfolio of IT centers around the world. Turkey isn't the only country tightening its grip on the Internet. The Iranian government has given companies behind popular messaging apps one year to move their data onto servers in Iran.
hey, just disconnect, you guys in Turkey! (Score:2)
yeah, you with the gold stars on your greatcoat. just pull the plug that hooks you to the decadent scum in the rest of the world. keep it local. we don't mind.
How to... (Score:2)
How to take your N world country and turn it into a N-1 world country: Restrict the Intertubez.
Way to walk it back.
Re: How to... (Score:1)
That's n+1
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er... yeh. :)
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Before taking office, was Erdogan by any chance a real estate developer with a chain of hotels and casinos?
Short-sighted (Score:2)
Do governments expect people to make accounts with all the "PayPal-type" companies in the world?
The only thing this will accomplish is push people to use Bitcoin or another decentralized crypto-currency.
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That's not necessarily a bad thing paypal regularly does anti customer things like tricking people into using their credit service, not allowing people to opt out of offers for their credit service, requiring a phone call to be removed from the service after accidentally signing up for their credit service, freezing accounts with pretty much no accountability and using whatever payment method is cheapest for them by default with no option to change the default setting.
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Me neither. All the problems I've heard about were fringe cases were huge sums of cash were involved.
Re: Short-sighted (Score:1)
Wait until you have a buisness with pay pal that is something other than selling through eBay.
I know tonnes of buisness that have accounts frozen and money held, some of their holds are 180 days and require ever escalating identity checks.
For little stiff they don't care. But for small buisness they can cripple your cash flow in a second.
Re:Short-sighted (Score:5, Insightful)
If you have a linked bank account, it defaults to that, and you have to manually change it for every payment. This is clearly based on the hope that many users will neglect to do so, and so they can debit money with no cost to them from your bank account (while charging the recipient 3.5% or more), rather than paying the credit card transaction fees (some of which go back to the buyers, if they're smart and have cash back or rewards cards).
Followed by their invariable attempts to sell your their horrible credit cards, dire and false warnings about credit card charges unless you use a bank account, false warnings about foreign exchange conversion fees.
Not the most egregious issues I'm sure (I've never sold anything via ebay or paypal), but makes the whole experience unpleasant.
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I can confirm that their credit cards are horrible. I made a single late payment and they closed my credit card account recently. I wasn't angry they closed it, I was angry I didn't get to close it first. Otherwise their customer service is nonexistant, getting a human requires calling during business hours and waiting up to an hour, their automated phone service is a re-purposed speak-and-spell, and they don't give the tiniest shit about yo
Re: Short-sighted (Score:3)
Agreed. I had their service for many years (10+) with no issues until the one time I did. Turns out being a long-time satisfied customer of theirs doesn't mean they will go to bat for you.
They were happy to lose me as a customer over $125 of faulty (doa) merchandise a vendor refused to accept for return.
The convenience of PayPal is not worth losing the protections your bank's fraud department would normally give you.
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Paypal can be hard to work with. As my own example, once I received $3,000, which was a loan repayment from a relative, and PayPal decided to "investigate." Whatever they did took over a week after which they cancelled the transaction with no reason given. I can understand security and prudence, but they could at least communicate (they did not answer my requests for an explanation).
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when he got the stuff, he told paypal, they gave me my money back, minus fees of like 20 bucks. When i complained about the fees, they shut down my acct instead of refunding me the fees, that i should not have had to pay.
i long for the day of paypal alternati
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Well, there's the bitch of it isn't it.
Let's imagine you're an honest person interested in setting up a payment processing system. You also want to provide your customers with some form of insurance against fraud and you want to operate on a scale large enough to accept payments worldwide and have legal means of moving cash in and out of your system. You also want to avoid violating tax laws, support proper reporting methods required by payment processing f
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IMHO, this is a case where going "BitCoin" might be an option. If Paypal started offering BitCoin (or other CryptoCurrency) option instead of localized currency there is no way that Turkey could stop them, since they couldn't tell if the technology was in country or out of country. But then again, Paypal wouldn't do such a thing, since it would leave the proprietary bits of Paypal on the threshing room floor
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Since use of bitcoin is easily regulated, a government can restrict it pretty effectively within its borders.
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You have to remember what this decision is for: Erdogan is a whore who wants to bury democracy. One less element in his nascent fascist state is one more point he figures to be in his favor. Merkel lost her chance, when talking to the press about Erdogan, she should have finished it off with Heil die neue Fuehrerin...even if the little fuck thinks of himself as male.
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Exactly this: it's not about controlling the internet but about controlling and monitoring the people who use it.
More countries will follow (Score:4, Insightful)
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It's a terrifying thought that more countries might follow-suit in an effort to gain control over the internet, thus fracturing it. The reasons are many: control and money of course, restricting speech, restricting anti-national views from within and without the borders, spying and data-mining, etc, etc. The internet has eroded national borders in many ways, and thus eroded some of the power and influence a government has over its people.
That would be an awful, awful state of affairs if the internet grows l
Re:More countries will follow (Score:5, Insightful)
Technically, it's not too awful hard to do - it just involves a buttload of DB/disk replication.
That said, the problem I have with it isn't technical, but political: The reason Iran/Turkey/etc want that data local is because they want to comb through it in order to find dissidents to jail and/or torture (of course they'll use the term "spies", "counter-revolutionaries", "criminals", etc).
*That* is the problem here.
The technical side is surprisingly easy in this aspect, and gives the benefit of adding DR and local cache/speed capabilities.
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Pretty much. Every time the US or EU demand this or that locality or back door, think how dictators in China, Russia, or a hundred countries south of Europe and the US cackle in glee at being able to use it to track and disappear dissidents.
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To be perfectly fair though this isn't really that different to any national government, except maybe in the outcome to the individual. The US wants access to the data to track money moving for criminal and security reasons. Turkey & Iran would want it for the same.
The real differences is what happens to someone when they are identified as a problem person. In the US they might end up in the legal system incarcerated for life. Somewhere else they might disappear.
Thinking this is going to backfire (Score:2)
So every IT company has to have infrastructure in Turkey to do business there? Sounds like they'll seriously limit their ability to participate in modern global commerce.
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No, but IT companies that plan to do a significant amount of financial transactions with Turkish citizens or companies apparently do.
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Ataturk must be spinning in his grave.
Unfortunate but not unreasonable (Score:5, Insightful)
As much as I hate protectionism in general, it isn't unreasonable that a country wants the right to subpoena information about financial transactions (please no trolling, laize faire bitcoin nut jobs). The fact that the records are physically located in the country isn't surprising as it enforces that leverage on the companies doing business there.
Nobody blinks an eye when the EU demands patient records and other 'protected' confidential data being held solely in Europe, but being financial in nature, all of a sudden that's overreaching?
All I can say is if you're a multi-national without the ability to data partition geographically, whatever your business is in, you're just welcoming a pain in the ass now or in the near future.
I imagine this really comes down to cost. Turkey probably isn't a big enough market to justify the datacenter. This is news people!! ...
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This is a direct response to NSA/GCHQ spying. The rest of the world, even those that oppose us, used to at least trust that their data were their own. This is the fallout of the U.S. and U.K. dipping their fingers into everyone's pies.
Good job, spooks. You made the world a worse place than it would have been without you.
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This is a direct response to NSA/GCHQ spying. The rest of the world, even those that oppose us, used to at least trust that their data were their own. This is the fallout of the U.S. and U.K. dipping their fingers into everyone's pies.
Good job, spooks. You made the world a worse place than it would have been without you.
Yeah, YOU know what drives Turkey to demand things from large corporations.
YOU know what drive PayPay to decide not to to business in Turkey.
How the hell do you know it wasn't because the growing Islamic influence in Turkey wanted to make it hard for a "degenerate" Western/US company that supports gay rights?
How the hell do you know the decision wasn't driven by PayPal not wanting to do business under the terms imposed by a gang of barbaric homophobes stuck in the Dark Ages?
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Both are less likely than good old corruption. South Korea banned Uber, to the cheers of "taxi consumer protectionszzz" nuts everywhere, then immediately handed their business model out for legal use by the politicians' connected cronies.
Same thing here. Why the hell do people think people go into government in the first place?
Re:Unfortunate but not unreasonable (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, maybe because PayPal still has a Saudi Arabia office, where homosexuality can carry the death penalty.
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How the hell do you know....
Perhaps because it says so right there in the story? Hell, it even says so right in the summary. Turkey wants to control its data, and the NSA/GCHQ have shown that they must surrender their data. Connect the dots. It's obvious.
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Bullshit, Erdogan was on the fascist bent long before any spying by NSA/GCHQ. Please try to keep up.
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You and I both know the difference here: EU members don't make it a regular habit to look for dissidents to silence.
Also, subpoenas can (and very often do) cross borders. The days of hiding one's ill-gotten money in a Swiss bank account are long past, since a simple subpoena almost always results in the Swiss bank happily providing every last record they have on a given depositor.
Not all countries do this of course, but most do, and IIRC Turkey is among those members.
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[quote]Nobody blinks an eye when the EU demands patient records and other 'protected' confidential data being held solely in Europe, but being financial in nature, all of a sudden that's overreaching?[/quote]
The EU does not demand that. The EU demands that information is well-protected (which may in turn mean that you should keep it out of the US). It does not forbid data to leave the EU at all. Turkey does.
[quote]All I can say is if you're a multi-national without the ability to data partition geographical
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Can't really say I blame 'em. (Score:2)
Turkey -- Islamic fascist dictatorship (Score:1)
Ex-Miss Turkey sentenced for insulting Erdogan [bbc.com]
A Turkish court has convicted a former Miss Turkey of insulting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, giving her a 14-month suspended prison sentence.
Merve Buyuksarac, 27, was found guilty of insulting a public official for postings she made on social media. She denied insulting Mr Erdogan.
And these fuckers want into the EU?!?!
Will Europe grow a spine?
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Re: Turkey -- Islamic fascist dictatorship (Score:2)
For the past year or so erdogan has sued on average three people a day, every day. Turkey doesn't belong in the EU.
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wrong, bitcoin will be outlawed by the countries or heavily regulated. already happening elsewhere
Turkey belongs in Europe (Score:2)
It was a mistake to keep Turkey out of the EU. If they had been given a pathway to membership in the 1990s they would have had to avoid all this Trumpist protectionism nonsense, they'd have gotten with the program, and they'd have opened their market up to international competition. Instead the hand of extremists has been strengthened in a country where the progressive side of politics once stood a decent chance of modernizing the place.
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No, it wouldn't. Erdogan and his dirty little political party never believed in democracy. He was always going be little pint sized dick.
Bias Writing (Score:2)
This feels really bias. PayPal is a major international player and they're pretty much the size of several big evil banks.
America is the only country I've lived in within the past several years where individuals cannot send money to each other electronically for free, via the national banking system. In Australia, you need someone's name, bsb and account number and you can send money to anyone, with any bank, for free, from your phone or web browser. In NZ, the bank and account number are one big number, an
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Just to bring up information- I (being a Chase bank customer) recently discovered Chase QuickPay- it makes it relatively easy (and free) to send money to people. I am not entirely sure how it works for someone who does not have a Chase account, but they claim to be a part of "clearXchange" which a quick google search shows cooperation between many American banks.
So person-to-person does exist in the US. For free. The banks probably were worried about competing with Facebook's system
Tough for small online businesses (Score:1)
Turkey needs regime change (Score:1)
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Aye, what the U.S. should do is declare Kurdistan is the brand, spanking new NATO ally...after shipping Incirlik to Kurdistan and removing the U.S. defensive missiles in Turkey.
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From what I've read elsewhere about the new laws, this isn't about protecting customers at all, but is protectionist to their own fledgling companies, but more importantly, it gives their government direct access to everything passing through those servers, and everything that direct access by the Turkish government implies. Oh, you live outside of Turkey and buy something from someone in Turkey? The entire unencrypted version of the data of that transaction is soon to be in the hands of Edrogan's governmen
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The headline I'd REALLY like to see, (Score:2)
would read "PayPal to suspend business operations". Full stop, no qualifiers.
solution for a user? (Score:1)
after changes in PayPal can't really blame them (Score:1)
Turkey, Iran (Score:2)
Hmm, what do these two cesspools have in common? Oh yeah. They're both living in the dark ages.
Cryptonomicon? (Score:2)
Is this about the internet, or is this about national identity and fiscal control?