Wait, where in the world does that happen?

..don't tell me that in the US if someone has your banking details they can do literally anything they want, and just empty your account

this. it sorta annoys me putting in the payee endpoint as well. You should be able to get a number or code or whatnot from the place wanting payment and it will setup the payee endpoint and give you a code. You should then be able to purchase something and give the payee the code which they can do to send a bill to whats setup at your bank. then you go and authorize the payment and of course someone could set it to always accept payments from the payee if they are lazy. It also super annoys me that there is not more options on bank accounts. I want my savings to only allow transfers out to specific accounts I setup. Like my checking. Not allowing any transfers from other institutions. The checking can then be open and I can trasfer there before doing something else with it. Any type of transfer should always do a balance check and not go if insufficient balance is available with no fee.

What Americans tend to refer to as "fraud protection" is charge back policies, where the payment processor acts as Content Police and revert transactions if they hear the vendor was unfair to their customer (and they usually are on the side of the customer).

My EU bank won't do that even on my credit card, because it's insane that one would expect a financial institution to be judge, jury, and executioner in the case of a disagreement over legal services rendered.

Americans have to own up to the uncomfortable fact that dependence on these policies is what keeps the big credit cars companies in power, on top of severely driving up consumer prices (unfairly weighted towards the rich of course who get cashbacks thanks to the obscene money Visa makes on their enormous transaction fees) and being incredibly unfair to small vendors who don't have the means to meaningfully dispute fraudulent chargebacks.

My country has our own government operated, fast, simple and cheap payment method so now visa and mastercard are making the US government pressure us to destroy it

Yeah but those services tend to care a lot less then the payment processors but the I do see your point.

For instance, it's not as easy as you think to get a website pulled down, or to get a domain name restricted, mostly because they're not paid for on a monthly basis, they're paid for on a yearly basis, and sometimes they even have contracts for multi years.

Different clouds support different things, that's why sites like Parlour still exist despite the massive amount of animosity the administrators of that site face.

Getting a hold of a global register to get them to do something about a domain name on their register, while possible, is not nearly as easy as getting hold of the payment processor.

It seems to me that if payment processing was made to be less effective by this tactic, they would have to choose less effective tactics that sites could choose to ignore. You're right that they don't own the hardware, but for big companies like Valve, it would be a pretty trivial setup for them especially with companies out there like open cloud.

Amex and Discover: "We exist, too!"

The canary was when the exact same thing happened (with much greater impact) to pornhub.

Nobody cared. and Pornhub Corp STILL can't use credit cards and are dependent on bank orders and cryptocurrency.

And I can't see a lot of developers going out of their way to prioritize this. Because it is easy to say you are sex positive. It is another thing to actually stand with smut and risk getting attacked by all the same groups.

Also, you know what else is a de facto monopoly? Steam! (cue all the usual suspects). You know what people will never stop whining about? Games not having Steam versions.

So yeah. Gamers Rise Up?

There's no exchange. It's just USD. It's just payment processing platform.

In the US, that is often true, but Australian Christian conservatism doesn't have the same pro-gun culture as the US.

Steam wasn't using it to bypass their policies and demands.