Furore erupted a couple of months ago when Valve confirmed that payment processors—citing a Mastercard rule—had pressured it to stop selling a number of adult games. Angry Steam users, and people who weren't keen on payment processors deciding what adults are allowed to buy more generally, began hammering customer service lines with complaints and enlisting others to do the same. Some began petitions.
Well, at least one of those petitions has now gotten a response. A request on the official UK parliament petition website to "Ban payment processors stopping services based on objections to legal content", has earned enough signatures (>10,000) to warrant an official government response. And the government says… leave us alone, more or less.
"Payment processors are able to choose who they process payments for, subject to any relevant requirements", drones the official response. "The Government has no plans to intervene in those commercial decisions." Indeed, it would like you to know that "The Government is committed to ensuring that the UK’s payment system works for all, allowing businesses and customers to transact with confidence". Unless you want to transact for some smut that Stripe doesn't like, I suppose.
The best you can hope for, says the British state, is that its ambitions to continue building up Open Banking meet success. Open Banking, if you're not familiar, is the name given to the system whereby you can share your financial info with trusted third parties (if you have your bank balance in your mobile phone wallet, that's an example of it in action), and the government boasts it "enables consumers to make purchases using a wider range of payment methods, including account-to-account payments".
Of course, you can't just transfer the price of a Steam game directly to Gabe Newell's Monzo account, so it's a bit of a non-sequitur response. Almost like whoever wrote it has no real idea what the issue at hand even is.
In other words: sling your hook, this is a matter for the free market to decide. "Decisions regarding which businesses payment processors contract with are a commercial matter, taking into account the relevant requirements on the firm. These decisions will be influenced by a variety of factors, and the Government has no plans to intervene in those commercial decisions."
One might note, here, that the British government was more than happy to intervene in the intricate workings of the free market with the Online Safety Act, which locked UK citizens' access to adult materials (or literally just Discord) behind age verification checks that have already been subject to a data breach.
But I suppose it's not much of a surprise. The odds of the UK government interposing itself in the issue of 'buying porn on Steam' were always slim, and that's before you take into account that the main purpose of the UK government petitions website is to let people make direct requests to their representatives and for their representatives to patronisingly explain why their requests are impossible.
Still, if you're an optimistic sort, there's some hope. If the petition gets over 100,000 signatures, it has to be discussed in Parliament itself, not just fobbed off with some boilerplate copy on the website. Even if that does happen, I'm sceptical it would lead to any concrete result, but hey, you never know.
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