community

Payment Processors are Critical Infrastructure and should be treated as such

Visa and MC are at it again.

Alex Ward

Jul 25, 2025 • 4 min read

So, I feel like we need to have a bit of a chat about how much sway Visa and Mastercard have on a lot of indie creation endeavors, specifically how they can decide to cut anyone off from payment at any time based on their own discretion.

Why are we talking about this? Well recently a group called Collective Shout has decided to go after Steam and Itch.io for hosting nsfw content, and in an effort to shut them down contacted Visa and MasterCard en masse, which in turn prompted those payment processors to send notices to the impacted services.

For Itch, this seems to have resulted in a mad scramble to shadowban any nsfw content, or indeed any content that was tagged as "adult". This heavy-handed action sparked a lot of discourse on Mastodon and Bluesky, with a bunch of creators on itch.io blindsided by this decision.

Here's Itch's statement:

And here's a Polygon article that covers what's been going on:

This is bad and we should let the payment processors know this.

You don't make NSFW Content, why do you care?

There are a bunch of reasons, hypothetical question asker, glad you asked.

Visa and MasterCard, at least in the United States, are the processor for the wide majority of credit card transactions. That puts them in a unique position of power, when they can cut off payment to anything they just happen to disagree with. They are critical infrastructure and because of that they have a responsibility to all of us.
Queer content (which I also don't make, but I have a wide network of queer friends and colleagues), is often flagged as "nsfw" for simply existing. A trans person happens to be in a game? "That's lewd!" they'll cry. I'm not normally one for slippery slope fallacies, but eliminating queer people from public life is a stated goal of many of these extremist groups.
Indie content creators rely heavily on online payments. Many of us don't have physical inventory, and it's pretty hard to sell a PDF at a swap meet with cash. There's not a great alternative here

👿

Do not say "but what about crypto?" Crypto still requires changing into dollars to pay for rent, and it's also tightly fenced off at the "conversion to dollars" point in the US so it's not an option for a lot of US based creators.

There are also other statutes which come into play here. It's already illegal to host certain kinds of sexual material (minors, nonconsentual distribution, etc), and there are methods of prosecuting that. A payment processor deciding that something is immoral is not the same thing as legislation saying something is illegal. They're acting as the morality police beyond the bounds of their legal obligations.

And they have no reason to stop there.

So what do we do?

If you, like me, do not like what is happening read this post:

And consider doing what it suggests.

Meanwhile, it looks like centralized storefronts are going to be bigger targets for extremists, so it might be time for a distributed system to be stood up. I've seen a few such efforts getting launched, though the payment processors are still a weak link.

Are you staying on Itch?

Yeah, for the moment. I don't blame Itch for this. They acted hastily without warning, but they don't really have a choice in the matter. They could have said "no" and then no one would be able to process payments on Itch, so I think this is the best possible action they could have taken.

They probably could have had better controls around how nsfw content is managed so they could have capitulated to the demands more quickly but as the saying goes do not comply in advance.

Anyhow friends, stay safe out there and tell Visa and Mastercard that they're in the wrong here.