More Paypal news that isn't in The News.

[hairyears]

This deserves a wider audience: you can't pay for Dreamwidth (or support the Diaspora project) using Paypal. Or Google Checkout. Here's what Dreamwidth have to say about that:
We've seen a bunch of people questioning why we don't accept payment via PayPal. We used to, but PayPal closed our account with them, after demanding that we censor our users

Comments

[gerald_duck]

I wonder to what extent this problem is US-specific?

And I wonder, if similar happens in Europe, what the European Parliament makes of it…

This is an area in which I have relatively little difficulty sorting out my own thoughts: there is, to me, a clear distinction between curtailing my free speech and merely failing to enable it. A company that won't let me publish on their website, or won't let that website take payment for letting me publish, or whatever to the nth generation, is failing to enable: if they sold noise-cancelling systems for use at political rallies or whatever, that would be curtailment.

However, I don't think something can be a common carrier while being selective about what it carries. And a payment broker should respect a customer's common-carrier status. However, that shouldn't be a legal compulsion, not least because a single common carrier in an environment where censoring content providers are the norm will become statistically more likely to represent a liability, just as Amsterdam is now a cesspool of iniquity by being just a little more liberal than most places in Europe. If something becomes a de facto porn site, with all the concomitant problems, a payment broker should be allowed to act accordingly.

The second "however" is that the law should most definitely prevent anything that acts as a cartel or monopoly from being selective about what speech it enables. If it was Visa or Mastercard acting in that way rather than individual payment brokers, that would be a serious problem. My current view is that Paypal isn't quite a monopoly. And, after all, Dreamwidth has been able to find a broker to handle them.

[purplecthulhu]

I suspect a lot of Netherlanders and a good few Amsterdamers would object to your suggestion that 'Amsterdam is now a cesspool of iniquity'.

[gerald_duck]

Maybe. But I've been there. The levels of rubbish, panhandling, drug taking and conspicuously tawdry sex were pretty distasteful. If I was wanting to go somewhere vaguely louche, I'd much rather be in Camden, Soho or Montmartre.

Which is a pity, because I'm myself pretty liberal. I wish I couldn't draw a causal link between their commendable liberality and the mess they're in, but I can.

Interestingly, I've subsequently visited Zürich, which seems to do a hugely better job of being liberal while also spotlessly tidy and discreet. I guess the difference is that the deviants in Zürich are rich deviants. /-8

[shermarama]

I live in Amsterdam, and have also lived in London, and my experiences of Amsterdam and Camden really don't match yours. Amsterdam certainly has tawdry sex in the red light district, because that's what it's for. That and drunk/stoned tourists. In terms of rubbish, Camden is far worse; one of the things I regularly notice and appreciate about Amsterdam is how clean it is. I barely saw a leaf on the ground this autumn because there were big hoovery machines collecting them all the time. (I suspect it's something to do with not letting them block the drainage systems.) Panhandling I can't really comment on; I don't see much of it in the rest of Amsterdam, maybe there's more in the Red Light District (if, by Amsterdam, you actually mean the Red Light District, please say so, and if you come here again, try going further than the bit that makes a nice living out of tourists before you judge the whole city), and as for drug taking, I don't see how being able to go to a coffee shop and have a civilised discussion about what sort of weed you'd like to buy is a bad contrast to walking along the main road in Camden and having someone lean into your path and mutter 'skunk' at you every ten paces. The bay of parking spaces in front of my apartment block had partially flooded yesterday, because the drain in the corner had got blocked. Normally the bay would be full, but no-one parked in it last night, so that the hoovery machine could come round and unblock the drain first thing this morning. It did, and now they're draining properly again. And that's the mark of a cesspool of iniquity, is it?

[gerald_duck]

OK, I admit I was there a few years ago (um… 2003-2004ish).

In terms of rubbish, I was struck most by how much junk there was floating at the edges of canals. In terms of drugs, I'm more or less fine with the idea of people frequenting coffee shops, I was more worried by the number of people congregating in open spaces who were clearly the worse for wear on stronger stuff than hash. And by how many of the beggars had a wild-eyed opiate-addict look. And by the way beggars would follow one continuing to pester rather than just waiting for the next person to pass.

I wasn't there in the evening, but the bits of the red light district I saw were already doing business - pretty distasteful and blatant business - in the late afternoon. That doesn't happen in Soho.

I was especially disheartened by the way multi-storey car parks needed huge security shutters on the entrance rather than just a barrier, plus a mechanism to prevent people getting in via the pedestrian entrance without a parking ticket… and I still noticed two cars having been broken into in the three or four hours I was parked.

Nobody actually offered me drugs in Amsterdam. But then again, the only place I've ever been offered drugs is Strawberry Fair in Cambridge ("special cookies").

[shermarama]

(I think I must look like the sort of person who wants to be sold drugs because that used to happen to me all the time in Camden. Not here, either, though.)

I think you have to be careful in this of judging one place by another's standards. The huge fuck-off chains that you see locking up bicycles here look like overkill at first, to someone used to the D-lock being the standard for a secure bike, but round here you can't buy D-locks. Big fuck-off chains are what's normal, what you buy from Halfords, and they soon start to look normal too. Similarly with security shutters; I mean, perhaps the question ought to be, given London's appalling car crime problem, why do UK car parks let people who aren't customers in? It's just a different standard.

And I think the Red Light District might be some of the same thing. It's only distasteful and blatant to be selling sex in the afternoon if you think it ought to be more hidden than that. The Dutch don't think of it as something titillating, just something that some people seem to find necessary, so there's no particular benefit or detriment to be gained from it only going on at night. Being open for business in the day is, in an example of typical Dutch pragmatism, just good opening hours. People don't think of it as a den of iniquity, as appallingly brazen, and if you do, that says more about you and your expectations than about the place itself, you know?