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Pirate Party MEP Helps Draft New Credit Card Company Controls

Dupple writes with this excerpt: "It has become an increasingly large problem that Visa, MasterCard, and Paypal control the valve to any money flow on the planet. Today, the European Parliament established this as a clear problem, and initiated regulation of the companies, limiting and strictly regulating their right to refuse service. The Pirate Party was the initiator of this regulation, following the damaging cutoff of donations to WikiLeaks, after said organization had performed journalism that was embarrassing to certain governments."

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  1. Re:Money by IamTheRealMike · · Score: 5, Interesting

    No, we already know what happens in this situation. US law takes precedence. Example: Danish company wires $26k to a German bank and the payment is seized by the USA because it was a payment for Cuban cigars.

    The EU has a terrible track record when it comes to stuff like this. SWIFT was the only major payment network that was a European company and the US Treasury completely compromised it by seizing their US datacenter. So they built another datacenter in Europe so they could have multi-homed operations without exposure to the USA and whilst construction was being done, the US put huge pressure on the bureaucrats who then rolled over and said, sure, you can have all the data you want from SWIFT. So if the EU parliament really wants payment networks to stop doing things because the US wouldn't like it, the first step is to cut off the US Treasuries unilateral access to SWIFT data. But they won't.