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In July 2025, thousands of video games vanished from Steam’s digital storefront overnight. Not because they were illegal, but because a handful of payment processors, led by the dominant duo of Visa and Mastercard, decided they violated vague, undisclosed content standards. This mass removal, triggered by pressure from an Australian activist group called Collective Shout that sent merely 1,067 emails to payment companies, represents just the latest example of a disturbing trend: the emergence of payment processors as unelected arbiters of what legal content can exist in the digital economy.
The Steam controversy illuminates a fundamental shift in how censorship operates in the digital age. Unlike traditional government censorship, which faces constitutional challenges and democratic oversight, corporate financial censorship operates through the shadows of terms of service and “brand protection” policies. When Visa and Mastercard control the flow of money, they effectively control the flow of information, creating a “choke point” that can strangle any business or platform that refuses to comply with their content demands.
The Duopoly’s Iron Grip
To understand the scope of this problem, one must first grasp the sheer market dominance of payment processors. Visa and Mastercard together control approximately 90% of all payment processing outside China, representing a combined market value of roughly $1 trillion. This duopoly extends far beyond credit cards, they process debit transactions, online payments, and virtually every form of electronic commerce that keeps the modern economy running.
“Visa and Mastercard collectively processed over $7 trillion in transactions across Europe alone in 2023,” reports a recent industry analysis. In the United States, their dominance is even more pronounced, with Visa processing $6.58 trillion and Mastercard handling $2.78 trillion in consumer charges in 2024. They’re essential infrastructure that businesses literally cannot survive without.
This concentration of power has given these companies unprecedented leverage over content decisions. As Senator Dick Durbin observed, “Visa and Mastercard… are so dominant in the payments market that merchants couldn’t stay in business without using their cards”. When these processors threaten to cut off access, platforms face an existential choice: comply with content demands or lose the ability to conduct business entirely.
The Weaponization of Financial Infrastructure
The recent Steam controversy demonstrates how this system operates in practice. After Collective Shout’s relatively small pressure campaign, Valve Corporation updated its publishing guidelines to prohibit content that “may violate the rules and standards set forth by Steam’s payment processors and related card networks and banks”. Notice the language: not content that violates laws, but content that might violate the private, often secret policies of payment companies.
Steam’s new rule 15 is breathtakingly broad, essentially giving payment processors veto power over any content for any reason.
The immediate impact was swift and sweeping. SteamDB logged the removal of hundreds of games, primarily targeting titles with sexual content but also ensnaring unrelated games in the dragnet. Notably absent from the removals were mainstream titles that feature similar content, like GTA, suggesting that payment processors’ enforcement is both arbitrary and selective.
This pattern extends far beyond gaming. Adult content platforms like OnlyFans have repeatedly faced similar pressure, with the platform nearly banning all explicit content in 2021 due to what it described as pressure from “banking partners and payments providers”. The company only reversed course after intense backlash, but the message was clear: payment processors, not platform owners or users, ultimately control what content is permitted.
The MATCH List: A Digital Death Sentence
Perhaps no mechanism better illustrates payment processors’ censorship power than Mastercard’s MATCH list, officially the “Member Alert to Control High-Risk Merchants” database. This industry blacklist, described by critics as a “black hole” with “no return or recourse”, effectively serves as a death sentence for any business unfortunate enough to be added.
Once placed on the MATCH list, businesses are banned from accepting credit cards for five years. There is no appeals process, no transparency about the criteria, and no way to challenge erroneous listings.
But here’s the insidious part: businesses can be MATCH-listed not just for financial violations, but for “brand-damaging transactions,” a category so vague it essentially allows payment processors to blacklist any business for any content they find objectionable. This creates a perverse incentive structure where payment processors are rewarded for erring on the side of censorship, since there’s no penalty for wrongly blacklisting a legitimate business.
The system’s opacity compounds the problem. “There is no formal notification process to Merchants placed on the MATCH list. Most find out when their current Merchant Services Provider terminates the relationship and the Merchant attempts to open a new Merchant Account and is rejected”. Businesses often discover they’ve been blacklisted only after they’ve already lost their livelihoods.
International Enforcement Through Financial Pressure
The reach of payment processor censorship extends globally, creating a form of extraterritorial content regulation that bypasses democratic institutions entirely. The UK’s Online Safety Act provides a particularly stark example of how payment processors have become enforcement arms of government policy.
Under this legislation, payment processors including Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal coordinate to implement government content policies across digital platforms worldwide. As the law’s implementation triggered a 1,400% surge in UK VPN signups, users desperately sought to circumvent mandatory identity checks imposed through coordinated payment networks.
The Japanese government has taken a particularly strong stance against this financial overreach. Following aggressive payment processor enforcement against legal adult content platforms, Japan launched antitrust investigations into Visa’s restrictive merchant practices. Japanese lawmakers, including free speech activist Yamada Taro, have identified payment processors as “primary threats to digital marketplace freedom”.
NieR creator Yoko Taro captured the global implications, calling payment processor censorship “a security hole that endangers democracy itself” because it allows companies to “dictate how other companies run their business” without democratic oversight.
The Chilling Effect on Free Expression
The payment processor censorship regime creates a chilling effect that extends far beyond its immediate targets. Platforms must now consider not just legal compliance, but the subjective moral judgments of payment company executives when making content decisions. This has led to increasingly conservative content policies as platforms seek to avoid any risk of financial deplatforming.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has documented numerous cases of financial censorship affecting legitimate speech. “When financial institutions and payment intermediaries shut down accounts or inhibit transactions, it can have serious ramifications for free expression online,” the organization warns. Examples include WikiLeaks’ financial blockade in 2010, the shutdown of accounts belonging to VPN providers, and the termination of services for independent journalists and activists.
Even technical support for privacy tools faces censorship. Larry Brandt, a long-time supporter of internet freedom who used PayPal to fund Tor nodes, found his 20-year-old account permanently banned without explanation. EFF’s investigation found “no evidence of wrongdoing that would warrant shutting down his account,” suggesting Brandt was targeted specifically for supporting digital freedom tools.
The arbitrariness of these decisions is particularly troubling. PayPal once announced (then quickly retracted) a policy that would have fined users $2,500 for posting “misinformation,” defined at “PayPal’s sole discretion”. While the company claimed the policy was released “in error,” the $2,500 penalty for violations remains in their terms of service.
Legislative Pushback: The Fair Access Movement
Growing awareness of payment processor overreach has sparked legislative efforts to restore some semblance of democratic control over financial infrastructure. The Fair Access to Banking Act, introduced in both the House and Senate, would prohibit payment processors from denying services based on political or reputational concerns.
The legislation specifically targets the coordination that enables financial censorship. “No payment card network… may, directly or through any agent, processor, or licensed member of the network, by contract, requirement, condition, penalty, or otherwise, prohibit or inhibit the ability of any person who is in compliance with the law… to obtain access to services or products of the payment card network because of political or reputational risk considerations”.
State-level fair access laws are also emerging. Florida and Tennessee have enacted legislation requiring financial institutions to provide “fair access” to services based on “quantitative, impartial, and risk-based standards” rather than political or moral judgments. The laws specifically prohibit financial institutions from denying services due to “political opinions, speech, or affiliations” or religious beliefs.
These legislative efforts recognize a fundamental truth: when payment infrastructure becomes as essential as electricity or telephone service for participating in the digital economy, treating these companies as neutral utilities rather than editorial boards becomes not just reasonable but necessary.
The Broader Implications for Democratic Society
The emergence of payment processors as content gatekeepers represents a fundamental challenge to democratic governance and free market principles. Unlike traditional publishers, who face liability for the content they produce, payment processors claim the right to censor while maintaining they are merely neutral intermediaries. They want to have their cake and eat it too, exercising editorial control while avoiding editorial responsibility.
This concentration of censorial power in the hands of unaccountable corporate entities creates “private governance,” the exercise of public power by private actors without democratic oversight. When Visa and Mastercard can effectively veto legal content worldwide, they are functioning as a shadow regulatory system that operates outside constitutional constraints and democratic accountability.
The implications extend beyond content policy to fundamental questions of economic freedom and market competition. If payment processors can arbitrarily exclude competitors, disfavored industries, or ideologically inconvenient businesses, then market forces cannot operate effectively. The supposed benefits of capitalism (innovation, competition, consumer choice) are undermined when financial gatekeepers pick winners and losers based on subjective moral judgments rather than market forces.
The Path Forward: Reclaiming Digital Freedom
The fight against payment processor overreach is ultimately a fight for the future of digital freedom. Will the internet remain a space for diverse voices and controversial ideas, or will it become sanitized and homogenized according to the moral preferences of a handful of financial executives?
The stakes couldn’t be higher. As more commerce moves online and physical cash becomes obsolete, payment processors’ power to control what we can buy, and therefore what content can exist, only grows stronger. Today they’re removing adult games from Steam and discriminating against sex workers. Tomorrow they might target political dissidents, controversial journalists, or any other group that falls out of favor with corporate boardrooms.
The solution requires both technological innovation and regulatory intervention. On the technological front, continued development of truly decentralized payment systems offers the promise of censorship-resistant commerce. On the regulatory front, common carrier designations and fair access laws can force payment processors to serve all legal businesses without discrimination.
Most importantly, the public must recognize that payment processor censorship is not a niche issue affecting only controversial industries. It’s a fundamental threat to the open internet, free markets, and democratic governance. When private companies can effectively legislate what content is allowed to exist by controlling the financial infrastructure that supports it, we have allowed corporate oligarchy to replace democratic governance.
The Steam controversy may seem like a small conflict over video games, but it represents a much larger battle over who controls digital freedom. The answer to that question will determine whether the internet remains a force for liberation and democratization, or becomes just another tool for corporate control.
As the campaign against payment processor censorship gains momentum, with over 200,000 signatures on petitions demanding transparency and coordinated efforts to pressure these companies through customer service channels, we may be witnessing the early stages of a broader movement to reclaim digital freedom from corporate control.
The question is not whether payment processors have the legal right to exercise editorial control over the internet, they clearly do under current law. The question is whether we, as a democratic society, are willing to allow them to continue wielding that power without accountability, transparency, or democratic oversight.
