‘Visa and Mastercard’s adult content clampdown is a battle they can’t – and shouldn’t – win’

If you were to ask a random person in the UK if they knew what a Ratners was, chances are they wouldn’t have a clue what you’re talking about. Yet, in the 1980s, the jewellery chain was as common as a cold.

You’d be hard-pressed not to find a Ratners Jewellers at your local high street before the turn of the century. With annual sales of around £1.2 billion at its peak, its affordable jewellery, from necklaces to rings, was a cornerstone in every shopaholic’s itinerary – it was the Pandora of its time.

So how does a jewellery brand making the modern-day equivalent of £288 million in yearly profit fall so far from the cultural zeitgeist? It’s simple; you take your customers for granted. In 1991, the brand’s founder, George Ratner, was invited to speak at the Institute of Directors’ annual convention. Elated, the entrepreneur wanted his speech to be the best it could be and so passed a draft to a public speaking consultant, who told him, “You should put in a couple of jokes.”

Ratner didn’t just take the advice; he stole it and ran headfirst into a ton of bricks. The businessman used his address to start lambasting the quality of his products, infamously telling the crowd: “We do cut-glass sherry decanters complete with six glasses on a silver-plated tray that your butler can serve you drinks on, all for £4.95. People say, ‘How can you sell this for such a low price?’ I say, because it’s total crap.”

His remarks that Ratners jewellery lasted less time than a store-bought prawn sandwich completely tanked the company, losing the brand nearly £500 million in less than a year. What was once viewed as an integral part of the British high street became a laughing stock, defined by its own failure to understand that shoppers can just go somewhere else.

Major companies are never safe from failure over their own bad decisions. Visa, Mastercard, and Stripe should do well to remember that.

Earlier this month, the three payment processing organisations, facing pressure from right-wing, anti-porn lobbyists, forced gaming marketplaces Steam and Itch.io to remove thousands of Not Safe For Work (NSFW) video games by threatening to prevent customers from using their credit cards on the platforms.

Itch.io was forced to “deindex” thousands of adult games from its library as it grappled with the impact of the policy, while Steam reportedly removed hundreds of titles from its storefront altogether.

The collective decision to target consumers’ right to buy whatever legal smut they desire has been met with righteous fury from those arguing that the censorship of completely legal goods is a small step towards private companies deciding what we’re allowed to buy based entirely on their values – sure, you might not be into raunchy video games, but what’s next? Sex toys? Alcohol? Rude t-shirts?

‘NSFW content is like the cockroach of the World Wide Web’

Despite all the valid concerns and justifiable backlash towards Visa and Mastercard, I’m finding it difficult to freak out over the future of pornography on the internet.

Yes, right now we absolutely should be highlighting the catastrophic damage this could cause to the livelihood of sex workers or adult artists – whose jobs are as legitimate as yours or mine – but pornography and, more broadly, sexual desire, is a force far more powerful than these three companies combined.

Adult content has defined the internet more than people know. In the late 1980s, efforts to distribute pornographic images led to innovations in file distribution that would set the stage for the creation of image boards. Horny nerds used to regularly share pornographic ASCII art – art made of computer text – to bypass limited bandwidth. In fact, in 1995, it was estimated that 83.5 per cent of images on internet servers were pornographic.

NSFW content is like the cockroach of the World Wide Web. It has outlived countless politicians intent on stomping it out, and it survived a concerted anti-pornography effort by the US Congress in the late 1990s with the Communications Decency Act. Adult artists have survived through censorship attempts by Tumblr, OnlyFans, Pinterest, and so many others – every single time, it was the private company that took the hit.

PornHub is still among the most searched websites in history. OnlyFans still features 220 million registered users. Reddit is still teeming with NSFW subreddits. The internet, much like the humans that inhabit it, is irreverent, likes sex, and it has been defined by decades of content that would make your dear old grandmother pale as a ghost. As long as that content is legal, age-appropriate, and not hateful, then private companies have no right to tell anyone they shouldn’t be allowed to purchase or view it.

From a certain perspective, Visa and Mastercard’s duopoly on payment processing may make this situation far more concerning, and while I agree that their attack on the freedom of consumers to purchase whatever legal goods they desire should be met with strong resistance, your credit card isn’t the only way to buy things.

Even if the payment processors extended these measures across the internet and somehow managed to stomp out a sizeable portion of pornography on the internet, it still wouldn’t be enough. If we were to put our capitalist hat on (I know, just stay with me here), all this would do is cause competitors to pop up and take Visa’s, Mastercard’s, and Stripe’s place – you only need to look at X/Twitter’s decline to see this in action.

Visa and Mastercard are scarily big companies; their combined net worth is somewhere in the trillions at the time of reporting. If they take this deeply short-sighted tactic and extend it to other businesses, it will be as devastating as it is unnecessary. It will likely change a lot about the internet and the way we complete online payments. But, as scarily big as both these financial giants are, they are not above the libido of 5.35 billion internet users.