Just to comment in the "little bit of free code" there are projects like python and numpy that would take ages to do properly and depending on the company would never ship (or function as reliably as it does right now)
Sometimes they're buying decades worth of debugging/testing
Would other companies that support pornhub/across in any way also be considered participants?
Water supply/electricity/ internet providers/whoever sells them dildos/food
I think a more interesting analogy than water/electricity would be storage.
Selling child porn has a special place in the law in a way that "feeding suspected CP criminals" does not.
But storing is also special. Storing child porn is very illegal, so how far does that extend? Does AWS renting an EC2 instance to pornhub, knowing pornhub may store CP on it, mean AWS is complicit in storing child porn?
Does Western Digital selling an SSD to pornhub for their datacenter make WD complicit in storing child porn?
Does the data-center that leases them a server become complicit in storing and distributing CP?
That analogy breaks down when the idea of encryption is considered. AWS has end to end encryption for customer data in motion, and optionally at rest. Pornhub is the only party that has absolute control and access of the data. The data centers are not at fault any more than the government is, for owning a road, when someone driving a tesla car in autopilot causes a crash.
In this analogy, Visa is in the same position as a power plant that provides electricity for Tesla cars.
I believe Visa should not be held legally accountable for the lack of action on Mindgeek/Pornhub in taking down and blocking reuploads of reported CSAM. However the issue is that Visa themselves have chosen to be a moderator of what content is allowed by its customers, regardless of the actual legality of the content. They do it indirectly by accepting and rejecting customers based on these guidelines that are not in line with what is or isn't allowed by law.
Based on a shallow reading of the court documents, Visa made essentially the same argument, that it stands an independent of the decisions of Mindgeek and those who uploaded the CSAM. The counter is the idea that Visa is at fault for giving Mindgeek/Pornhub/Uploaders of CSAM a platform to make money in the first place. That was a decision made by Visa. The fact that Visa already stopped being a payment processor for Pornhub/Mindgeek once in 2020 due to a NYT article about CSM shows that Visa was aware of and had control over how strictly Mindgeek/Pornhub polices the uploads for CSAM.
The case isn't about the existence of CSAM on Pornhub either, it's specifically calling out how Visa and Mindgeek has already profited from traffic generated by CSAM hosted on Pornhub.
In my analogy, it would be a power plant knowing the electricity they provide will be used in Tesla cars used by criminals to rob places. Tesla, in this example, knowingly selling cars that they know will be used for robberies and not doing anything about it. Tesla cars can't run without electricity, and the power plant makes money from selling the electricity to a group they know will use it up faster than the general driver.
Electricity and transportation is a regulated utility. I wonder if this case would not have a legal standing if net neutrality existed and a counter was made by Visa that it treats Mindgeek like any other media content provider and won't reject customers it provides services to, because it doesn't differentiate based on the specifics of the data. The website owners would still be responsible for host CSAM in that situation. Visa could potentially argue no joint understanding if net neutrality existed. Right now it's in contention because Visa has already shown it rejects and accepts customers based on their own rules about what kind of data is being served by its customers.
Visa's previous action to stop and then restart providing a platform to Mindgeek/Pornhub, after they removed unverified content, shows a clear understanding of what kind of media is served. By re-accepting them as a merchant, Visa opened itself up to being a beneficiary and conspirator in Pornhub making money from CSAM, by being the company that provides a way for Mindgeek to make money. Not from pornhub directly but by being a payment processor for the advertising arm of Mindgeek.
The specific issue is making money from CSAM, not the existence of CSAM.
> Electricity and transportation is a regulated utility.
Maybe it's time to regulate payment processors and turn them into utilities. That or create a national payment processor that does one thing and one thing only (process payments) under a transparent set of laws treating every traction equally.
I have no love for Visa or Mastercard. I'd rather not deal with them at all if I had an alternative that was just as convenient. It kind of crazy that with our modern tech and banking system we don't have that easy alternative and still have to keep these dinosaurs around just to easily pass numbers back and forth between banks.
> The fact that Visa already stopped being a payment processor for Pornhub/Mindgeek once in 2020 due to a NYT article about CSM shows that Visa was aware of and had control over how strictly Mindgeek/Pornhub polices the uploads for CSAM.
Yes, which shows that when Visa was aware that Pornhub was (allegedly?) breaking the law, they stopped providing service to them. Only once Pornhub tightened their policies significantly (and removed all of their content from unverified users) did Visa resume...
And it definitely is about the existence of it, actually; one of the allegations is specifically that Pornhub had child porn, failed to police it, and Visa knew both of those things.
Payments are a pretty specific aspect of trafficking, and while it's feasible some of those other areas you mention could be problematic, Visa has to be much more worried than the caterer.
The argument specifically relies on the financial processing role:
> MindGeek is being sued for knowingly monetizing child porn. Visa’s act of continuing to recognize MindGeek as a merchant is directly linked to MindGeek’s criminal act, as Visa’s act served to keep open the means through which MindGeek completed its criminal act knowing that that criminal act was being committed. At this early stage of the proceedings, before Plaintiff has had any discovery from which to derive Visa’s state of mind, the Court can comfortably infer that Visa intended to help MindGeek monetize child porn from the very fact that Visa continued to provide MindGeek the means to do so and knew MindGeek was indeed doing so. Put yet another way, Visa is not alleged to have simply created an incentive to commit a crime, it is alleged to have knowingly provided the tool used to complete a crime.
These utilities likely have laws that shield them from liability for these things, otherwise every illegal grow-op would cause the power company to be criminally liable for having supplied power to the grower's house and that makes no sense.
In this case Visa knows full well what they are enabling, by allowing payments to be processed on PH, especially given the volume of transactions, there's no way they don't know what they are supporting.
A important point is that it's an absolute pain in the ass to preprocess tabular data for neural networks.
Categorical > one hot encoding > deal with new categories in test time (sklearn does this, but it's really slow and clunky)
Numerical > either figure it out the data distribution for each column and normalize by that or normalize everything by z score. Found an outlier?? Oops, every feature collapsed to 0
Can you that for 10 features? Sure, now try it again with 500, it's not fun
Ok, now that you've done all that you can begin training and possibly get some reasonable result.
Kiss your wife goodbye as you enter your car "bye honey! On my way to being exploited by Uber!"
Drive away and open your exploitation app. Accept a ride, go to the person: "who's the person that's going to participate in my exploitation together with Uber today? Oh, there he is!". Drive him to the place he needs to be, drive away.
"Ok, do I want to be exploited some more today?"
Decide to be exploited on a few more rides and return home.
Now being serious, if you're an Uber driver and let's say that in the short term that's your best option, why would it be better for him to have this option striped from him? Why do you think anyone else should make that call except him?
In your strawman, the only options available for regulators is to do nothing and allow exploitation, or remove one exploitative industry and force the exploited further into poverty.
There are multiple avenues available, the least of which is to pass sweeping legislation to force corporations into compliance with basic human decency standards.
Sometimes they're buying decades worth of debugging/testing