These bills (there’s a similar version in the House) are getting a lot of attention among Itch and Steam this week, but we should be clear that this is a bill designed to serve conservative ends, and there’s no guarantee under a conservative administration that it will protect independent game creators.
To understand how these bills will be implemented if passed, it’s important to understand their origins. One context made explicit in the text of the Senate bill is Operation Chokepoint, and Obama era program that advised financial institutions to deny services to businesses and groups that administration deemed at high risk of money laundering and fraud. A number of those businesses were in industries (like arms manufacturing, payday lending, and crypto startups) with heavy investments in Republican and libertarian political circles. And, indeed, the most consistent supporters of these bills (which have been introduced multiple times since the first Trump administration) have been gun lobbies like the NSSF, and crypto industry investors like Mark Andreeson. (I suspect that familiarity with the legislation came to the indie videogame scene by way of his spiel about it on Joe Rogan.)
So, on the one hand, throwing support behind the bill is likely to help out a lot of business that many here would be opposed to helping.
Maybe that seems like an “enemy of my enemy is my friend”-type situation, but I don’t think it is. It depends on the premise that financial institutions can’t find a pretext for excluding Itch and Steam that will pass muster under the Fairness in Banking Act. But the same legislators passing this act are also drafting laws to restrict access to NSFW material online, and are particularly motivated about limiting LGBTQ visibility and expression, not to mention anything they can connect to “woke” or DEI initiatives. If they pass something like the Fairness in Banking Act, I have no doubt they we’ll see them carve out exceptions for the very sorts of media you’re hoping to protect here.
In other words, it’s entirely plausible a law like this could make it impossible to de-bank Collective Shout, without protecting Itch from de-banking.