Okay, you claim you've read the bill. What is the language in the bill that excludes NSFW media creators?
It does not surprise me that a conservative introduced a bill to protect conservative causes, and defended it with rhetoric that appeals to his conservative base, but that doesn't change what the bill actually says.
The bill itself doesn’t, but this particular Congress, as well as numerous states, are already making moves to restrict legal access to NSFW media online, in which case NSFW media won’t be protected by this bill. So people throwing their weight behind this bill on the premise that it will protect Itch are likely to discover that they’ve wound up making it impossible to de-bank groups like Collective Shout (not to mention arms manufacturers, payday lenders, crypto scams, etc.) without actually protecting LGBTQ or NSFW media creators.
Beyond which, there’s the question of why non-government financial institutions shouldn’t be able to decide not to provide service to some categories of business. If a credit card company doesn’t want to profit from mass shootings by processing payments for bump stocks, even though federal law doesn’t prohibit them, it seems wrong to require them to conduct that business anyway. This bill effectively intervenes in their rights of conscience — which is what it was designed to do.
The problem, from my POV, is not that private institutions can decide they don’t want certain clients, but rather that a few big players have effectively built up monopoly power, which makes it impossible to find another financial service provider when the biggest players say no.
They have monopoly power (or rather, duopoly power) because banking and payment processing are so highly regulated that there is no reasonable possibility of standing up an alternative, let alone one resistant to the same pressures that lead to events like this. The regulatory moat is so wide that they're effectively a government arm. We don't let the electricity and water companies refuse service to people over "conscience" because they are utilities with a government-sanctioned monopoly or oligopoly - it's the same principle, a principle upheld by the courts many times. For that matter, there are many private businesses required to provide their services to all comers just because what they do is too important. And to be clear, we're not going to have a deregulated banking sector, because history has shown us how badly that can go.
I'm not in favor of the age verification measures or general attitudes you mention, but there is a difference between gating access and defunding. Alcohol is also age-gated, yet it remains legal for those of age.
I give this reply more for others reading it than for you. You went from "I have read the bill, which is why I’m pretty sure it won’t protect NSFW" to saying that it's not an issue with the bill. So I no longer believe your weird selective libertarianism thing is being put forth in good faith, and I might not respond in future.
Anti-trust would be an odd thing for a libertarian to advocate, but okay.
It’s simple really. This bill is designed to help a lot of businesses that hurt society (fossil fuel producers, arms manufacturers, crypto startups, etc. — a lot of which are libertarian darlings). Maybe, under a different administration, it could also help independent game designers, but with the same legislators working to restrict NSFW and LGBTQ material online, we could very well end up helping those industries without doing anything to help NSFW and LGBTQ creators.
But cheers. This is the third year they’ve introduced it without passage, so I’m not super worried about it making it into law.
