- that doing business is akin to speech.

- that corporations are entitled human rights (freedom of speech).

Also, freedom of speech means nothing for humans if corporations can force their customers not to discuss certain topics in the name of “I don't want to do business with someone who says that”.

Yeah and when that was written the act of paying with a credit card would have looked like magic

Maybe things have changed a bit

And there being only one gas station.

And the guy having not objected to the exact same bumper stickers for the last 15 years.

Visa have said this is because of 'enhanced risk' caused by this content, but they've been fine with it up to now. It's only because of the Australian group's censorious actions that they've decided to act. That's the frustrating thing, at least to me.

Whether they have the legal right to do it or not, it's still a dick move.

(If you'll forgive the pun.)

And in fact, you cannot stop me from putting leaflets on your car, no matter how distasteful you find the content, just because it's your property. In fact, in many jurisdictions, putting stickers is allowed too, the line being drawn at damaging the property of someone else. (I can write stuff on your car with easy to wash water paint, but I can't carve a message on it).

> If you ran a bookstore, and I could force you to carry a bunch of books that glorified Nazism

Welcome to the life of every bookstore clerks in the world. And it turns out they aren't allowed to remove books they disagree with, nor add their own favorite book in the store. If the owner of the store can force that on its clerks I see no reason why the legislator couldn't do the same on the owner. In fact, in countries that aren't hypocritical about freedom of speech, you cannot get fired by your boss if they dislike what you say, but you can definitely be fired if you refuse a customer, which shows doing business has nothing to do with freedom of speech.

So at the end of the day, having refuted your two arguments, my point still stand: Doing business isn't akin to speech, and corporations aren't human beings in the first place so they shouldn't be entitled human rights anyway.

Also, property right isn't some special kind of right that trumps everything else, it's one basic right like any other and have no precedence/superiority over the others.

You have expressed your opinion, which you are certainly able to have, but the objective reality is that freedom of association applying to businesses is incredibly old and consistently reiterated precedent. If you want to change it in countries where this is the law of the land, you're going to need to pass new laws (and in the case of the US, amend the constitution.)

But the problem is that you seem to misunderstand the difference between being protected from the government compelling speech/association/etc. with the law compelling the protection from other individuals, businesses, etc. from being able to take action because of their disagreement with what you said.

Frankly, I have no idea how the world you are envisioning would function. It would be a neverending argument over what side trumps the other in every disagreement of this nature. It's just not viable and this is one of the reasons that the precedent here is so strong and so universal.

I don't know why you bring that up though, as it has no relationship with whether or not the businesses and up having human rights on their own.

> is incredibly old and consistently reiterated precedent.

Again, this is irrelevant, as the age of a practice has no impact on how legitimate it is (slavery used to be incredibly old and reiterated ”).

> and in the case of the US, amend the constitution.

Nah, appointing the right Supreme Court justices is enough to create or destroy constitutional rights.

> Frankly, I have no idea how the world you are envisioning would function

It doesn't take that much imagination though, all you have to look at the real world, especially on the other side of the Atlantic: here businesses just can't put arbitrary restrictions that aren't backed by legitimate interest, and the said restriction must be necessary and proportionate to the achievement of the said legitimate interest. They simply cannot say “I'm free to do whatever I want” because they definitely aren't.

In fact I'm pretty sure that even in the US they cannot either, which is why Visa is framing it in a fraud reduction procedure.

Everyone has to carry around half a million credit cards? Every merchant has to make half a million separate payment processing agreements, each with its own card machine?

No; this is a natural monopoly situation, and just needs to be regulated hard.

Yes regulation are necessary, including for interoperability, but I don't really buy the natural monopoly argument (at least not more than any tech companies).

...Of course, we do need some more safeguards first to make sure that such an entity wouldn't be massively abused by tyrannical executives cheerfully twisting the law into bizarre pretzel shapes in order to attack anyone who disagrees with them.

But, even if the Civil Rights Act didn't exist, this is an excellent way to go out of business near-instantly.

Good illustration that it's not about free speech, as if it was the law would be as unconstitutional as Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act.

> this is an excellent way to go out of business near-instantly

It depends, there's an audience for Nazi bars too.

>We do not make moral judgments on legal purchases made by consumers. Visa does not moderate content sold by merchants, nor do we have visibility into the specific goods or services sold when we process a transaction.

So they are trying to outright lie or they are so disconnected they are ignorant of what other parts of their company are doing. Neither are a good luck.