Until a service becomes so widespread and essential as to be declared a public good/utility, this looks like 'business is business' IMO.
Also business is business only gets you so far. What happens if service was withdrawn because the user was black?
So for Gab to not have access to funds either one of two things can be true. 1: There is a large conspiracy of banking organisations to stifle Gab for reasons we can speculate about. 2: Each of these organisations have seen Gab and made individual decisions about whether they want to associate themselves with Gab.
What boggles my mind is how many people think that it must be 1.
Having said that, who are all those companies regulated by?
I don't have a fully formed accusation here. All I know is that finance is heavily regulated. I suspect even the fear of regulators asking questions, and all the paperwork that would entail would be enough reason for some companies to cut their links.
I suspect Gab isn’t related to something like that though. It’s more that media focus on Gab means each company they do business with will want to drop them as a PR hot potato, to avoid news articles saying “why is X still willing to work with Gab?”
All of these processors ultimately depend on their banks, who are super strict. Banks are super strict because money is an insanely regulated industry. Banks are directed by regulators and lawmakers. They do not take any chances.
Services like these each somehow coincidentally (not really) come to the same conclusions because they're all trying to appease the same industry, directed by the same regulators. If they lose their banking relationships they are dead.
It's not a conspiracy and they're not really making individual decisions either, it's just how modern banking works.
So closer to 1.
I think it's less conspiracy and more defensive business strategy.
I wish payment processing and banking were more anonymous, and I'm very interested in projects like GNU Taler[1] that seek to find privacy conscious ways of doing transactions online. However, if they can't even find a bank to do business with them (or start one themselves), they're kind of screwed.
Why do people care so much about Gab, but not gambling sites which have been successfully dealing with far worse problems for years now?
