The Secret War to Censor the Internet: Who Benefits When the Web Is Walled Off

Introduction

There is a video by Lextorias titled "The Secret War To Censor The Internet" that has been making the rounds. It documents a coordinated campaign by payment processors, primarily Visa and Mastercard, to pressure online platforms into removing adult content. Steam removes hundreds of games. Fansely bans furries and VTubers. Suraya, a Japanese games retailer, shuts down entirely. Niconico cuts a deal to restore card processing after removing content. The pattern is clear: if Visa and Mastercard do not like what you are doing, you cannot accept payments, and if you cannot accept payments, you cannot exist.

At the same time, a campaign called "Stop Killing the Internet" has launched as a sister movement to "Stop Killing Games." It warns that governments in the UK, Canada, the United States, and the European Union are pushing age verification laws that would fundamentally change the nature of the internet. The UK's Online Safety Act is already law. Canada's Online Harms Act is moving through parliament. Multiple US states have passed or are considering age verification requirements for social media. The European Union is developing its own framework for age verification across the bloc. Each of these laws is different in its specifics, but they share a common structure: they require platforms to verify the age of their users, they impose significant penalties for non-compliance, and they give regulators broad discretion to determine what content is acceptable.

The campaign makes a crucial point that is often ignored in mainstream coverage of these issues. The age verification laws are not being developed in consultation with the people who will be most affected by them. Young people, who rely on the internet for social connection, education, and community, are not being consulted. Online safety experts, who have spent years studying the actual harms that young people face online, are not being heard. The laws are being written by politicians who want to appear tough on technology companies, and they are being supported by the same corporate interests that benefit from a more controlled, more surveilled internet. that would require users to upload government ID to access YouTube, Twitch, Discord, Reddit, and other platforms. The campaign argues that these laws are not really about protecting children. They are about control. They are about surveillance. They are about building the infrastructure for internet censorship that can be expanded to cover any content the state decides it does not like.

These two stories are usually told separately. The Lextorias video focuses on payment processor censorship. The Stop Killing the Internet campaign focuses on government regulation. But they are two sides of the same coin. Both are part of a broader war on the open internet. Both are driven by the same underlying forces: the logic of capital, the centralization of power, and the desire of ruling classes to control the means of communication.

The Lextorias video runs over an hour and documents dozens of cases of payment processor censorship going back years. It shows how Visa and Mastercard have systematically pressured platforms to remove content that they deem unacceptable, without any legal authority, without any public debate, and without any recourse for the creators and platforms affected. The video is thoroughly researched and carefully argued. It makes a compelling case that the payment processor stranglehold is one of the most significant threats to free expression on the internet today.

This analysis brings these two stories together. It argues that the war on the internet is not about protecting children, not about preventing fraud, and not about cleaning up content. It is about control. It is about who gets to decide what can be said, what can be seen, and what can exist online. And it argues that the only way to defend the open internet is to understand the class interests that are driving the attack.

Part One: The Payment Processor Stranglehold

The Lextorias video opens with a seemingly small change to Steam's rules in July 2025. The platform updated its guidelines to prohibit content that violates the standards of its payment processors and related card networks. Within days, hundreds of games were removed. They were not games that violated any law. They were games that Visa and Mastercard had decided they did not want to be associated with.

The Lextorias video traces this pattern back decades. In the 1990s, Visa and Mastercard began pressuring platforms to remove adult content. In the 2000s, they extended this pressure to include gambling content. In the 2010s, they targeted cannabis-related businesses. In the 2020s, the categories expanded to include anything that might be considered controversial, from political speech to artistic expression. Each expansion is justified as a response to specific concerns, but the cumulative effect is a steady narrowing of what can be sold on the commercial internet.

This is the nature of payment processor censorship. It is invisible. It does not require a law, a court order, or a public debate. It happens quietly, through contracts and terms of service that no one reads. Visa and Mastercard are not government agencies. They are private corporations. But because they control the infrastructure of online payments, they have the power to determine what can be sold and, by extension, what can exist online.

The pattern repeats across the industry. In 2021, OnlyFans announced it would ban sexually explicit content, citing pressure from payment processors. The backlash was immediate and intense, and the company reversed its decision within days. But the fact that it had been forced to consider such a ban at all demonstrated the power that payment processors hold. OnlyFans is a billion-dollar company with millions of users and significant political influence. If they could be pressured, smaller platforms had no chance at all.

In 2024, the Japanese games and comics retailer DLsite announced it would remove thousands of titles from its platform, citing changes in payment processor policies. Creators who had spent years building their audiences and their livelihoods on the platform saw their work disappear overnight with no warning and no compensation. The company expressed sympathy but said it had no choice.

The pattern repeats across the industry. Fansely, a major creator support platform, banned adult material involving amateur wrestling, hypnosis, and anything resembling role-playing as animals, including furries and VTubers. The reason was pressure from payment processors. Suraya, a Japanese retailer of games and comics, announced it was closing because it could not find a payment processor willing to work with adult content. Niconico, Japan's largest video sharing platform, had its Visa and Mastercard processing suspended for a year before it agreed to remove content.

The payment processors have also targeted political content. In 2022, Visa and Mastercard suspended payments to the social media platform Parler after the January 6th Capitol riot. Whether one agrees with Parler's content or not, the precedent is dangerous. If payment processors can decide that a platform is too politically controversial to serve, they can effectively shut down any platform that challenges the political establishment. The same could happen to activist networks, independent media outlets, or organizing platforms for labor unions.

The Lextorias video documents dozens of similar cases. What emerges is a picture of a small number of financial institutions exercising effective veto power over the content of the internet. They do not have to justify their decisions. They do not have to be transparent about their standards. They simply have to refuse to process payments, and the targeted platforms have no choice but to comply or die.

This is not an accident. It is the result of decades of consolidation in the payment processing industry. Visa and Mastercard together control the majority of the global card payment market. They have no meaningful competition. Merchants who rely on card payments have no alternative. If Visa and Mastercard decide that a certain category of content is unacceptable, that content is effectively banned from the commercial internet.

Consider what happens to a creator whose work is removed from a platform because of payment processor pressure. They do not simply lose one source of income. They lose access to the entire commercial internet. Once Visa and Mastercard have decided that a category of content is unacceptable, no major payment processor will touch it. No bank will work with it. No advertising network will serve it. The creator is effectively exiled from the formal economy, pushed into underground markets where they have no legal protection and no recourse if they are exploited.

The class dimension of this censorship is important. The content being targeted is primarily adult content, which is produced by independent creators, small studios, and individual artists. These are not powerful corporations with armies of lawyers. They are workers trying to make a living from creative work. They have no leverage against Visa and Mastercard. They cannot negotiate. They cannot fight back. They can only comply or disappear.

Part Two: The Government Offensive

While payment processors are squeezing platforms from the financial side, governments are launching a parallel offensive through regulation. The Stop Killing the Internet campaign documents how the UK, Canada, the United States, and the European Union are all pushing age verification laws that would require users to prove their identity before accessing social media platforms.

The stated justification is protecting children. The UK's Online Safety Act, Canada's proposed Online Harms Act, and various US state-level age verification laws all claim to be about keeping young people safe from harmful content. But the actual mechanisms they propose go far beyond anything that could be justified by child protection alone.

Age verification on the scale these laws contemplate would require every user of every major platform to upload government-issued identification. This would create a centralized database of identity documents linked to online activity. Discord already had a data breach when a third-party age verification provider was compromised, exposing tens of thousands of government ID images. The infrastructure being built is a surveillance system, not a safety system.

The Stop Killing the Internet campaign makes an important point: these laws are being pushed through without meaningful input from the people who will be most affected. Young people, who rely on the internet for social connection, education, and community, are not being consulted. Experts who have spent years studying online safety are not being heard. The laws are being written by politicians who want to appear tough on tech companies, and they are being supported by the same corporate interests that benefit from a more controlled, more surveilled internet.

The campaign argues that the real goal is not protecting children but building the infrastructure for censorship. Once the age verification system is in place, it can be expanded to cover any content the government decides is unacceptable. The UK's Online Safety Act is a good example. It was presented as a necessary measure to protect children from online harm. In practice, it requires platforms to proactively monitor all user content for a wide range of potential violations, from illegal content to content that is merely harmful. It empowers regulators to fine companies millions of pounds for failing to comply. And the definition of harm is broad enough to include almost anything that the government decides it does not like. Critics have pointed out that the law could be used to suppress political dissent, to restrict access to information about reproductive health, or to criminalize the sharing of content that the government finds inconvenient.

Canada's proposed Online Harms Act follows a similar pattern. It would create a new regulatory agency with sweeping powers to compel platforms to remove content. It would require platforms to implement age verification systems. It would create new criminal offenses for content that the government decides is harmful. And it would do all of this without meaningful parliamentary debate or public consultation.

The same system that verifies your age can verify your political affiliations, your reading habits, your social connections. The infrastructure of control, once built, is never used only for its stated purpose.

Part Three: The Intersection of Finance and State

The payment processor campaigns and the government regulations are not happening in isolation. They are connected by the fact that the same corporate interests benefit from both.

Large technology companies like Meta, Google, and Microsoft have the resources to comply with both payment processor demands and government regulations. They can afford the legal teams, the compliance departments, and the technical infrastructure required to satisfy multiple regulatory regimes. Small platforms, independent creators, and alternative social networks cannot. The effect is to consolidate power in the hands of the largest technology companies while driving smaller competitors out of existence.

This is the dynamic that is often missed in discussions of internet censorship. The people pushing for more control are not just government bureaucrats and moral crusaders. They are also the executives of the largest technology companies, who benefit from a regulatory environment that makes it harder for new competitors to emerge. They are the payment processors who want to avoid the reputational risk of being associated with controversial content. They are the investors who want the internet to be a safe, predictable, profitable environment for their capital.

The face of a moral crusade is a useful excuse for control. When the stated goal is protecting children, it becomes very difficult to oppose the measures being proposed. Anyone who questions the need for age verification can be painted as indifferent to child safety. This is not an accident. The framing is deliberate. It is designed to foreclose debate and to make opposition seem morally suspect.

Consider who pays for the lobbying campaigns that push age verification laws. The same companies that will benefit from those laws are often the ones funding the political campaigns that support them. The same politicians who vote for internet restrictions receive campaign contributions from the technology companies that will profit from those restrictions. It is a system of mutual benefit that operates largely out of public view.

The Lextorias video alludes to this when it notes that the payment processor campaigns are not about enforcing any consistent moral standard. Visa and Mastercard have no problem processing payments for companies that engage in labor exploitation, environmental destruction, or the sale of weapons. They only intervene when the content is controversial enough to threaten their brand reputation. They are not enforcing ethics. They are managing risk. And the risk they are managing is the risk of public scrutiny and potential regulation.

Part Four: The Class Nature of Internet Control

To understand why the internet is being walled off, we have to understand who benefits and who loses.

The people who benefit from a more controlled internet are the same people who benefit from a more controlled society generally. They are the owners of large corporations, the political class, and the institutions that depend on maintaining the existing distribution of power. A controlled internet is easier to monitor, easier to regulate, and easier to extract profit from. It is a more predictable environment for capital.

The internet has been a democratizing force in many ways. It has allowed independent journalists to reach audiences that were previously controlled by media conglomerates. It has allowed activists to organize across borders. It has allowed artists and creators to distribute their work without the permission of publishers and studios. It has allowed marginalized communities to build spaces where they can speak freely without fear of harassment or discrimination. Every one of these possibilities is threatened by the war on the open internet.

The people who lose from a controlled internet are the same people who lose from control in every other sphere of life. They are workers, independent creators, marginalized communities, and anyone whose voice challenges the existing order. The internet has been a powerful tool for organizing, for education, for building alternative media, and for connecting people across borders. Every restriction on the internet is a restriction on the ability of ordinary people to communicate, organize, and resist.

The question of who controls the internet is ultimately a question of who controls society. The same class that owns the payment processors, that funds the political campaigns, that sits on the boards of the major technology companies, is the same class that benefits from every restriction on the ability of ordinary people to communicate freely. They benefit from a population that is fragmented, surveilled, and dependent on centralized platforms for access to information and community.

This is why the fight against internet censorship is not a single-issue campaign. It is connected to every other struggle for freedom and justice. The same forces that want to control what you can see online also want to control what you can read, what you can say, what you can learn, and what you can do. The internet is not separate from the broader society. It is a battlefield in the same class war that is being fought in every other arena.

The Stop Killing the Internet campaign's website argues that governments are using child protection as a political weapon. It points out that the same politicians who vote for internet restrictions have failed to address the root causes of harm to young people: poverty, inadequate mental health services, broken social safety nets. The internet is being blamed for problems that the system has created and refuses to solve. It is easier to pass a law requiring age verification than it is to fund youth mental health services or address the housing crisis that leaves young people without stable homes.

The Lextorias video and the Stop Killing the Internet campaign both frame the issue in terms of freedom of expression. They argue that censorship is wrong because it violates individual rights. This framing is not wrong, but it is incomplete. It misses the class dimension of the fight. The people who are losing their ability to earn a living because payment processors have decided to ban adult content are not just having their rights violated. They are being dispossessed. They are being pushed out of the economy by the same forces that have pushed workers out of industries for centuries.

Part Five: The Alternative

The Stop Killing the Internet campaign has launched with a website that describes its goals in broad terms. It opposes government restrictions on internet access. It calls for a public and accountable debate about the future of the internet. It invites individuals and organizations to sign up in support of the cause. These are valuable first steps, but they are not a strategy.

A real strategy for defending the open internet must address the structural power of payment processors. This means either breaking up the Visa and Mastercard duopoly, creating publicly owned alternatives to private payment infrastructure, or building platforms that can operate without relying on the traditional financial system. Each of these approaches faces significant challenges, but none of them is impossible.

A strategy must also address the political power of the technology companies that benefit from regulation. The largest platforms have learned to live with, and even profit from, the regulatory environment. They have the resources to comply with any law that is passed. Their competitors do not. Regulation that is presented as consumer protection often functions as a barrier to entry that entrenches the dominance of the largest companies.

What would a free internet look like? It would not be an internet where everything is permitted regardless of harm. It would be an internet where the power to decide what can exist is distributed, not concentrated in the hands of a few corporations and government agencies.

A free internet requires alternatives to the payment processor oligopoly. This could take the form of publicly owned payment infrastructure, cooperative payment systems, or decentralized financial networks that cannot be shut down by a single company. It requires alternatives to the major platforms that can be controlled through regulatory pressure. This means supporting federated platforms like Mastodon and PeerTube, which are not owned by any single company and cannot be easily censored.

A free internet also requires political organization. The forces pushing for more control are powerful and well-funded. They cannot be stopped by signing a petition or boycotting a single company. They can only be stopped by building a movement that is equally powerful and equally well-funded. The Stop Killing the Internet campaign is a step in this direction, but it needs to be connected to broader struggles for economic justice, democratic control of technology, and the redistribution of power.

The Lextorias video ends with a call to awareness. Know what is happening. Tell others. Support alternatives. These are necessary first steps, but they are not sufficient. Knowing that payment processors are censoring the internet does not stop them from doing it. Using an alternative platform does not break the power of Visa and Mastercard. These actions are important, but they must be part of a larger strategy that aims at changing the underlying distribution of power.

Conclusion

The war to censor the internet is not a single battle. It is being fought on multiple fronts simultaneously. Payment processors are squeezing platforms from the financial side. Governments are passing laws that require identity verification and surveillance. Large technology companies are lobbying for regulations that will entrench their dominance. And the public is being told that all of this is necessary to protect children.

The Lextorias video and the Stop Killing the Internet campaign are valuable because they expose what is happening. They show that the censorship is real, that it is coordinated, and that it is not about child protection. But they do not fully explain why it is happening. The answer is that the internet, in its current form, is a threat to the existing distribution of power. It allows people to communicate, organize, and share information in ways that are difficult for ruling classes to control. The war on the internet is a war on this possibility.

The payment processors are not acting alone. The governments are not acting alone. They are acting together, as parts of a system that benefits from a more controlled, more surveilled, more predictable internet. The Secret War to Censor the Internet: Who Benefits When the Web Is Walled Off

Introduction

There is a video by Lextorias titled "The Secret War To Censor The Internet" that has been making the rounds. It documents a coordinated campaign by payment processors, primarily Visa and Mastercard, to pressure online platforms into removing adult content. Steam removes hundreds of games. Fansely bans furries and VTubers. Suraya, a Japanese games retailer, shuts down entirely. Niconico cuts a deal to restore card processing after removing content. The pattern is clear: if Visa and Mastercard do not like what you are doing, you cannot accept payments, and if you cannot accept payments, you cannot exist.

At the same time, a campaign called "Stop Killing the Internet" has launched as a sister movement to "Stop Killing Games." It warns that governments in the UK, Canada, the United States, and the European Union are pushing age verification laws that would fundamentally change the nature of the internet. The UK's Online Safety Act is already law. Canada's Online Harms Act is moving through parliament. Multiple US states have passed or are considering age verification requirements for social media. The European Union is developing its own framework for age verification across the bloc. Each of these laws is different in its specifics, but they share a common structure: they require platforms to verify the age of their users, they impose significant penalties for non-compliance, and they give regulators broad discretion to determine what content is acceptable.

The campaign makes a crucial point that is often ignored in mainstream coverage of these issues. The age verification laws are not being developed in consultation with the people who will be most affected by them. Young people, who rely on the internet for social connection, education, and community, are not being consulted. Online safety experts, who have spent years studying the actual harms that young people face online, are not being heard. The laws are being written by politicians who want to appear tough on technology companies, and they are being supported by the same corporate interests that benefit from a more controlled, more surveilled internet. that would require users to upload government ID to access YouTube, Twitch, Discord, Reddit, and other platforms. The campaign argues that these laws are not really about protecting children. They are about control. They are about surveillance. They are about building the infrastructure for internet censorship that can be expanded to cover any content the state decides it does not like.

These two stories are usually told separately. The Lextorias video focuses on payment processor censorship. The Stop Killing the Internet campaign focuses on government regulation. But they are two sides of the same coin. Both are part of a broader war on the open internet. Both are driven by the same underlying forces: the logic of capital, the centralization of power, and the desire of ruling classes to control the means of communication.

The Lextorias video runs over an hour and documents dozens of cases of payment processor censorship going back years. It shows how Visa and Mastercard have systematically pressured platforms to remove content that they deem unacceptable, without any legal authority, without any public debate, and without any recourse for the creators and platforms affected. The video is thoroughly researched and carefully argued. It makes a compelling case that the payment processor stranglehold is one of the most significant threats to free expression on the internet today.

This analysis brings these two stories together. It argues that the war on the internet is not about protecting children, not about preventing fraud, and not about cleaning up content. It is about control. It is about who gets to decide what can be said, what can be seen, and what can exist online. And it argues that the only way to defend the open internet is to understand the class interests that are driving the attack.

Part One: The Payment Processor Stranglehold

The Lextorias video opens with a seemingly small change to Steam's rules in July 2025. The platform updated its guidelines to prohibit content that violates the standards of its payment processors and related card networks. Within days, hundreds of games were removed. They were not games that violated any law. They were games that Visa and Mastercard had decided they did not want to be associated with.

The Lextorias video traces this pattern back decades. In the 1990s, Visa and Mastercard began pressuring platforms to remove adult content. In the 2000s, they extended this pressure to include gambling content. In the 2010s, they targeted cannabis-related businesses. In the 2020s, the categories expanded to include anything that might be considered controversial, from political speech to artistic expression. Each expansion is justified as a response to specific concerns, but the cumulative effect is a steady narrowing of what can be sold on the commercial internet.

This is the nature of payment processor censorship. It is invisible. It does not require a law, a court order, or a public debate. It happens quietly, through contracts and terms of service that no one reads. Visa and Mastercard are not government agencies. They are private corporations. But because they control the infrastructure of online payments, they have the power to determine what can be sold and, by extension, what can exist online.

The pattern repeats across the industry. In 2021, OnlyFans announced it would ban sexually explicit content, citing pressure from payment processors. The backlash was immediate and intense, and the company reversed its decision within days. But the fact that it had been forced to consider such a ban at all demonstrated the power that payment processors hold. OnlyFans is a billion-dollar company with millions of users and significant political influence. If they could be pressured, smaller platforms had no chance at all.

In 2024, the Japanese games and comics retailer DLsite announced it would remove thousands of titles from its platform, citing changes in payment processor policies. Creators who had spent years building their audiences and their livelihoods on the platform saw their work disappear overnight with no warning and no compensation. The company expressed sympathy but said it had no choice.

The pattern repeats across the industry. Fansely, a major creator support platform, banned adult material involving amateur wrestling, hypnosis, and anything resembling role-playing as animals, including furries and VTubers. The reason was pressure from payment processors. Suraya, a Japanese retailer of games and comics, announced it was closing because it could not find a payment processor willing to work with adult content. Niconico, Japan's largest video sharing platform, had its Visa and Mastercard processing suspended for a year before it agreed to remove content.

The payment processors have also targeted political content. In 2022, Visa and Mastercard suspended payments to the social media platform Parler after the January 6th Capitol riot. Whether one agrees with Parler's content or not, the precedent is dangerous. If payment processors can decide that a platform is too politically controversial to serve, they can effectively shut down any platform that challenges the political establishment. The same could happen to activist networks, independent media outlets, or organizing platforms for labor unions.

The Lextorias video documents dozens of similar cases. What emerges is a picture of a small number of financial institutions exercising effective veto power over the content of the internet. They do not have to justify their decisions. They do not have to be transparent about their standards. They simply have to refuse to process payments, and the targeted platforms have no choice but to comply or die.

This is not an accident. It is the result of decades of consolidation in the payment processing industry. Visa and Mastercard together control the majority of the global card payment market. They have no meaningful competition. Merchants who rely on card payments have no alternative. If Visa and Mastercard decide that a certain category of content is unacceptable, that content is effectively banned from the commercial internet.

Consider what happens to a creator whose work is removed from a platform because of payment processor pressure. They do not simply lose one source of income. They lose access to the entire commercial internet. Once Visa and Mastercard have decided that a category of content is unacceptable, no major payment processor will touch it. No bank will work with it. No advertising network will serve it. The creator is effectively exiled from the formal economy, pushed into underground markets where they have no legal protection and no recourse if they are exploited.

The class dimension of this censorship is important. The content being targeted is primarily adult content, which is produced by independent creators, small studios, and individual artists. These are not powerful corporations with armies of lawyers. They are workers trying to make a living from creative work. They have no leverage against Visa and Mastercard. They cannot negotiate. They cannot fight back. They can only comply or disappear.

Part Two: The Government Offensive

While payment processors are squeezing platforms from the financial side, governments are launching a parallel offensive through regulation. The Stop Killing the Internet campaign documents how the UK, Canada, the United States, and the European Union are all pushing age verification laws that would require users to prove their identity before accessing social media platforms.

The stated justification is protecting children. The UK's Online Safety Act, Canada's proposed Online Harms Act, and various US state-level age verification laws all claim to be about keeping young people safe from harmful content. But the actual mechanisms they propose go far beyond anything that could be justified by child protection alone.

Age verification on the scale these laws contemplate would require every user of every major platform to upload government-issued identification. This would create a centralized database of identity documents linked to online activity. Discord already had a data breach when a third-party age verification provider was compromised, exposing tens of thousands of government ID images. The infrastructure being built is a surveillance system, not a safety system.

The Stop Killing the Internet campaign makes an important point: these laws are being pushed through without meaningful input from the people who will be most affected. Young people, who rely on the internet for social connection, education, and community, are not being consulted. Experts who have spent years studying online safety are not being heard. The laws are being written by politicians who want to appear tough on tech companies, and they are being supported by the same corporate interests that benefit from a more controlled, more surveilled internet.

The campaign argues that the real goal is not protecting children but building the infrastructure for censorship. Once the age verification system is in place, it can be expanded to cover any content the government decides is unacceptable. The UK's Online Safety Act is a good example. It was presented as a necessary measure to protect children from online harm. In practice, it requires platforms to proactively monitor all user content for a wide range of potential violations, from illegal content to content that is merely harmful. It empowers regulators to fine companies millions of pounds for failing to comply. And the definition of harm is broad enough to include almost anything that the government decides it does not like. Critics have pointed out that the law could be used to suppress political dissent, to restrict access to information about reproductive health, or to criminalize the sharing of content that the government finds inconvenient.

Canada's proposed Online Harms Act follows a similar pattern. It would create a new regulatory agency with sweeping powers to compel platforms to remove content. It would require platforms to implement age verification systems. It would create new criminal offenses for content that the government decides is harmful. And it would do all of this without meaningful parliamentary debate or public consultation.

The same system that verifies your age can verify your political affiliations, your reading habits, your social connections. The infrastructure of control, once built, is never used only for its stated purpose.

Part Three: The Intersection of Finance and State

The payment processor campaigns and the government regulations are not happening in isolation. They are connected by the fact that the same corporate interests benefit from both.

Large technology companies like Meta, Google, and Microsoft have the resources to comply with both payment processor demands and government regulations. They can afford the legal teams, the compliance departments, and the technical infrastructure required to satisfy multiple regulatory regimes. Small platforms, independent creators, and alternative social networks cannot. The effect is to consolidate power in the hands of the largest technology companies while driving smaller competitors out of existence.

This is the dynamic that is often missed in discussions of internet censorship. The people pushing for more control are not just government bureaucrats and moral crusaders. They are also the executives of the largest technology companies, who benefit from a regulatory environment that makes it harder for new competitors to emerge. They are the payment processors who want to avoid the reputational risk of being associated with controversial content. They are the investors who want the internet to be a safe, predictable, profitable environment for their capital.

The face of a moral crusade is a useful excuse for control. When the stated goal is protecting children, it becomes very difficult to oppose the measures being proposed. Anyone who questions the need for age verification can be painted as indifferent to child safety. This is not an accident. The framing is deliberate. It is designed to foreclose debate and to make opposition seem morally suspect.

Consider who pays for the lobbying campaigns that push age verification laws. The same companies that will benefit from those laws are often the ones funding the political campaigns that support them. The same politicians who vote for internet restrictions receive campaign contributions from the technology companies that will profit from those restrictions. It is a system of mutual benefit that operates largely out of public view.

The Lextorias video alludes to this when it notes that the payment processor campaigns are not about enforcing any consistent moral standard. Visa and Mastercard have no problem processing payments for companies that engage in labor exploitation, environmental destruction, or the sale of weapons. They only intervene when the content is controversial enough to threaten their brand reputation. They are not enforcing ethics. They are managing risk. And the risk they are managing is the risk of public scrutiny and potential regulation.

Part Four: The Class Nature of Internet Control

To understand why the internet is being walled off, we have to understand who benefits and who loses.

The people who benefit from a more controlled internet are the same people who benefit from a more controlled society generally. They are the owners of large corporations, the political class, and the institutions that depend on maintaining the existing distribution of power. A controlled internet is easier to monitor, easier to regulate, and easier to extract profit from. It is a more predictable environment for capital.

The internet has been a democratizing force in many ways. It has allowed independent journalists to reach audiences that were previously controlled by media conglomerates. It has allowed activists to organize across borders. It has allowed artists and creators to distribute their work without the permission of publishers and studios. It has allowed marginalized communities to build spaces where they can speak freely without fear of harassment or discrimination. Every one of these possibilities is threatened by the war on the open internet.

The people who lose from a controlled internet are the same people who lose from control in every other sphere of life. They are workers, independent creators, marginalized communities, and anyone whose voice challenges the existing order. The internet has been a powerful tool for organizing, for education, for building alternative media, and for connecting people across borders. Every restriction on the internet is a restriction on the ability of ordinary people to communicate, organize, and resist.

The question of who controls the internet is ultimately a question of who controls society. The same class that owns the payment processors, that funds the political campaigns, that sits on the boards of the major technology companies, is the same class that benefits from every restriction on the ability of ordinary people to communicate freely. They benefit from a population that is fragmented, surveilled, and dependent on centralized platforms for access to information and community.

The payment processor campaign and the government regulation campaign are two prongs of the same attack. They reinforce each other. The age verification laws make it easier for payment processors to identify and refuse service to platforms that host controversial content. The payment processor restrictions make it harder for platforms to survive without the compliance infrastructure that only large companies can afford. Together, they are creating an internet that is safer for capital and more dangerous for everyone else.

This is why the fight against internet censorship is not a single-issue campaign. It is part of the broader struggle for a society where ordinary people have control over the tools of communication, over the platforms they use, and over the decisions that affect their lives.

The Lextorias video ends with a warning that the war on the internet is accelerating. The Stop Killing the Internet campaign ends with a call to sign up and join the movement. Both are right to be concerned. Both are right that action is needed. But neither goes far enough in identifying the root cause of the problem.

The root cause is not Visa and Mastercard, although they are powerful enemies. It is not the UK government, although its laws are dangerous. It is not the technology companies, although they benefit from the current trajectory. The root cause is a system that concentrates power in the hands of a small number of people and institutions, and that gives them the ability to control what the rest of us can see, say, and do.

The internet will be saved not by better technology alone, but by building the political power to demand that it be saved. That means organizing. That means building alternatives. That means refusing to accept that the internet must be controlled by a handful of corporations and government agencies. It means recognizing that the fight for a free internet is the fight for a free society.

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