Credit card of future by Robert Scoble
Remember that suit Wikileaks’ hosting company, DataCell was about to file? Today was the day they were planning to do so. And surprise surprise, Visa and MasterCard have suddenly decided to start processing payments from DataCell again.
Late last week, WikiLeaks and DataCell gave me a copy of a legal complaint the group had planned to file Thursday with the European Union Commission, accusing the card companies and their Danish payment processor Teller of abusing their market positions by cutting off WikiLeaks’ financial sources.
Neither Visa nor MasterCard has responded to that threat, and even now a Visa spokesperson merely tells me that the company is “looking into the situation.”
But in the meantime, Visa, MasterCard and American Express payments have all inexplicably opened to DataCell and WikiLeaks through another payment processor, according to DataCell.
“Today we have observed that an alternative payment processor that we have contracted with, has in fact opened the gateway for payments with Visa and Mastercard, and now also for American Express Card payments, which is an option we did not had before,” DataCell wrote in a statement on its website.
We’ll see how long it lasts. But it says something about the due process used here if the mere threat of legal action has opened up the credit processing already.