PayPal sparks furore over limits on "obscene" e-books

[lucy]

As I see it, and as a general principle, if you sell a service or goods, your are in the busines of selling service or goods, you are not in the busness of converting people to your ideas.

Now that's just plain wrong. Every privately owned business is free to sell or not sell a service or product, provided they abide the corresponding laws.
I work in the publishing business. The main topic of the journal we produce is human powered mobility. The fact that we don't publish articles about Porsche's newest version of the Cayenne has nothing to do with wanting to convert anyone to our ideas of how traffic in modern cities should work, but it has a lot to do with what we chose to write about.
And in that choice we are (almost) completely free.

Paypal has this choice, too, of course. They also have to take into account that people won't like their decision, which apparently they didn't.

[thir]

Now that's just plain wrong. Every privately owned business is free to sell or not sell a service or product, provided they abide the corresponding laws.

Sure. That is what I said.

I work in the publishing business. The main topic of the journal we produce is human powered mobility. The fact that we don't publish articles about Porsche's newest version of the Cayenne has nothing to do with wanting to convert anyone to our ideas of how traffic in modern cities should work, but it has a lot to do with what we chose to write about.
And in that choice we are (almost) completely free.

You publish magazines, which people can choose to buy or not. But you do not, if I understand you correctly, use your publishing business to try to impose othernon-related ideas on people, for example, if they buy your magazine they must refrain from/adhere to something completely different. As I understand it, you sell your mag with no strings attached.

What pay pal did was to sell a service - how to pay for things to buy - while at the same time trying to use this service to interfere with what you can buy, which is none of their business.