I have talked on Twitter and elsewhere about my frustrations with Paypal. We’ve had some customer service issues; a payment reversed here, some other difficulties there. It’s a bit clunky, and hard to use some features for our store.

So I started looking into Google Checkout. At first it looked great; full of useful features, flashy, slick. Had some nifty stuff about shipping and taxes and such that would be super handy for the ZRC.

Then the art and technical director found some problems when going over the process to set up a store.

First, Google Checkout explicitly disallows tip jars. Why is this a problem, when we don’t have one? Well.. I thought we might in the future. I’m planning to release some stuff completely for free with the standard Creative Commons license we do for the ZRC, bigger things than our usual pamphlets and guides, and I thought, hey, if people wanted to chip in after reading and appreciating them, that’d be swell. Ditto for the desktops and poster images I have the art director working on now.

That’s not allowed, I guess. Not a huge deal but weird.

Then the Art and Technical Director found something that I couldn’t live with. Google places a lot, and I mean a LOT of restrictions on what you can sell in your store if you use their service, content based restrictions I can’t tolerate for the ZRC.

We’ve talked about censorship before here on the blog. Protests and calls for censorship for ‘A Serbian Film’, or for gay zombie pornographic film‘L.A. Zombie’ for example. The ZRC believes in free speech. So how could we agree to terms like this (which you may not be able to read w/o a google account):

Google has developed the following policies to ensure overall program quality and a positive user experience for everyone. Any individual or business processing transactions through Google Checkout must adhere to these policies.

Google reserves the right to expand or edit these policies at any time. Google will also exercise its sole discretion in the interpretation and enforcement of these policies in conjunction with the program’s Terms of Service. Products, goods, services and other items not listed below may still be restricted.

Unacceptable product categories
Examples

….

Adult goods and services
Pornography and other sexually suggestive materials (including literature, imagery and other media); escort or
dating services; novelties and toys

…

Offensive goods Goods, literature, products, or other materials that:

Defame or slander any person or groups of people based on race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sex, or other factors
Defame or slander any person or groups of people protected from defamation or slander by applicable law (such as the protection afforded to the royal family in some jurisdictions)
Encourage or incite violent acts
Promote intolerance or hatred
Promote or support membership in terrorist groups or other organizations prohibited by law
Promote revisionist theories proscribed by applicable law
Contravene public morality

So basically, Google goes way, way beyond simply telling you that you can’t sell something illegal in your area/nation with their service, which should be obvious. You can’t sell anything that offends THEM, that could be construed as pornographic or even ‘sexually suggestive’. You can’t sell any materials that ‘contravene public morality’ whatever that is supposed to mean.

Whose morality? Which public? Who knows.

Note how it seems that the lowest and narrowest applicable standards may apply to everyone who uses the service. It’s not illegal to defame ANY royal figure in America; we have the 1st Amendment, after all. (And it’s almost impossible to slander a public figure in the US)

But if I was to say ‘Down with the bloody tyrant Queen of England’, would our store face losing its storefront? What about the Saudi monarchy? The very thought of having to watch everything I say for fear anyone on Earth would be upset is appalling.

It goes on and on like that. Undefined terms, vague generalities, restrictions on what speech and content you can sell even if it’s perfectly legal, all interpreted at their discretion. And that would definitely affect us at the ZRC.

After rebooting the store I was/am planning to add some merchandise; signed copies of ‘Helpless’ by Michelle Hartz, which has scenes that could be construed as ‘suggestive’. Google wouldn’t let me sell those, I guess. Copies of ‘Atomic Age Cinema 2′, which has profane language and suggestive jokes. Couldn’t sell that either. Heck, our ‘Zombies Forever’ posters might be construed as inciting violence – violence against Sparkly Vampires.

Who DESERVE IT.

For that matter, Google’s terms could ban selling lots of Shakespeare if you want to get right down to it.

The Trope Namer: Hamlet, act 3, scene 2, by Shakespeare
Hamlet: Lady, shall I lie in your lap?
Ophelia: No, my lord.
Hamlet: I mean, my head upon your lap?
Ophelia: Ay, my lord.
Hamlet: Do you think I meant country matters?

Now, I’ve never looked into Paypal’s TOS too closely, but from the stuff on sale on Ebay and around the web via paypal, it’s obvious they don’t care much about the content of what you sell. Google claims to care deeply, and in ways that fly in the face of what we do and stand for here.

So we’ll keep looking for a better upgrade option, and I apologize to those of our buyers who are inconvenienced or turned off by the prospect of using Paypal in the present.

Tags: Social Justice

This entry was posted by John Sears on Friday, May 27th, 2011 at 11:21 pm and is filed under ZRC News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.