In light of the number of attacks that WikiLeaks has undergone in the past week an organization known as Anonymous has begun Operation: Payback to bring retribution down on the companies that would, in their words, censor WikiLeaks’ information.
While major online financing services such as PayPal, MasterCard, and Visa have shut down their dealings with the embattled WikiLeaks, one microfinancing startup is still hanging on. Flattr, a micropayment startup created by Peter Sunde, co-founder of the infamous BitTorrent sharing site The Pirate Bay, still accepts donations on behalf of the document-leaking non-profit.
WikiLeaks, which has come under intense international pressure after publishing leaked U.S. diplomatic cables, has seen its most of its major funding sources dry up (the big ones are U.S.-based). PayPal, owned by online auction giant eBay, restricted WikiLeaks’ account on Saturday, saying the organization violated its policy on facilitating illegal activity. MasterCard began denying donations to WikiLeaks on Monday, followed by Visa a day later.
PostFinance, the financial arm of the Swiss postal system also shut down a bank account owned by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who was using it to collect donations. Assange was arrested in London on unrelated criminal allegations Tuesday.
Sunde has been a public advocate for Assange and WikiLeaks. He has also proposed a peer-to-peer DNS system that would prevent domain name registrations from being revoked, as was done with the WikiLeaks.org domain.
His company Flattr, based in Sweden, allows users to vote on content they like, much like Digg or Condé Nast’s Reddit, except each vote is actually a micro amount of cash. Users pay a monthly donation to Flattr (minimum €2). At the end of the month, that fee is split between all the content providers that user has Flattr’d.
Sunde started Flattr in March along with Linus Olsson. WikiLeaks, which has experienced funding problems in 2009, was among its first financing partners, although any company can now sign up to accept Flattr payments. At the time, he told TechCrunch that Flattr was “prepared for the controversy.”
As originally announced in March, Financial Times is now accepting PayPal as a payment option for users who want to subscribe to its FT.com Web site.
PayPal can also be used for FT‘s new FT Press Cuttings tool, which launches Thursday. FT Press Cuttings allows users such as public-relations professionals to email full-text articles at £1 ($1.58) per recipient. Links can still be sent free-of-charge.
Blockbuster nears bankruptcy but thinks it can outdo NetFlix in the long haul, consumers can now make payments via their Twitter accounts using TwitPay, Jet-Blue sells “All You Can Jet” plane tickets for unlimited flying for a month and Savewave ramps up their digital coupon program. What’s going on? Companies are having to work harder for your money and you want them to. Read more
Paypal is making it easier to donate money to your friends and family on social networks. From raising money for a child’s soccer team to gathering donations to support a loved one’s surgery, this new service, called Fundrazr, makes it easy to to make relatively small donations directly on your Facebook wall. This easy one-click solution is right on the heels of similar products to come out, most notably the donation tool Flattr. Whether these services will compete or be able to carve out their own niches is yet to be seen.
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If you’re raising funds for any kind of real-life group, event or project, you might already know that it isn’t easy to manually manage and track funds with PayPal and other similar web-based payments providers, let alone allow members to view financial details. If that’s the sort of feature set you’re looking for, WePay might be what you’re looking for.
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Paypal. They might charge exorbitant fees that piss people off, but the reality is, they provide a service that 26 million people a month keep coming back for.
Looking to capitalize on some fun, the send-money-to-anyone service has rolled out a new Website, Do Stuff For Money. Read more
Since PayPal isn’t developing their online payment services and the list of countries ‘Send Money Online’ doesn’t get smaller you need to search for alternative services to PayPal. I have seen many people complaining about PayPal, because they are supporting merchants only in big countries and people from smaller countries can’t use the full PayPal service package. I think the weak point of PayPal is Europa and here already are other strong players that can game with PayPal.
