The guidelines are advisory only and are a response to
increasing concern about "extreme" content on the internet.
According to the Guardian newspaper the guidelines state:
"Banks provide facilities to internet merchants that enable them
to accept card payments for content and merchandise. [We] deplore
the abuse of these facilities on ethical, legal and sound business
grounds.
"Banks will not knowingly do business with
internet sites that sell content/merchandise inciting, advocating
or perpetuating activities such as child pornography, racism,
terrorism and violence against persons, including scenes of sexual
violence."
"We are not setting ourselves up as moral arbiters," Sandra
Quinn, a spokeswoman for APACS, told the Guardian. "But we have to
be sure we are doing all we can about preventing the spread of such
extreme images.
"We had no objections from our members on the grounds of
[whether this was] censorship. But we don't want to be any more
prescriptive. It's a grey area," she added.
