beyond the point of no re:turn

the gates are closing around nicodou if you’re arriving internationally. along with a suite of other restrictions, the now familiar haunt of “child-like depictions” means some videos well outside of that category became unavailable to view outside of japan starting this month. unlike pixiv, you can’t flip a few well-hidden region toggles, and your IP instead acts as your fingerprint. nico seiga, the pixiv-like art portal that steered left for cheesecake ero where nijie went right, is blocked entirely. curiously, while the R-18 genre for videos has been nuked entirely, inmu has lived to see another beast day.

there’s an entire laundry list of restrictions translated in an english article — a true rarity ever since the english portal was sunset years ago and support went to a skeleton staff — but there’s also indication of an ongoing tug-of-war that is losing to payment processor pressure, part of a saga that has seemingly lived on through the site’s reboot. it took until today for me to notice that the user following feed, previously nicorepo, has been totally gutted and only got caught in the net weeks after that initial announcement. not even the FCC and COPPA, which is a reasonable benchmark to hold services to absent other protections, put the screws to youtube this much on feature restrictions.

nico, moreso than the other japanese services that are now buckling under similar pressure, enshrined hopes to redefine copyright and free speech with the emergent social web. it was one of the few lingering large sites to have channeled those hopes very directly into a manifesto, something of a relic you would now only expect to see from the technocrats that frequented the WELL, read e-zines, or bought into the second life revolution. first penned in 2007 and largely unchanged after it was last amended in 2009, it hitches its exuberance to other hacker cultures (three days is all you need) that have bemoaned how the net has adopted an unavoidable corporate structure, and how current social and political structures must bend to the web revolution or face irrelevance.

“bridging virtual worlds” has been poisoned by the metaverse grift, and some of the terminology makes it easy to brush away as a curiosity, but the ambitions presented by this declaration have otherwise not dulled, and it has remained in the footer even through its kadokawa acquisition. the way it crowns creators is still plainly realized by how staff has chosen to make them whole after the site’s failure to a degree that is, frankly, shocking for how comprehensive it is. after those promises were laid out in july, and on the second day after the site’s relaunch this august, though, the declaration was removed and hasn’t been acknowledged since. while it is a jettison similar to google’s abandonment of “don’t be evil” during its restructure into alphabet, the timing is especially troubled here, and it has made the site look smaller and weaker than it felt even as part of the kemofure struggle session. unable to push back on global processors, nico has clearly been outmuscled, and those ambitions of free culture no longer have any shield to fall behind. the global village is available to you on nico, but, starting now, only if you reside in japan.

recently I enjoyed a roundtable discussion that claimed to expose some of the mechanisms of payment processors, which we are seeing in action here, and it’s a decent overview of how these crackdowns have specifically impacted adult games. some of their conclusions I believe are naive, or are misrepresenting the information flow between merchants and processors, but on the whole it is useful to see critical examination of these functions happening with more sunlight as these pressures continue to exert on fringe elements. these mechanisms are, of course, deliberately obtuse to frustrate investigation and to deflect responsibility, so it is no wonder that professionals and hobbyists lack much clarity on how to proceed. card networks and their arbitragers undoubtedly remain the weak link that enables a soft censorship at all, especially when they must exercise a brand sanitation that bends not only to moral panic, but a legal classification as obscenity. these are in practice not so different, when you are likely to take a plea if you are unfortunate enough to land in court where jurors are unlikely to acquit, and third parties can no longer expect a broad immunity. the verdict I came to in my last post on nico’s health broadly hold on these realities, and yamada taro shaking hands with an apologetic suit lackey at visa is unlikely to alter that trajectory.

while I’m not resigned enough to swear off the site for good yet, against all signals telling me I should have long ago, these events should reframe how we think about nico’s health and cast doubt that I will ever get anyone to ever click a link leading out to it. nico had already retreated inwards after its failure to go global, and this doesn’t inspire much confidence that it can outlast the squeeze. even as I initially imagined this post as a guide to help people steer around these barriers¹, it does dawn on me that I’m likely in the exclusive class of overseas (ex-)premium users that actually noticed to begin with. archiveteam has picked up on the notice, but given the reactive nature of that effort, and an interest that hasn’t really picked up again after the site’s recovery, I have my doubts that they, or IA more broadly², or really anyone outside of an individual with too much S3 glacier storage to heat up, will have the bandwidth or reaction time needed to suck down a lot of heavy video if the bell tolls suddenly.

for today, my smile and optimism are gone, until “recent social conditions, the international situation, and laws and regulations outside of japan” relax. perhaps I should instead settle for the devs fixing the seek issues on the new player and implementing a full dark mode beyond the watch page. down either road, I’ll be living in suspense.