In the interest of being fair to Epoch, I do think some lessons were learned about the Phoenix Forum/GayVN summit fiasco.

I don't know if anyone noticed, but Epoch quietly gave in on the exclusivity issue, and CCBill is now among the cosponsors for the GayVN summit.

I also believe that Rand indicated somewhere that Epoch had taken a significant step back from their involvement with the Summit because, if I remember correctly, "there were disagreements on the direction in which it was going." They are still sponsoring, but I think perhaps they did realize that the advice they had received (or bought) was not as good as they thought it was and figured moving into the background was sensible.

More than anything I just wish everyone could get along. Perhaps Rand or someone at Epoch can contact Lee and explain why Epoch isn't interested in his business.

I do think, if Lee gets information and chooses to share it, this would be useful to other webmasters in making decisions about which processor to use. It is pretty scary to think that one of the only two credible US-based processors is basing decisions about processing that should be based on relative risk and other business factors on the strength of personal biases rather than good business.

I really hope that isn't the case, and I really desperately hope that Epoch will soon hire somebody that really understands the value of PR and how silence, bad decisions, and pettiness can do serious damage to a company's reputation in a community that is already fractured, dramatic, and gossip-laden as the gay adult webmaster community is.