| Today's top tech stories: - China warns that the grueling "996" work culture is illegal
- Apple settled with app developers without making major concessions
- Affirm's stock soared after news it would partner with Amazon on a buy-now-pay-later feature
OnlyFans' pitch has always been about intimacy. Not because most of the content is erotic (though it is), but because the interaction between creator and consumer is so direct. People subscribe not to OnlyFans as a whole, but to the feed of particular performers. Those performers often develop relationships of a sort with their fans, exchanging messages and personalizing content for particular quirks and kinks. It was a connection that a socially distanced world proved particularly hungry for. However, the content platform's decision last week to ban—and then abruptly un-ban—explicit content highlights the other parties that were always lurking in the middle of that relationship. The company says the original decision, first reported by Bloomberg, was necessitated by concerns from OnlyFans' banks and payment processing companies. That came after Mastercard announced stricter requirements for processing payments for porn sites to try to ensure that performers on the sites were of age and willing participants. It's a reminder that the ability to instantaneously pay someone many miles away who you have never met—and whose real name is probably not the one you know them by—doesn't just come into being on its own. Someone created that infrastructure, and maintains it, and your ability to use it depends on their continued approval. It's similar to a lesson that been learned elsewhere. Small e-commerce merchants, reliant on Amazon to reach their customers, find their survival dictated by the internet giant's terms of service. Social media platforms such as Parler and Gab, seen as overly indulgent of racism and misogyny, lose their contracts with web hosters, forcing them to go dark. And in a world where single people increasingly find each other through their phones, those who are booted off of dating apps, for reasons that are sometimes unclear, can be essentially edited out of the dating pool. It is not excusing toxic online trolls or unscrupulous retailers or creepy (or worse) daters to say that the rules we now rely on to deal with them are opaque, arbitrary and undemocratic. For the sex workers and performers who make their living on OnlyFans, there was always a sense that it was too good to last. Not that the deal for them was all that amazing. OnlyFans provides precious little for the 20% cut it takes of subscription fees: Performers get almost no help promoting themselves, and often, as Amy Thomson and I wrote in Bloomberg Businessweek, have to track down and deal with content piracy on their own. The fact that OnlyFans has become a household name undoubtedly brought attention to what the company probably hoped would pass as a quiet course correction on the way to the initial public offering it is rumored to be planning. In the tweet announcing the reversal of the decision last week, the company said it had "secured assurances necessary to support our diverse creator community"—assurances presumably secured from payment processors. It was a victory for content creators in an economy where, in general, they have few points of leverage, but it also made it clear who is still in charge. —Drake Bennett in New York One of China's most popular film stars, Zhao Wei, appears to have been erased from parts of the Chinese internet. Her major films were no longer available on streaming sites starting late last week, and her name had been scrubbed from Tencent's landing pages. The reason for the disappearance wasn't immediately clear, but the country has recently been cracking down on the entertainment industry and fan culture. Apple issued its strongest push yet to get employees vaccinated. China is seeking to ban data-rich companies from holding IPOs in the U.S. Bitcoin is having an impact on El Salvador's debt. China's largest artificial intelligence company, SenseTime Group, has filed for an IPO in Hong Kong. | 
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