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Comments (163)

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  Glyptodon
  I do think we're getting to the point that middlemen don't have much value add. Economics even suggests they don't add value I think. Possibly neutral markets, payments, and logistics should just be a public service.
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  Anonyneko
  I wish they would face litigation for banning the sale of large swaths of content (or even banning the content altogether on sites relying on donations/subscriptions to survive). Paypros have no business being censors.
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  hmokiguess
  I think a lot of this is starting to bubble up to the surface after PIX made headlines[1][1] https://whatispix.com
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  legitster
  I think I would push back on the idea that credit and debit cards represent a deadweight loss to the economy. Operating a cash business has its own expenses - theft risk (employee or otherwise), handling time, and (most importantly) you are limiting your customer base to only cash. There's a lot of reasons lots of small businesses are going card only.For good or bad, a lot of studies have confirmed that cards have overwhelmingly increased consumer spending.I think the far stronger case is that the industry has no actual incentive to fix the underlying fraud that they are charging merchants to fight. They have done a lot of work to institutionalize the problematic infrastructure and make it almost impossible for startups or outsiders to fix.
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  tiffanyh
  What seems to be getting lost is that the acquirer, not the payment network, sets the Merchant Discount Rate. The acquirer is also the merchant’s direct payments provider.Yet the acquirers seem to be always absent from these lawsuits.
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  yturijea
  I hope more things like this comes to light, as we have seen how mastercard and visa in union has moved censorship among things around the world, which by the way is illegal, but due to their monopoly could still carry out and they did.So the hope is that new or one of the other brokers step up and hopefully their ethics are better.
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  criddell
  What's the intended outcome?If you break up the Visa and Mastercard cartels, does this San Diego pizzeria then have to decide what cards to accept on a bank-by-bank basis?
• purplezooey
  That's how we do it in the US. We let industries consolidate and merge until they can raise prices with abandon, then chip back away at it with lawsuits.
• jijji
  FedNow charges $0.045 per transaction and runs 24/7 and payments are instant. A better solution would be bank cards that used the FedNow network already in place which would send money directly to the merchant, bypassing visa/mastercard entirely.I've been using Same Day ACH in all my businesses for over a decade and the transaction fees are about $0.30/transaction and the dispute window is 60 days for PPD (personal checking accounts) and 3 days for CCD (commercial check accounts) and you get the money the same day. It beats paying visa/mastercard percentage fees and the 120 day dispute windows where people can literally get their money back four months later for work that was already performed. By using Same Day ACH, we get the money from the customer faster, save potentially millions of dollars in fees, and reduce dispute windows from four months to 3 days (for B2B sales)
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  somat
  Wouldn't high fees be competitive? A lot of incentive to compete there. Anticompetitive would be setting the fees too low to compete with.I guess the point being there is probably a better reason for the high fees than the company trying to be anticompetitive, Or perhaps better said as a better reason for being anti competitive than high fees. Monopolistic lock in? Regulatory Capture? The problem is, that this blames the government instead of the company.
• za3faran
  I'm noticing that many establishments are charging you more when you pay by credit or debit cards.
• gadders
  Slight digression. This podcast/article is a good explanation of why people who partake in a class action rarely see any of the settlement money:https://oliverbatemandoesthework.substack.com/p/the-work-of-..."We have a case pending right now in the Ninth Circuit. It was a privacy lawsuit against Google. A journalist, not a trial lawyer, determined that you could turn off tracking in Google Maps and it was not supposed to share your data, and then learned that Google was sharing it anyway, whether you turned it off on your phone or turned it off in the app. State attorneys general came in, fined Google a bunch of money, and forced Google to stop. And simultaneously there is a follow-on class action built on the journalists’ research, and that has settled.The settlement is that Google creates a fund of sixty-two million dollars. The lawyers get nineteen million and the class gets zero. The rest is a big slush fund for a set of left-wing groups. Nothing requires the recipients to be left-wing other than that being what the attorneys chose to present to the court. They do it partly because some of these organizations are clients of the law firm, some of them have lead partners of the firm sitting on their boards, some of them are the attorneys’ alma maters, and some of them are just left-leaning outfits that are promising to do left-wing things. The class is two hundred million people. Maybe a hundred fifty million of them would not like what is being done in their name with their money.And the judge decides who gets paid. This judge was very excited about getting to stop being a judge and start being a grant administrator with a big pot of philanthropy. We said, why are these unrelated organizations, which are not even unrelated, they are affiliated with class counsel, getting the class’s money? If the plaintiffs’ lawyers want to support the ACLU, it should come out of their pockets and not the class’s pockets. It is perfectly feasible to distribute that money to the class. Much smaller settlements get distributed to similar class sizes all the time. You can complain that if you divided it evenly among every single class member it would be a tiny amount and not worth paying out, but you do not have to do it that way, and most class actions are not done that way. Most class actions settle for less than a dollar per class member. You create a claims process, let class members sign up if they want the money, and divide it that way."
• Razengan
  Finally
• bilater
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• checkvisaslots
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• surcap526
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• max109020
  I think it’s a good idea .wonderful