Justice Department accuses Visa of debit network monopoly that impacts price of 'nearly everything’
Justice Department accuses Visa of debit network monopoly that impacts price of 'nearly everything’
Visa and MasterCard have surged in the past two decades, reaching a combined $1 trillion market cap. That has attracted unwanted attention from regulators.
DOJ is really going at it lately.
I can't wait to hear about the outcome of this litigation in 20-25 years.
Right?
Going after Google AND Visa?!
Even if it's all theatrics, the Justice department hasn't really showed up to work in recent memory and this is a refreshing change from the void abyss DOJ usually haunts
And even though it was on all our backs collectively… the 10¢ rebate coupon and like a year of free credit monitoring or some shit. It’s sad that justice doesn’t seem to be blind. Or maybe it is, but having capitalism whispering in its ear.
Visa should be nationalized. Let the government run the payment processing if we are only going to have only one.
Check out FedNow. Basically a domestic government run payment system. Still pretty new and growing.
By which nation? It operates pretty much everywhere.
Obviously my nation! Lol. That's a good point they would have to break it off and ban the other arms from coming back to the US and using the same name I guess.
All of them
I'm
Ah fuck! Did VISA get you?
I'd love to see the federal reserve issue a no fee stablecoin, though I wonder if it would be secure in the long term with quantum coming.
I have the most incredible news for you about this crazy new thing called... cash.
More seriously, there's no reason government bodies shouldn't just create a central digital transaction system with real money, instead of pouring resources into the stupidity of a blockchain system. Save everyone a lot of trouble and wasted compute cycles and just make the source of trust in the system the fact that it's administrated by a trusted central authority running a database, instead of the various shell game wank of blockchain systems.
The DOJ isn't going after this, but VISA is also the source of all these fucking porn bans on like Tumblr and shit because if you want to be able to use their payment processing, you also have to follow their fucking puritan ass values.
Honestly, if this kicks that secondary issue in its ass, that's amazing.
I don't think it will help with that, the war on pornography is only going to get worse.
Not exactly puritan to expect that if you’re serving porn you’ve done at least the base line vetting to make sure it’s not child porn or non-consensual.
These network transactions cost between 2 to 4 % for merchants, which is a cost passed to consumers by businesses raising prices. That's a fairly large "inflation", and certainly it seems out of line with the effort they out into it. It's anticompetitive practices that keep it in place.
Fwiw debit card transaction are capped around 21 cents per transaction depending on the size of the bank holding the account. You’re right for credit cards though. Also, imho, I’ve never seen merchants pass along these debit card savings to the consumer. With they would though.
I've never heard of that cap! Any references.
Also, imho, I’ve never seen merchants pass along these debit card savings to the consumer. With they would though.
Gas stations do! But not really passing the savings, just flipping it by penalizing credit cards.
They can easily say, "Actually it's 0.10 off by using a debit" as opposed to "it's 0.10 more for using credit".
Whether they directly pass the costs or indirectly, these are still costs made by the seller. In other words either the costs are passed on by the credit card customers or simply all customers. Somebody has to pay for the costs and in the end the seller has to make some profit to survive.
Yeah, you can think of it as a simple transaction fee for debit transactions, and a full blown credit and risk shifting system for credit transactions. The banks charge high fees for credit transactions because they're actually lending money and bearing some credit risk for them, whereas the debit transactions are just moving money from one account to another.
Those truck stops that have the X gas price for cash Y gas price for credit (x < y) are a good example of a merchant passing the savings onto consumers. More niche is all the coin shops I've been to pass the fee onto you if you use a card.
Our transactions cost 3 dollars per 100 spent
And the merchant terms are getting worse and more arbitrary.
I wonder what the world would be like if that IBM source code which is the backbone for all financial transactions and payment gateways weren't tightly controlled proprietary tech.
More fraud maybe, but less nickel and dime trickle upwards.
Obligatory fuck IBM they are largely patent trolls at this point adding zero value to anything.
What are you referencing specifically? I work in payments and I've never heard of this IBM code. The card networks just use an ISO format and every front end is different (the two we have are completely different in very fundamental ways though they are definitely both old as fuck).
If you could set me up with some texts or resources on programming a cashier till, or maybe even a bank, and a complete payment gateway that will be able to process debit transactions, which does not require an IBM package, then I would be eternally grateful. Like really beyond grateful.
When trying to research this online or asking people who work in the field everyone seems to say you buy the framework from IBM and build on top of it. Everywhere. All roads lead to Rome.
I think part of the popularity of Blockchain is that its pretty much the only alternative system of sending monetary value.
About time.
For reference, visa charges about 1.5%-3.5% on everything.
Oh, plus ten cents for every transaction, because fuck you, that's why.
Now that you mention 3.5%, yeah I can see how 30% is a bit much
What isn't a monopoly anymore? Which doesn't make their ultimate goal is to fuck people to make a profit. Latest one that hit me hard is
catcar manufacturers selling people's data to the insurance companies and people are getting insurance pricebikehike(fuck you, Google and fuck your fucking keyboard) for no reason.cat manufacturers
insurance price bike
I know exactly what you meant but these typos are strangely hilarious. Cheers, we all make silly typos sometimes. Me especially when I'm typing on a phone because I hate using autocorrect.
For anyone confused: car manufacturers / price hike
This is 100% Gboard autocorrecting words that are already correct. It feels the need to speak for me. I'm so fucking sick of it changing already correct words to what it thinks I need to type. I've even fucking emailed Google about it. They think they're helping us type better and faster, but they're actually making us type slower, as we have to fucking double check everything we type.
Look what you did? You opened a can of worms. Lmao. You could have just let it slide and I would have caught it, because I'm a maniac and always go back to my comments and re-read them.
Well after living through 2008, I am convinced the DoJ will magically forget about thise whole thing in a few years lol.
I honestly thought MasterCard was bigger, but maybe that's true here. 🤷
The only things I see that have a visa logo on it, are those prepaid cards. Out of all the cards I've ever had, bank or credit, I'm pretty sure only 1 has ever been visa, and that was like 15+ years ago, everything else is, or has been MasterCard.
Yessss