Antitrust Troubles Snowball for Tech Giants as Lawmakers Join In

Right, which drives up transaction volume which in turn means the payment network and the seller get more volume and more money. The risk is accounted for in interchange.

> Insurance companies make more money when everybody has to buy insurance. How is that an argument for forcing everybody to buy insurance? "Middlemen make more profit" is an argument against.

The bigger your risk pool the lower your cost. That's how insurance works. The more people you can socialize big losses over, the less you have to charge each person. Your margin on top is a function of your business goals. It's not strictly true that more people equals more money, you can always pass on the costs. Depends on where you make your money. A 501(c)(3) that offers insurance for instance would just charge less.

> You're using peak cash back and average interchange fees. The cards with 2% cash back aren't the cards with 3% interchange fees. And you're not accounting for the merchant losses from the chargeback itself which causes them to have to charge higher prices.

3% for card present is actually really high, I was using a blended average of the ~2.5ish% charged for card-present, 3ish% charged for online and 3.5ish% charged for card-not-present transactions at the point of sale to small and medium sized businesses. You can expect this to be 1% lower for merchants of substantial scale.

I'm not sure what you're suggesting is true. If we look at markets that cap interchange fees, they charge 0.3% [1]. Therefore, I think it's safe to assume that 0.3% is typical to cover the cost of loan origination and fraud. The rest is returned to consumers via rewards programs, plus a little cream due to lack of regulation. Further Visa interchange on that 2% cash back card is no more than 2.4% meaning I'm not out of the ballpark with my 2% rewards + 0.3% loan origination costs + 0.1% cream/chargebacks/misc insurances/etc. [2]

> Meanwhile a legitimate $2000 chargeback is atypically large.

Hey, you asked for mine, I gave it to you.

> Those numbers go even further south for people with bad credit who can't get a cash back card and then have to shop at low income merchants who suffer a high customer fraud rate, meanwhile they won't be making a large legitimate chargeback because they can't afford purchases that large to begin with.

Again, see [2].

> Marketing gimmicks that purposely sound valuable but aren't worth very much in practice.

In what way is my getting a one-month-free loan a gimmick? It's the foundation on which I structure my personal finances, secure in the knowledge if someone defrauds me I don't have to pay until it's resolved. I've also taken advantage of the loss protection.

> You're asking for data so I'm asking to run the experiment. How else do you get better data? And your claim that the interests are aligned ignores the cost of the insurance. If you can get a discount for waiving your right to a chargeback for a merchant you trust, it's basically free money, and your interests are both aligned in not paying for insurance you don't need. If the fee is then high to have a right to do a chargeback against the shady merchant you don't trust, maybe there is good reason for that.

If you start letting people waive the cost of insurance adverse selection kicks in so now only the people who plan to abuse the system pay for the insurance making it prohibitively expensive. This is why you don't allow people whose houses are on fire to buy fire insurance. Or why until recently you couldn't get health care in the individual market that covered pre-existing conditions. Why on earth wouldn't you not get cover until you needed it then buy it? Because that's not how insurance works.

> The sample is confounded because many merchants don't offer a cash discount but many credit cards still offer cash back, and cash is slower, so many customers prefer credit cards for reasons outside of the ability to refuse charges later.

Debit cards?

> But even then, many people nonetheless pay cash, especially when the discount actually exists. If the value of being able to do a chargeback was so great, why would anybody ever do that? More importantly, why shouldn't they be able to, including over the internet?

I'm saying the value you're suggesting doesn't exist. If it did, it'd be an option. And that that's not how insurance works.

I don't know, you keep making un-founded assertions as though they were fact then demanding an opportunity to prove them. I don't understand why you're suggesting that this is some big money-making scam when it's far more profitable for these companies to increase transaction volume than to skim 'chargeback insurances' which just aren't that big a portion of interchange.

Let me ask this: how much do you think chargebacks actually cost and do you have data to back this up.

[1] https://www.adyen.com/blog/all-you-need-to-know-about-the-eu...

[2] https://squareup.com/guides/credit-card-processing-fees-and-...

In 2019, having online speech without discovery and viral propagation is obviously disadvantaged. That's like saying in 1960's America, it would have been alright for networks to ban a political party from using radio and television, because they still have newspaper ads.

What you're advocating is that one side of the political spectrum should get a huge media advantage in terms of "friction" and network effects -- because their side owns the companies controlling it. That's not advocating for a free marketplace of ideas. That's advocating for a rigged marketplace of ideas, because you happen to like the direction of the tilt.

Would you be satisfied if Republicans were deplatforming your pundits and widely censoring speech you favored on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter? I wouldn't, and I don't think you'd like it very much. (In a way, it was like dealing with the Moral Majority types back in the 80's and 90's.) Be careful how you rig the system and distort the marketplace. One day, it might well be the turn of people you don't like. (1)

diametrically opposed to Constitutional free speech

Free Speech is more important than property rights:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh_v._Alabama

(1) - Given that I agree with Bret Weinstein, that some Bad Actors are exploiting the far left for their own purposes, this is basically already happening. It's just that the bias of most left leaning people prevents them from seeing the corruption on their own side.

But they do! They main complaint about monopolies is that they're impossible to outcompete.

Control of the demand side of a market is called a Monopsony, not Monopoly. It's mentioned in the thread above, more info here: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/monopsony.asp