151–160 of 399 posts
Even if anticompetitive behaviour is clear, I wonder if a USA government would take action against them. Has such a thing happened before? I mean fighting a company that gaves the USA an advantage in a global market, as opposed to local monopolies.
Yes. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Roosevelt#Trust_busti...
I would argue Visa and Mastercard and payment processing at large as the top priority by far. It's crazy that we've given up control as a society of the only mechanisms for electronic payments in an increasingly cashless world to unregulated private entities who continue to jack up fees as often as they can get away with. Makes everything 3-5% more expensive. Ridiculous.
There is 100% nothing stopping the Federal government from offering a full-faith-and-credit-backed "America electronic transaction system" for electronic transactions, with those fees handled by taxes. But much as there's nothing stopping the Federal government from greatly simplifying the burden and toil of tax season by issuing 90% of Americans a pre-filled-out "This is what you owe; sign this and return it or disp…
https://www.propublica.org/article/filing-taxes-could-be-fre...
https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-f...
Google is a private corporation that runs various free services, i.e. you are the product. You agreed to their terms and services. If you don't like that, you can use a competitor. As long as there's an open internet infrastructure, there's no anti-competitive behavior. Everyone can be a google competitor of one of its services. Case in point, DuckDuckGo etc. If you want to regulate something, start with the ISPs and…
You're missing the point. The anti-competitive behaviour isn't harmful against other search engines - it's against companies in the other domains where Google can leverage its nigh total search engine dominance to push its other products, e.g. Google Flights and Google Shopping. How is a flight booking service supposed to fairly compete with Google Flights when Google owns the top of the funnel where users go to search for these services? It's exactly the same thing that Microsoft did with Internet Explorer in the 90s: leverage their control of the platform (in that case, an OS) to exclude competitors for their other products (web browsers).
Google is a private corporation that runs various free services, i.e. you are the product. You agreed to their terms and services. If you don't like that, you can use a competitor. As long as there's an open internet infrastructure, there's no anti-competitive behavior. Everyone can be a google competitor of one of its services. Case in point, DuckDuckGo etc. If you want to regulate something, start with the ISPs and…
(1) https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I definitely have concerns about the stranglehold the payment processors have, but does it really make everything 3-5% more expensive? My understanding was that a good chunk of the 3% fee is given back to consumers as cash back or rewards, and that dealing with cash also had costs for businesses.
This is correct. The best you can usually do is 2% cash back, so really the consumer is being charged 1% for the convenience of using a credit card. Obviously most consider that worth it, which is why credit cards are so popular.
Generally cashless is cheaper for the retailer. Fewer losses to employee fraud and robbery. You don't have to pay for employees to deposit cash.
The downside is that you're liable to fraud and chargebacks.
On top of search, one of the real issues is that they set their ad prices with no market forces at play. $50 per click? Why yes, but only because they say so... Fake click? We say its real, pay us...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is 100% nothing stopping the Federal government from offering a full-faith-and-credit-backed "America electronic transaction system" for electronic transactions, with those fees handled by taxes. But much as there's nothing stopping the Federal government from greatly simplifying the burden and toil of tax season by issuing 90% of Americans a pre-filled-out "This is what you owe; sign this and return it or disp…
Right, the same government that couldn't get a healthcare website going is supposed to also power every single transaction from internal infrastructure. There are hidden costs that are much higher than 3% to giving the government full control over every transaction in society. It's a single point of failure with no redundancy or decentralization, a large attack vector, and a human rights nightmare. As a general rule,…
I'd honestly love to see something like a credit union at a large enough scale to run it's own payment processing system. Something like that could get you a nice level of independence from government control and give you an organization more incentivized to care for it's members.
Even if anticompetitive behaviour is clear, I wonder if a USA government would take action against them. Has such a thing happened before? I mean fighting a company that gaves the USA an advantage in a global market, as opposed to local monopolies.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/chart-evolution-standard-oi...