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Comment by arrel | Hacker News Reader

It seems like a lot of people are defending credit card pricing, but the idea that they’ve been charging the same % since before the internet and are still absorbing the same “cost” of fraud protection is absurd.

I would love Stripe to start advocating for lowering credit card fees, either through regulation or providing more avenues for competition.

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Be careful what you wish for the EU mandated reduced fees - the backs just stopped doing cashback cost me almost £20 a month.

Of course the reduced savings where not passed on to the end consumer

That working as intended. Now vendors can lower prices for all users instead of being held hostage by credit card banks/processors/users taking money from cash/debit users to divide among themselves.

No they took it for themselves

It’s too late. Much of that extra savings on fraud protection has already been funneled back to the card owner in the form of cash back or reward points. Not a whole lot can be done to break that unless the government comes in and legislates something as they do in Europe.

The benefit went entirely to the merchant the consumer lost out in the EU

If your merchants are charging monopoly prices then you need antitrust enforcement.

There are many costs that remain stubbornly fixed as a portion of GDP (Ads has been 2% of GDP for > 100 years). Fraud as an industry, and corresponding fraud protection services likely fall under this umbrella barring substantial technological innovation.

Has the internet decreased or increased fraud.

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