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Genuine question: are the payment processors legally exposed because of the purpose of transactions going on in their system? If so, this seems to be the main problem --I mean if social media platforms can absolve responsibility for content, Mastercard/Visa absolutely should as well....

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The issue is that EU and Australia have regulated interchange fees for MasterCard/Visa, costing them gobs of money and value.

The US doesn’t need to fine or litigate them if they want to penalize them heavily, they can just pass a “consumer protection bill” (so Walmart and others can pay <1% instead of ~2% on all credit card payments).

The interchange goes to the card issuer, not to the scheme. Visa and MasterCard fees are the smallest part of the overall fee charged by the payment processor. (That said it might be higher in the US, I don't know).

A lot of the incentive to pay by card evaporates if the vendor pushes the fee to the customer.

The incentive to issue cards evaporates when there’s less fee to collect.

Both would be bad upstream for visa/Mc/Amex.

Works mostly the same in the US

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