alt Hacker NewsIt's the other way around. You have choice with a company, and people can switch provider very quickly if they are bad. You have very, very coarse-grained control with the government every few years.
Replies
> You have choice with a company,
This is wrong for a large share of the companies that most people deal with on a daily basis. And that share has been steadily increasing every single year.
Ok, I choose to not use Visa/Mastercard in the US, and I want to subscribe to some saas. What do I do now? Or do you mean "choice" as in "you can always choose not the breathe or eat"?
Theres a natural tension here, because in order for this to be true you need a diverse market with many competitors. But that is bad usually, because it's extremely inefficient, so it gets optimized out. The monopolies we see are indeed an optimization - the natural climax of a developing market.
Consider payments: you do not want to carry around 100 different cards and trinkets just to pay for things in your daily life, right? And for merchants, they do not want to make deals with 100 different companies to accept payments, right? So what's the end result?
We see the monopolies in the US economy because our economy is very efficient. It could be even more efficient - consider, for example, how much time and money could be saved if only one phone OS existed.
But then of course that's bad for you, the consumer, because then these huge corporations rule your life and can essentially do whatever they want.
In the context of mastercard and visa being a duopoly and the recent debacle such as certain games being removed from steam because they threatened to not allow stream to use the card payment system, it's a pretty bad take.
Not that central bank won't be able to do the same, but it would have to follow laws set by the government rather than law+whatever the card companies decide to.
Agree to disagree. Lock-in is a thing that companies design for.
I've moved countries five times in my life. I still haven't been able to fully get rid of my dependency on Big Tech or the Visa/Mastercard duopoly.
Like others said that choice is not really given in this case.
Also with the government option it wouldn’t mean that you can’t still use other methods - for example in brasil credit card or cash work just fine, PIX is just one (very convenient) option.
You only have a potential choice until a company buys out all its competitors and surpresses the rest.
> You have choice with a company, and people can switch provider very quickly
Oh yeah?
Please enlihhten me, how exactly can I switch providers from the Visa/Mastercard duopoly?
> You have choice with a company, and people can switch provider very quickly if they are bad.
There are exactly two companies in the global credit card market and they operate in lockstep, literally coming to agreements to shut down legal businesses together. Visa and MasterCard have absolutely no right to determine who is and isn't allowed to receive payment. Governments have that right, but that doesn't mean they should use it -- if they're abusing that right, people can vote them out. The effectiveness of people voting out harmful politicians is another matter, but that's kind of on the people being bad at voting, not the idea of government altogether, and at any rate you have no vote whatsoever in what MC/Visa do (unless you vote for government to regulate them!).