> First, in the US there are four companies, not two (or three, if you don't want to count Discover). And chargebacks aren't the reason that there are so few players - they're far from the biggest barrier to entry for an upstart, aspiring credit card provider.
Regardless of how many players there are, it's hard to deny that they behave like a cartel, which I think was the point of GP's use of duopoly.
I don't really see chargebacks as an anti-competitive practice, but I do see them as shifting the burden for their shockingly-bad security practices to merchants and consumers and focusing on ease of use (even for criminals) to increase the amount of credit card spending and profits for the payment networks. Europe has had chip and pin for decades now (it was already well established on my first trip there in 1998) and we're just getting it now after a ton of major breaches that should have been easily prevented. But merchants are forced to take credit cards because consumers love the convenience of paying that way and they're prevented from knowing the added cost that it imposes. That's where the cartel behavior comes into play...the policies that prevent merchants from advertising different prices for credit card transactions to reflect that added cost of accepting credit cards adds a silent ~5% tax onto everything we buy. Even for informed consumers, it creates tragedy of the commons situation because you'd be foolish to buy with cash when you can pay the same price and get 1% cash back.
All of this follows from the chargeback system that places all the burden for fraud on merchants. If the payment networks bore the burden for fraud out of their cut, we would have seen credible security features long ago. And somehow, when breaches like Target and Home Depot come to light, we blame those companies rather than the payment networks who should have been responsible for solving these issues many years ago.
> Europe has had chip and pin for decades now (it was already well established on my first trip there in 1998) and we're just getting it now after a ton of major breaches that should have been easily prevented.
There's a lot of misinformation about chip-and-pin (which is not surprising, because a lot of well-funded companies currently have a financial interest not to clarify the misinformation). This has been explained in more detail on the threads about the breaches by others who work on payment systems, but chip-and-pin would not actually have prevented several of the breaches that have happened recently in the US.
Furthermore, the main benefit to chip-and-pin has to do with the liability, not actual security. I'm not talking about the liability shift onto merchants who don't accept chip-and-pin; I'm talking about the situation in which fraud or suspected fraud occurs using a chip-and-pin system. In this case, though, the benefit is entirely for Mastercard/Visa/etc., and not for the consumer.
Regardless of how many players there are, it's hard to deny that they behave like a cartel, which I think was the point of GP's use of duopoly.
I don't really see chargebacks as an anti-competitive practice, but I do see them as shifting the burden for their shockingly-bad security practices to merchants and consumers and focusing on ease of use (even for criminals) to increase the amount of credit card spending and profits for the payment networks. Europe has had chip and pin for decades now (it was already well established on my first trip there in 1998) and we're just getting it now after a ton of major breaches that should have been easily prevented. But merchants are forced to take credit cards because consumers love the convenience of paying that way and they're prevented from knowing the added cost that it imposes. That's where the cartel behavior comes into play...the policies that prevent merchants from advertising different prices for credit card transactions to reflect that added cost of accepting credit cards adds a silent ~5% tax onto everything we buy. Even for informed consumers, it creates tragedy of the commons situation because you'd be foolish to buy with cash when you can pay the same price and get 1% cash back.
All of this follows from the chargeback system that places all the burden for fraud on merchants. If the payment networks bore the burden for fraud out of their cut, we would have seen credible security features long ago. And somehow, when breaches like Target and Home Depot come to light, we blame those companies rather than the payment networks who should have been responsible for solving these issues many years ago.