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.
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 dispute it with your own filing," we won't do that because fully half of Congress is from a party that has, as a plank, that private institutions serve the public interest better than public institutions.
Beyond that plank, it's important to note that these same politicians are often bought out by lobby money from the private institutions who stand to benefit. They stand aside and let people from private industry, like TurboTax or H&R Block, write the laws that make things harder on their constituents, and then turn to them and and go, "See, government is inefficient!" It's a complete racket!
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, private institutions all too often do outperform public institutions. I'm pretty sure Space X has bipartisan support, for example.
I mean, government does GPS. Sends folks to space. You mention SpaceX, but let's not pretend NASA doesn't exist. Yeah, there was once that website that had a bad launch, but there's nothing inherent in government that wouldn't allow this to work well.
I do think ideally this could be done by NY or CA first. We should test out ideas in the states, where possible.
SpaceX successfully built a capsule to get people into space.
They built it to the specifications that NASA enforced upon them, which were paid for in blood.
And you don't have to look far in the SpaceX organization to see what risks the company is willing to take if an external authority isn't imposing regulation on them.
I think this mixes up low odds of success with risk, the latter rather being an expectation value than a probability (i.e. probability of success or failure times the value of the things at stake). Risk can be low even when the odds of success are not good just by nothing being really at stake.
Think about their rocket landing program: the probability of landing a rocket on a boat in the first attempt might have been low but the risk was almost negligible because the launches that SpaceX practiced landing on had been paid for by a customer already. Now, if SpaceX had bet the company on reusability by paying for all these rockets out of their own pocket instead and hoping they manage to get it right before cash runs out, then this could have been called risky.
GPS is a lot less stateful than real-time financial transaction processing. It takes time corrections from base stations and broadcasts a time signal. End users have no way of mutating state on the GPS satellite; they only listen.
I'm not saying it's easy to make a global positioning system, but it's easier than processing every transaction in the United States.
I was partially responsible for designing a system that could be used to eventually scale to handle processing every global credit and debit transaction.
Were you also partially responsible for designing a GNSS system? Otherwise it isn't clear how you can make any claim as to the difficulty of that, if you're using your experience on the former as your bona fides. I think the difficulty of payment processing isn't in the happy path, but in fraud/anomaly detection, merchant servicing/outreach, dispute resolution, all of which do not have a "set it and forget it" solution.
The platform had to encompass all of those payments infrastructure responsibilities. I'm quite aware of their relative difficulty.
Separately, I did not have to implement a GNSS system, but at the job I had immediately after Visa, I did have to work very, very closely with GNSS vendors who integrated with our AV middleware software (including having to write drivers for them), and in my current role I'm CEO of a company which produces a software platform that provides automated V&V of complex SISoS (including those integrated with and dependent on GNSS).
End to end payments systems are hard in the rats nest of legacy expectations and integration sense. End to end GPS deployment & management seems hard in the science and systems engineering sense.
With about 70% of their revenue from the US Government in 2018? Those defense companies might as well be an extension of the government with the added "benefit" that it allows individuals to get wealthy off them.
Edit: Further to that and the comment pointing out where GPS was researched and developed, the Air Force still operates GPS block III and contracted these services out to Lockheed. So yeah, ultimately any success Lockheed has with GPS III is ultimately a success for the government..
That's kind of the point though; would this whole arrangement work any better if it was all directly under the DoD hierarchy? Vs. private contractors like this? I was not intending to be snarky in the original comment. I've lived in a system where a lot more of the economy was under the government in the org chart and it was not magically better than the American system.
GPS is more akin to a public lightbulb than any kind of interactive service. The government seems to falter when it has to deal with 1:1 interactions with constituents, not when it is simply building something.
To be fair, that was the first time the federal government had attempted to build a modern web application. There's a great interview with President Obama, I believe in FastCompany, where he discusses the approach to building healthcare.gov -- the crux of the issue was with the mindset. When you build large physical infrastructure, you need large companies, but the same is not true of technical infrastructure. This mindset had lead to the use of the mega contractors, but it was ultimately a small team that built the version that worked. This revelation lead to the institution of the US Digital Service.
Among the things that failed in the design for healthcare.gov: the overall plan was to have each component built, to a specification, and then any two teams that were integrating components would test integration, and the whole thing would work.
Three pieces of the puzzle missing:
1) It appears there was no honest-to-God real end-to-end testing in the plan: no team to own it, no chain of responsibility if it didn't work. So cross-functional issues like total system performance were ownerless, and it is the nature of government contracting work to push blame away, not assert ownership where none is demanded by the contract.
2) Even in integration testing, responsibility was unclear when it failed. If the specification itself proved faulty, neither side of the protocol had ownership over fixing the problem; faulty specs led to pissing matches of blame-pushing instead of any party saying "Okay, the spec is now this, just fix it."
3) Since nobody had holistic ownership, no core infrastructure decisions were made. The whole project, under the hood, was a mismash of different databases, languages, messaging services, and protocols, owned by (and chosen by) each contractor with no thought paid to long-term maintenance of the app as a singular service. Each team had their own ad-hoc dashboards with no top-level view to allow anyone to understand why the end-to-end site experience was broken. There was nobody to own a concept equivalent to "Ops" or "Site reliability" who had authority to make judgement calls here; long-term maintenance was going to look like full understanding of dozens of similar systems doing similar tasks.
There are plenty of ways to structure a public service like this that isn't fully controlled by the government. USPS comes to mind, though it's obviously not perfect in terms of independence from government control.
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.
FWIW the Canadian tax system is heading in this direction. With electronic filing programs most things get pre-filled now with data from Canada Revenue Agency based on the information they've received from your employer, your bank, your trading institutions, etc. Then it's more a matter of going through and verifying information and adding in any missing information (for example sale info from my stock units held in my employer's US brokerage) and looking any deductions that might apply (and the set of those is shrinking, which imho is a good thing)
Canadian here— there's definitely been a movement in recent years away from deductions in favour of direct payments throughout the year. Thinking especially of the child benefit and the carbon tax rebate, and the elimination of boutique credits like one that used to apply to the purchase of public transit passes (https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/programs/about-canad...).
I get that politicians like the psychology of people receiving a cheque or direct deposit vs a tax deduction ("it was my money all along"), but I think it is genuinely a positive step in terms of helping people at the low end of the economy who don't have the means to save receipts or jump through whatever other hoops are necessary to nickel and dime the government at tax time.
It is a good thing. Private tax accountants are a huge political lobby in the US, so it's a non-starter here.
The US barely got off the ground a free option for public e-filing, and we managed to botch it up by handing it to a private company to implement, which promptly turned around and made it absolutely as impossible to access as they were allowed to by law.
I used to run a company in Lithuania and now am a simple employee in US.
It took me about 10 minutes for monthly tax filings and 30 minutes for the annual tax filing for my company and 4 employees. I did not have an accountant - I didn't need one.
It is a nightmare filing taxes in US, even paying $300 to Intuit. It takes about a week of my time... for something that is supposed to be automated. I also never manage to get the tax calculated correctly in advance, because no consumer facing tax company will bother with you before you get your annual statement(W2). I have a very variable income - RSU's and other optional income... so I get hit by underpayment fee from IRS.... and don't get me started on the fact that every state has their own tax authority...
The Democratic Party is a long-standing "bankers party" and "corporatists party" (a party for big companies and organizations). In that sense, they're just as "bad" as the Republican Party, and due to how the whole democratic system is set up in the USA, Americans are in reality bereft of alternatives. Picking anyone else than those two, is effectively a blank vote. This system can at least in part explain why so many Americans choose to stay at home during the elections, because to them, for whatever reason, it doesn't really make much of a difference who is in power.
This is why it's important to vote in primaries and to cultivate leaders at the local level. The Republicans became a lock-step far right party by building up infrastructure and candidates at the lowest levels and building from there. Too many progressives don't seem to pay attention to any elections below the presidential election (and then whine that things are rigged when their candidate gets less votes than someone they don't like).
The Republicans deliberately built the grassroots top down, with targeted media and subsidised networking. Supposedly grassroots orgs were aggressively seeded and astroturfed.
It's not that progressives don't pay attention, it's that the Democratic machine doesn't do this. In fact it works to sabotage and disempower effective grassroots opposition to its corporatist policies.
There are always a few break outs in every cycle - like Cori Bush this year - but they're there for show, not for policy. If they get too pushy they run into opposition, and if they don't accept a compromise with the party line they're quietly removed by PACs that funnel non-grassroots special-interest money to challengers.
To be fair, the presidential election thing progressives are whining is rigged is that their candidate lost despite getting 3 million more votes than someone they didn't like.
That it happened twice in 3 presidents is icing on the "it's rigged" cake.
I was referring to whiners in the primaries. There are many factors for why trunmp won in 2016 and changing any one of them could have changed the outcome. One of those factors was Sanders voters who stayed home or voted for third-party candidates.
They are not, alone, responsible for it, but it is still a fundamental difference in the parties; some Democrats are pro-big-business, but only one party has public-private partnership as a party plank.
> 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 dispute it with your own filing,
All of Scandinavia does this. Has been doing it for ages.
Most people need do nothing at all. And it works really well even if you do have to make some amendments (income in a foreign country for instance that the tax authorities can't see directly).
"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."
And there's technically nothing stopping the US from sending humans to mars either.
There are many reasons that it's not done, including the most important one, which is that it's not necessary.
Simply producing or supporting a standard, and then maybe having some regulations around it would be 100x easier.
> 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.
That is the plan, albeit the minimal fees involved paid for through users of the Fed’s system.
I actually like this aspect of the USA. Most parts of the world, specially more socialistic-leaning countries, would have politicians eager to expand their powers and size of the state so that they have control over a bigger cut of the pie. Of course, this is supposedly for the good of the people.
It seems to me that more people is socialistic-minded in the USA these days, to me that looks like a indicator of the decline of the country.
The thing that always bothered me about this argument is that in reality the US has many more regulations that apply to regular people than most of what you call "socialistic-leaning" countries (one example look at the regulations for what you can or can't do with your house/yard in many suburbs )
People should have feel the burden that taxation places on them.
Payroll withholding already artificially dampens the strain that taxation imposes on everyone that earns a paycheck. Issuing a pre-filled out form is another step backwards.
Paying taxes should be burdensome and uncomfortable.
That is an ideology and a rather twisted one. We were over this when people were opposing anaglesia and anaesthesia. Wanting people to suffer needlessly is a bad thing.
Make taxes burdensome, and you create a market for tax filers who make them easy for you. All youve done is make taxes more expensive then, without getting better government services.
every industry is regulated to a certain degree, but categorizing an industry as a utility is a step change difference.
in the US we do not regulate interchange fees except via Durbin Amendment (only passed 10 years ago) which regulates debit interchange for large banks only. this is totally different from Europe where interchange is heavily regulated.
While it's true many merchants pay 1-3% in processing fees, many of the costs involved are real. Building the network, fraud, rewards to consumers, etc.
Visa's net income is roughly $11 billion a year[1], and they process roughly $11 trillion a year[2]. So their take is ~.1%, not 3-5%.
Note that this ignores that banks may make money off these transactions as well. May be better to look at Discover (the lender and the network) instead of Visa. But I'd think the total take from these companies is much closer to .1% than even 1%.
You seem to think that Visa is a bigger thing, than it actually is.
That 3% is the total cost to the merchant. Visa is just a payments network. It is not the payment processor(the company that the card terminals connect to). They are not the issuer - the banks that charge as well.
Visa facilitates integration between different payment processors and issuers, they don't even handle fraud or low level stuff.
the 3-5% number is just a reference to the total “tax” merchants pay for payment processing as a whole - I get that most of that is the interchange fee that is paid out to issuers. but Visa and MC are the ones who dictate the interchange fee rates that issuers receive outside of the Durbin Amendment which capped debit interchange for large banks.
Yeah banking and ISPs or the network utility need to be regulated as utilities first. They are both "too big to fail" and local monopolies respectively and they are both abusing their position.
A competing banking system through the USPS is a great idea that needs to be remade, it worked well for a long time in the US [1]. It would eliminate the predatory checks cashed industry and credit through the system would be competitive to keep the private systems in check, much like the USPS does other delivery services or Federal student loan rates keep private rates in check. The same needs to happen for healthcare with a public option. When you have public systems, the private ones have to compete more, it is a win for everyone.
The network utility needs to be split, lines handled by power companies that know how to run a utility, and then the servicers on top that are competitive would also be interest aligned with the network utility users.
I have no doubt this "Google should be regulated as a utility" is being pushed by ISPs that know they are utilities but fought to remove that classification. They deserve to lose their local monopolies and right to that because they abused their position and have turned rent-seeking over capacity expansion with data caps, overloaded nodes, prioritization, dropped packets, all incentives to NOT expand the capacity which is a major problem when the market incentives are aligned against the interests of the country, products and innovation.
I can't see this duopoly persisting for that much longer. If I say the phrase "don't leave home without it", what is the first thing that comes to mind? I'm guessing it runs iOS or Android. In the long run, he who controls phones, controls payments. (Which actually strengthens TFA's case, if you think about it.) Visa and MC execs must know this and be scared shitless.
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.
right now we have a situation where the rich (who pay for things with expensive premium credit cards) are being subsidized by the poor (using cash or basic credit cards) because interchange is much higher for the top of line credit cards.
Banks basically break even on interchange after paying out awards and security costs and then the merchant acquirer + network get like .2% - 1% depending on the size of the merchant. V/M is one of the most benign duopolies out there.
I mean, if it wasn't I guarantee some fintech company would come out of the woodwork to disrupt it because the potential upside is huge once you scale.
Most merchants bump their prices to account for the fees, without any discounts for paying in cash. This means that the ~25% of US households that are unbanked or underbanked are paying a 2-3% "tax" without any benefit -- further harming the poorest population to the benefit of those with good finances & credit.
Payment processors and providers are regulated around the world and in the US, if the US wanted too they could cap fees they already do to some extent just not as much as say Europe.
every industry is regulated to a certain degree. making something a utility is a step change difference.
interchange in the US is not regulated outside the Durbin Amendment for debit interchange for large banks.
Visa and MC are way too lightly regulated when they are the gate keepers to a cashless world due to what I would consider a historical accident. No reason why these networks shouldn’t be utilities in a cashless world.
"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."
Regarding such jacking up of fees, it seems that nearly every month PG&E, a regulated utility company in California, sends notices of price hikes.
I'm not sure how they manage to get away with this, but it makes me skeptical that merely regulating a company, or even nationalizing it, will be sufficient to keep rates low, since regulatory capture will continue to be a possibility.
Further, its an open secret that the very politicians who are tasked with regulating industry are often former (or future) executives in the very companies they regulate. Political office is a revolving door for industry executives, which regularly land well paid jobs in those same industries after retiring from politics.
I'm not sure how to solve this problem, but we need to look at it squarely in the face and not labor under the illusion that government and corporations are clearly separate nor diametrically opposed entities.
Said as a former brick-and-mortar business owner, if CC fees disappeared overnight, companies with breathe a sigh of relief and proceed to not lower prices one cent.
Nobody is making purchasing decisions based on a 1% different in price for a car, let alone day-to-day purchases.
The big problem with the Visa/MC duopoly isn't the lack of regulation or enforcement of antitrust. It's that the US government, unlike many other countries on earth, does not provide adequate and free payment services to citizens itself.
are you asking me why it doesn’t make sense to write a check for every small purchase you make?
if the Fed’s faster payment network goes live and makes ACH instantaneous can payments can be done with a QR code or something similar then that is viable but not right now.
beyond that, almost no e-commerce store accepts ACH. It also doesn’t benefit the consumer to bother with the hassle of ACH vs card when there’s no discount...you’re just saving the merchant money. Amazon is the only one I can think of.
I'm always amazed when talking to US friends how far behind the rest of the world the US is with respect to banking. For a long time friends were telling me they were getting their salary, paying their rent etc. by cheque, when I had been using automatic wire transfers or debits for a long time already.
With respect to your comment above, here in Scandinavia (where banks are also atrocious for other reasons) as well as much of Europe, with most of the internet payment processors (like Klarna) you can use wire transfer, debit from the account as well as direct internet banking for online shopping. We also have swish, which is a payment system were you essentially wire transfer money by using the mobile number.
That said many people (myself included) also use credit cards for their convenience.
While Visa and Mastercard are the big fish in the sea, they do have competition. There is also Discover and American Express. They also charge similar rates, which suggests that 3% fee isn't random. Not sure where 4%/5% came from, fees average out to somewhere between 2%-3% for small merchants.
almost all processors add a fixed fee on top of the 3% eg 30 cents. if you are a coffee shop or convenience store that is a much higher % of the average purchase price than a merchant that sells something more expensive.
In the long run, overpaying for electronic transactions should only be the case if the major card-issuers collude.
Otherwise, vendors should gravitate to those issuers that yield acceptable service at the lowest price and customers should gravitate toward those issuers that deliver them the greatest value.
Rewards-point/miles schemes are moderately insane, but they allow the customer to express their preferences with greater precision. Want to pay a lower effective transaction fee, perhaps at the risk of higher interest rates if you carry a balance? Choose a cash-back card.
Perhaps 3-5% is actually what compliance/fraud-detection/customer-service/etc. ultimately requires? I was once a huge Bitcoin advocate; crypto transactions absolutely have a place in the world, but the true irreversibility of such transactions (at demonstrably lower costs) opens a huge door for nefarious actors.
it’s not - it wouldn’t be that expensive if interchange (biggest chunk of transaction processing) was more heavily regulated beyond the Durbin Amendment.
right now we have a situation where the rich (who pay for things with expensive premium credit cards) are being subsidized by the poor (using cash or basic credit cards)
This is a beautiful implementation of a tactic to shift a conversation.
OP starts with a seemingly related pivot to the topic of how to prioritize the regulation of a company like Google with the regulation of other companies. Such a conversation would obviously involve at least few points about why Google ought not top the list. (And hopefully many points given OP says Google is "by far" not top priority.) I was certainly interested to read such a digression...
Then, like Alan Sokal's prank[1], OP leaves out any argument for that prioritization. Instead, OP moves directly to complaining about the other companies which OP has declared by fiat should take priority.
And, voila! Every single comment below OP at the time of this writing similarly avoids the ostensible discussion about Google's prioritization, instead discussing only the other companies and the efficacy of their regulation. Potential regulation of Google as a topic is completely avoided in any of the child nodes of this OP.
Whether this was intentional or not, it makes an excellent archetype for this tactic.
Threads start and branch on different topics, which are varying degrees related to the main post.
Kind of like how you have now switched the discussion to Alan Sokal. That doesn't mean you are making some tactical shift as part of a larger strategy.
Google isn't top of the list - because it's way easier for a user to stop using, than MC and Visa networks.
I would argue for an EU type approach and instead of regulating Google or payment networks - force demonopolization and opening up markets to more competition.
If you wish I can even share the priority list in my mind, for what sectors require addressing before Google:
1. Actual local monopolies
2. Local education sectors and their organisations
3. Radio spectrum for local wireless internet and cable providers (to challenge local cable monopolies)
4. Banking and payments systems
5. Construction sector
... basically there's 99 problems and Google ain't one.
Monopolization of any industry isn't high up there on the priority list of issues we should address by far.
Climate change, election interference, and COVID-19 are far more pressing issues than monopolization.
However the fact that these other bigger issues exist doesn't mean we shouldn't care about or take action on the lesser. If one brings up how we should address issue 'x' and are met with "but what about issue 'y'?" it does give the impression of deflection or of whataboutism.
So when Facebook has a monopoly on social media and allows misinformation to spread about _those exact three topics_, what would you suggest we do about it?
That post is ironically itself misinformation and leading assumptions.
1. Facebook is a monopoly on social media is a false assumption. Even limiting it to the mainstream there is reddit and twitter. Tumblr a prior competitor essentially died by "suicide" after being bought up.
2. That allowing misinformation is a problem and something that "we" should do about it. That is not only contrary to the first ammendment but suffers from watching the watchmen problems.
3. To demand to be able to stop it on a technical level is absued epistemologically as asking bullets to only kill bad people or encryption to let "good guys" in.
4. Misinformation itself is contextual. "Bleach kills the Coronavirus." is true. Saying "Bleach kills the Coronavirus!" in the context of cleaning treatment equipment is still technically true but there may be implementation issues with what may be washed safely and misses nuance when it corrodes fittings. Saying "Bleach kills the Coronavirus" as a treatment itself is misinformation because it will kill the patient before it cures them in the same way a bleach embalming could eradicate infectious agents.
If Facebook didn't have a monopoly on social media, would competitive pressure make it stop what you consider misinformation? Of course not. You can find a stream of misinformation in more marginal press outlets. Only larger outlets that have a relative monopoly (NYtimes say), can afford to be relatively free of crude misinformation (but even here they have their very definite spin as does everything).
The only reason people are talking about forcing Facebook to impose some restrictions on communication is because Facebook has somewhat of a monopoly on some communication.
Which is to say that talk of Facebook and regulation winds up being "Facebook is big and powerful and we want the state to have that power instead, damn it". Without liking Facebook's approach all that much, I'm less of a fan of this.
I addressed this in the third sentence of my comment:
> However the fact that these other bigger issues exist doesn't mean we shouldn't care about or take action on the lesser. If one brings up how we should address issue 'x' and are met with "but what about issue 'y'?" it does give the impression of deflection or of whataboutism.
The point is that we can care about more than one issue at a time.
But if you really cared about "election interference" then attacking media monopolies would be at the top of your list and you wouldn't make this argument.
You need to pick things that aren't directly connected if you want to deflect, or your argument comes across as being too obviously in bad faith.
Those issues are all interrelated. We can't solve them because of corporate domination of the political system and the buying off of the American intelligensia.
Where did that assumption come from? Just because people disagree doesn't mean they are bought off. Citation definitetly needed to even remotely approach a pattern like "bought off" let alone a proof.
It comes from years of observation and study of the structure of the government and society. If you're interested there are many books about this from Manufacturing Consent by Edward S. Herman to critiques of the academy that shut up after the state started funding them extravegantly after WW2, to the current ossification that is easily observed where no policies are allowed to shift that benefit the wealthy at the expense of society. It is so extensive that one or two citations isn't sufficient and deserves a lifetime of study.
> This is a beautiful implementation of a tactic to shift a conversation.
Or it is merely contextualizing the debate around what should and should not be considered a public utility by contrasting the case of Google with others. This in turn helps creating consistency and improves our understanding of the matter.
This forum is not the platform where the fate of Google is decided, so "taking attention away" can't really have malicious consequences, if it helps us coming to a principled understanding.
The argument for the prioritization is right in OPs post - a vast majority of every person-to-business transaction has a 3% transaction fee layered on top of it.
> No, look at how bad Y and Z are! They're so bad!
this is a... Sokal? (I think it's pretty easy to read the intent here, and more generally: internet comments are hardly rigorous proofs, and that's probably a good thing.)
Anyway, there are bigger problems in the world than Google. While I am not sure payment processing is more urgent that regulating Google, there are many other things that are orders of magnitudes more important to tackle than regulating Google.
Anyway, on the topic, none of the reasons presented in the article seem compelling. Government regulation should step in when consumers have no choice but to use something that has achieved a monopoly, and the payment networks mentioned do make a more compelling case.
It seems inappropriate for regulation to step in when something happens to be popular but there are equal or better alternatives easily available, and changing to a different search engine is about the easiest change a person could make in their life.
In the case of mitigating any bad behavior by Google, there's a very easy alternative solution for the problem, which is to convince people to use other search engines. I haven't used Google as mine for over 15 years and I don't believe I've suffered at all for it. I've found DuckDuckGo to perfectly suit my needs. Google run as a public utility could potentially hurt all the other search engines that many would consider to be superior solutions already.
I wanted to say I dont think Googles dominance would be such an issue if they were forced to stop collecting personal data to target ads. IMHO they are already in decline in terms of relevant (to the user) search results.
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.