I understand the pitch here, but different industries (and organizations within industries) pose dramatically different fraud risks. There are "anything flies" payment processors today, but the fee premium you pay is massive due to the risks involved. For example, CCBill specializes in high-risk transactions and will handle anything legal, but the fees can be as high as 14.5%!
So why doesn't Visa and MC also allow high-risk transactions, and similarly charge 14.5% (or whatever they need to keep their profit margins where they'd like) for the privilege?
Nearly everyone with a credit or debit card will have one with one of the major payment networks (that just all happen to disallow these sorts of high-risk businesses). No one has the ability to pay with CCBill unless they've run into a high-risk business and have decided that's a (possibly pretty big) hurdle that they're willing to jump. And many people won't want to sign up with CCBill... the end result is that these high-risk businesses are less viable. Maybe they should be less viable, but I don't think unaccountable corporations should be making that decision for us.
Because a) Visa/MC’s core competency isn’t navigating the fraud-ridden waters of high risk transactions and b) Visa/MC are scared of possible legal consequences of engaging with these businesses. It’s just not predicted to be profitable for them.
Visa/MC are relentlessly profit-oriented. If they’re not engaging with entire market sectors it’s because they don’t predict it to be profitable.
I’m a bit confused by your second paragraph. You can still transact with CCBill from MC/Visa. CCBill is like Stripe for high risk orgs.
