> The thing with credit cards is that you can have more than one. I have a Visa and a Mastercard and when I shop at Costco I use Visa.
Well... yeah. No shit. Because you couldn't use the Mastercard if you wanted to. That's what this article is complaining about. And in their most recent quarter Costco posted a handy 80 billion in net sales, I'm betting those processing fees added up to a tidy sum for Visa, corroborated in the fact that they plunked down 150 million to keep it exclusive to them.
> I don't see this reason stopping someone wanting to compete as though if they can't get the Costco dollars, they have no product.
It's literally textbook pay for play. It's purchasing an advantage in an open market. Mastercard will receive no transaction fees from Costco this or any year unless this agreement is revisited, and not because people don't want to use Mastercards there, but because Visa paid Costco to not let them. How is that anything but anti-competitive?
Yes, all these are anti-competitive. But illegally anti-competitive? That is not really possible to resolve in a HN comment. Every market in every region is different, and whether some exclusive contract is or is not anti-competitive has to be resolved in court, which looks at all the details of the matter.
It's not whataboutism. Whataboutism would be 'what about children dying in Darfur?'
This is an explanation that this practice is normal in a competitive environment and trying to prevent exclusive deals is silly if you extrapolate it to other domains
In other words, create a rule or principal that's clear and not specific to this situation. Because right now the principal seems to be exclusive deals between businesses should be illegal and I explained a handful of cases where this would obviously apply
The fact that monopolistic agreements are common place doesn't make them competitive.
As with every single time something monopolistic comes up on HN. You can squash one instance of it at a time; you do not need to address every single one in a fell swoop.
Well... yeah. No shit. Because you couldn't use the Mastercard if you wanted to. That's what this article is complaining about. And in their most recent quarter Costco posted a handy 80 billion in net sales, I'm betting those processing fees added up to a tidy sum for Visa, corroborated in the fact that they plunked down 150 million to keep it exclusive to them.
> I don't see this reason stopping someone wanting to compete as though if they can't get the Costco dollars, they have no product.
It's literally textbook pay for play. It's purchasing an advantage in an open market. Mastercard will receive no transaction fees from Costco this or any year unless this agreement is revisited, and not because people don't want to use Mastercards there, but because Visa paid Costco to not let them. How is that anything but anti-competitive?