E.U. Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes ( photo from WSJ/AFP/Getty)
We have three arenas of anger: card consumers, merchants and banking institutions.
Card consumers are about 100 million and their issues and status are widely reported.
Merchants might number 1 million and their issues are specialized and have been reported here concerning their usage fees. An Amex insider voiced an unpublished counter-argument, "Amex has higher merchant fees but other fees are lower or zero, so it averages out to be the same". Of course, nobody heard this, nobody entered this to the comments list.
Institutions might number several dozen, but today the WSJ commented on anger from their arena.
Visa and Mastercard operate specialized data communication networks and have been officially accused of "data-highway robbery" by the European Union. ( The official accuser is pictured above). This is the same issue that won a monopoly complaint in favor of Amex, with enormous payments from the robbers to Amex.
The article says that American Express performs this communication at no cost. This is the counter-argument to higher merchant fees, but it was not framed that way and, besides, its buried deep within the terribly specialized arena of "institutional anger".
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