> The US government can break up the duopoly and open up payments processing federally.

Between that and someone actually creating a viable Steam competitor, I will say the government breaking them up and rolling out their own solution would be even less likely. You'd have fights on both sides of the isle and from privacy groups. Not that we have much privacy now under the current scheme, but there's at least a tiny bit of separation between V/MC and the government.

What should happen instead is regulation. They should be held to the same standards as legal tender since they're used in place as such. They shouldn't get to decide how it's used, and that should be enforced.

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righthand 7 days ago | parent [-]

Isn’t regulation even less likely though than a split? You yourself acknowledge the times and the current admin is heavy anti-regulation.

	▲	TheCraiggers 7 days ago \| parent [-]
		Perhaps. You're right that it's currently unlikely, but I still argue that it would be easier to legislate than split up. It's not like the financial industry doesn't already have an insane amount of rules and regulations at both the state and federal level preventing them from being too nefarious. Having a rule that states "You're not allowed to cut off vendor foo just because they sell bar" doesn't seem that much of a stretch, especially if you look at credit as basically another form of legal tender.