Comment by chirau
17 hours ago
That would be quite a play. Stripe, PayPal, Venmo, Braintree, Xoom all under one umbrella. The Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) for online card-not-present (CNP) checkout on that is going to be absurdly high and this will take a lot of convincing to beat antitrust. They will probably have to unwind Venmo and Braintree.
Convince who? There is no such thing as antitrust anymore in the USA, it’s merely the size of the bribe required to let the merger go through now
States have the ability to sue to block mergers as well as the federal government. See the recent 11 state lawsuit seeking to block the WarnerMount merger.
Just a couple of months ago, someone was still suing[1] to block Alaska Air/Hawaiian. This is a merger that already entirely went through. I would predict equal likelihood of some state lawsuit derailing a merger like this.
[1] https://viewfromthewing.com/passengers-demand-court-undo-ala...
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Sure they have ability, they are just not doing it often enough
If it isn’t red states the current admin won’t care at all. If it’s mostly or entirely blue states, they’ll just default to siding with the merger out of spite.
Which is funny because regardless of whether or not those states succeed in blocking the merger, those legacy video entertainment businesses will become irrelevant whether they are one business or two, due to the fierce competition from TikTok/Instagram/Reddit/Youtube/Whatsapp/computers/anything on the internet in general.
It's probably the most inconsequential merger, from a consumer standpoint.
Do you have any evidence that you can just bribe your way past antitrust regulations (which are enforced by hundreds or maybe even thousands of attorneys across the political spectrum) or is this just how you feel because you don't like who is in the White House right now?
Quite true. Or honestly, it's really barely about direct financial bribery anymore[1] - all the recent ones have just hinged on incredibly naïve (and easily manipulable) readings of how a merger might affect culture war / red vs blue partisanship.
For instance, CNN really doesn't matter, and was a tiny part of WB/Discovery, but of course Trump cares deeply about (hating) CNN, so all that was needed to win over Trump and guarantee his approval was for the acquirer to whisper to him that they'd do a housecleaning there. This lifehack would work for acquiring any company that happens to control any media property that hasn't established itself as a Trump cheerleader.
Note: I'm not even a Democrat today, but the pure and petty corruption on display definitely sickens me.
[1] though, back when it was, the bribes were astoundingly high ROI due to how cheap they were!
If it's a card-not-present transaction, Visa or MasterCard is making the bulk of the commission and forcing the vendor to take on the risk of a transaction without a PIN or password.
At least the others offer the hope that maybe some customers will pay directly from a Stripe/PayPal account, without the high commission and high risk of a Visa/MasterCard network transaction.
>If it's a card-not-present transaction, Visa or MasterCard is making the bulk of the commission and forcing the vendor to take on the risk of a transaction without a PIN or password.
3DS2 is the solution to that problem.
Not true. Visa and Mastercard don't make the bulk of the commission. When a merchant pays a standard 2.9% + $0.30 fee on a credit card transaction the issuing bank gets roughly 1.5-2.5% for interchange, which is the bulk. The processor or acquirer gets anywhere from 0.2-0.5% and the card network gets only about 0.1-0.15.
Also, PayPal does not lower a vendor's commission. If they pay with a PayPal cash balance, PayPal still charges the merchant a premium flat rate (often 3.49%) and simply pockets the entire spread. They don't pass the savings down. And consumer's don't have a Stripe account to pay from, Stripe is probably aiming for PayPal wallets via this move.
Upvote because AFAIK this is true. Not sure why your comment was downvoted to dead just a few minutes ago.
Gosh, with such efficiency of operations consumers will win because pricing of their services will be more efficient! Todays Feds will try selling that story.