Comment by lxgr

I can definitely see that it would look like that – if stakeholders wanted to. On that, I’m not convinced at all, for these reasons:

Banks earn money on card payments and pay (or potentially even lose, due to fraud liability) money on ACH and FedNow. The card networks compete with each other exclusively on the issuer side for structural reasons (a merchant generally has to accept whatever the cardholder pulls out of their wallet or risks losing the purchase) and can for this discussion be considered aligned with the banks.

Cardholders get (often opaquely valued, sometimes even gambling adjacent) points and perceive credit cards as having better dispute rights for them, so they also prefer them over anything else, including cash and bank transfers, and any legal action against cards will face immediate popular backlash. (I can hear the "mile optimization" influencers screaming bloody murder just thinking about it.)

Merchants are the only stakeholder heavily lobbying congress for literally anything cheaper, but so far it hasn't made a real dent, despite decades of trying. I think the Durbin amendment can be considered a failure, all things considered; not many stores offer discounts on debit cards or surcharges on credit cards specifically, and those that do seem to often just make a completely disproportionate money grab of 4% or more, vastly beyond their actual costs. Besides that, the "small issuer exemption" ends up benefiting large fintech players at least as much as the actual local and community banks it was intended to serve.