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Comment by john_brown_body | Hacker News Reader

Instead of a non-profit, it should simply be nationalized and run as a utility. This not only eliminates the "tax on transactions", it would also transfer Visa's enormous power to structure markets (by cutting entities out of the payment processing system) from a private corporation to a body with at least some democratic accountability.

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I'm guessing you're from the USA, expect the USA to run it, and expect nobody else to mind.

Why should Visa be treated as a utility but not a company like google for example?

That is an excellent question. Why isn't internet search also treated like a public utility?

Don’t know. Where and how do you draw the line?

I would certainly draw it much closer to the public interest that it is now by most countries.

In particular, "platform" businesses like Visa, Google, Amazon, etc. should at a bare minimum restricted from competing with the users of their platform. Ideally, the social value of the platform would be made public by a government buyout (aka nationalization) instead of flowing to the hands of the few select shareholders of the platform or subject to the whims of the platform company's executives.

Here's a more concrete proposal from someone much closer to the ability to affect this sort of change. https://medium.com/@teamwarren/heres-how-we-can-break-up-big.... It includes a definition of a "platform utility".

It should. And facebook as well.

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