[samcat116]

> Would the EU allow Visa or Mastercard to impose such exclusion rules on merchants who want to accept their credit cards? Definitely not.

I mean Costco has been doing this for many years and people seem ok with it? It's somewhat annoying but I get enough value out of Costco that myself and I think many are happy with the tradeoff.

[lxgr]

That's a rule imposed by Costco, not by Visa or Mastercard. Structurally, that's a completely different story.

In fact, Visa's and Mastercard's rules used to even prohibit merchants from any kind of selective acceptance (e.g. "no commercial cards" or "only debit cards") or even from charging different fees by type. This used to be called the "honor all cards rule", but is now no longer legal in many markets in its most narrow form, i.e. "same fees for all cards".

Giving merchants the option of selective payment method acceptance, or of offering discounts for some but not others, is extremely important for competition between payment methods. For example, allowing merchants to charge higher payment fees for cards that pay large kickbacks to the cardholder, or to alternatively give them a direct discount for "cheaper" cards, is one of the few bargaining chips merchants have over the networks and by extension issuers, if one were to try to address the problem of expensive card payments from a free markets perspective.

Outright not accepting one of the two large networks, in exchange for probably a significant cut in fees by the other, is a pretty smart move that works even under "honor all cards", but is only feasible if you're Costco – if you're a corner store, you'd probably just lose roughly half of your customers in the US.

[ckcheng]

So you’re saying Apple IAP as merchant of record forcing use of Apple Pay is ok (?) but Apple App Store forcing use of Apple IAP as the only merchant of record is not?

(You were clarifying the difference between these things elsewhere so hoping you could clarify this, thanks.)

(And I want to see more Costco v Apple comparisons!)

[marc_taler]

I've never been in a Costco - is that a mall where you pay in each shop individually, or a single store where you pay the total at the exit? In the latter case, the customer is legally only buying from one merchant, who can of course decide which payment system(s) to accept. But in the former case, in the EU it would be illegal for the mall operator to dictate which payment methods shops may offer their customers.