US Justice Department accuses Visa of illegal monopoly that adds to the price of ‘nearly everything’
CNN
The US Justice Department filed a lawsuit Tuesday accusing Visa of illegally monopolizing the debit card market.
The US Justice Department filed a lawsuit Tuesday accusing Visa of illegally monopolizing the debit card market. For more than a decade, the department alleges, Visa has abused its dominant positionin the debit card market to force businesses to use Visa’s network instead of competitors’, and to stop new alternatives from entering the market. “We allege that Visa has unlawfully amassed the power to extract fees that far exceed what it could charge in a competitive market,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement. “Merchants and banks pass along those costs to consumers, either by raising prices or reducing quality or service. As a result, Visa’s unlawful conduct affects not just the price of one thing – but the price of nearly everything.” CNN is reaching out to Visa for comment on the suit. The antitrust suit is one of several major actions taken by the Justice Department recently. The department also recently filed civil suits against a real estate company that allegedly helped to artificially inflate rents across the country and another against Ticketmaster’s parent company Live Nation, and convinced a judge to declare that Google violated antitrust laws with its search business. It also comes just three years after the Justice Department sued to block Visa from merging with financial technology startup Plaid. The $5.3 billion-dollar merger agreement was scrapped, and the lawsuit was dropped.
The DeepSeek drama may have been briefly eclipsed by, you know, everything in Washington (which, if you can believe it, got even crazier Wednesday). But rest assured that over in Silicon Valley, there has been nonstop, Olympic-level pearl-clutching over this Chinese upstart that managed to singlehandedly wipe out hundreds of billions of dollars in market cap in just a few hours and put America’s mighty tech titans on their heels.
At her first White House briefing, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt made an unusual claim about inflation that has stung American shoppers for years: Leavitt said egg prices have continued to surge because “the Biden administration and the department of agriculture directed the mass killing of more than 100 million chickens, which has led to a lack of chicken supply in this country, therefore lack of egg supply, which is leading to the shortage.”