Speaking on The Pat Kenny Show, Lagarde underscored Europe’s dependence on foreign digital payment infrastructure. “Visa, MasterCard, PayPal and Alipay are all controlled by American or Chinese companies,” she noted, arguing, “We should make sure there is a European offer.”
Everyone and their cousins have their own platform. That’s the issue. No one wants to standardize on someone else’s alternative so the incumbents reign supreme.
Is a federation of different platforms not possible? Warning: I know absolutely nothing about this.
It’s technically possible, guaranteed.
The problem is capitalism. Every company is too selfish, and every government too neoliberal, to build some at cost publicly-owned globally interoperable payment system.
Even now, the buy EU movement is largely just replacing US-oligarchy-owned services with EU-oligarchy-owned services. It’s better than funding the American nazi party, but it’s not a long term solution.
This is more going into the direction of feudalism than just capitalism. A million tiny realms and every one keen of keeping their population locked in and uninformed about the outside world. I think there’s even a name for it: technofeudalism.
It was bound to happen eventually.
Maybe the @EUCommission@ec.social-network.europa.eu is in a good place to enforce a cross-border payment system.
Visa won’t be able to make commercials like this anymore.