The US have a monopoly on credit card payments with Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Diners Club, etc.
Even with online payment systems like PayPal, GPay, Apple Pay.
The only Canadian option that I know of is the new Shop Pay, which is owned by Shopify. (And we all know the founder CEO, Tobias Lutke is a far-right fascist traitor who loves the idea of being a 51st state.)
Right now Visa and Mastercard are controlling what stores can sell, and what services can be provided. Censoring online content, like asking Steam and Itch.io to remove certain games.
What are examples of alternatives in other countries? I know that Japan, for example, has their own independent ones, I think?
Do you think they might be refused by American companies in order to keep their monopoly?
I’d like to know what you think.
Many companies have payment methods like QR codes that link with bank accounts (or require manually topping up in their own system from your account via transfer or ATM) and we have that in Japan. I’m not aware of any credit card that isn’t using the VISA/MC/Amex infrastructure (unless you want to count gift cards that only work in a specific store). I don’t know if the QR codes work at all for online stuff (I’m a luddite about that stuff: cash and credit work fine for me).
The other thing to note that, even were Canada to create its own domestic network, travel becomes harder for Canadians until/unless any common networks integrate with it.
Don’t we have JCB? Is that piggybacking off MC or Visa’s infrastructure?
And yes, you can do online payments using stuff like PayPay.
I did a little bit of digging (I checked before my comment and noted JCB asked the user to pick Visa or MC, but didn’t dig deeper). Apparently, they do use their own network domestically, but overseas they user partner networks (Amex, Discover, UnionPay, etc.)
Very cool. Thank you for doing the digging!