We don't need a new law for this. We need to enforce monopoly law.

We just had a demonstration that the two biggest payment processors, together controlling the vast majority of credit card payments, made the same policy change at the same time and in the process completely suppressed many people's businesses.

Treat them as an anti-consumer oligopoly and regulate accordingly.

Maybe in 2029 we can dream of proper trust busting. Probably sooner given current events. But this administration definitely isn't the one to deal with this.

And especially, they'd be negatively inclined to do anything based on this motivation. If anything, they'd cheer the payment processors on.

Legislators are more often chipping away common carrier protections on communications with various age and id laws than they are extending common carrier type protections into other areas. The fact that it seems to be happening around the globe makes me think its a coordinated campaign.

it's definitely the result of lobbying; i've experienced it firsthand in a former job. a private dark fiber provider successfully sued the county to prevent expansion of a previously-laid tax-funded municipal fiber project on anticompetitive grounds - he used every trick in the book including lobbying and it worked. and that was just one asshole who didn't want to compete with a small public project. scale that up to ILEC levels with billions in revenue and a revolving door economy and... yeah, i don't see this sort of thing playing out in the peoples' favor any time soon.

The other side of this is the US Government imposes strict requirements around KYC and AML/CTF. Banks have effectively been deputised by the US government to enforce and regulate payments.

A bank can't merely process any transaction that comes its way. You need to know who the parties are, you need to check they aren't on a prohibited list, or in a prohibited country/region. You need to know the purpose of the transaction (to pick up money laundering, or drug/terrorism financing).