“Visa is winning the decades-long battle for control over how U.S. consumers pay for everything. It got here in part by paying for competition to go away and by using fees as weapons to make partners bend to its wishes,” noted The Wall Street Journal in an extensive examination of the company’s business practices.

The practices uncovered by the Journal should come as no surprise to those who have fought for transparency and competition in the debit and credit card market for more than two decades.

The U.S. government has taken an increasingly close look at these practices. In September, the Justice Department filed an antitrust lawsuit alleging that Visa monopolized the debit card market and increased fees to retailers that increase the costs of goods purchased by consumers. These actions also stymied innovation in the U.S. payments market, which is not as advanced as that of other countries that have more options for payments, especially the ability to conduct transactions from bank accounts.

“Visa’s unlawful conduct affects not just the price of one thing—but the price of nearly everything,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in filing the lawsuit.

“Each time a Visa card is used for a purchase, Visa takes a cut of the transaction—a so-called network fee that it pockets. Visa also sets a much larger ‘interchange’ fee that merchants pay to the banks that issue credit cards,” the Journal noted.

And as part of this strategy, Visa has aggressively sought to block payments innovations that were perceived as threats to its business—including Apple Pay, PayPal, Square and Plaid—by threatening higher fees, other punitive actions, paying them off, or acquiring them.

“The abusive actions Visa has used to dominate the credit card market, as revealed by The Wall Street Journal, highlight why legislation is needed now,” said Doug Kantor, NACS general counsel. “Visa paying off competitors, using fees as weapons, and holding back U.S. payments innovation that could have benefitted everyone needs to stop. The evidence of harm to Main Street businesses and their customers is too much to ignore.”

NACS and other retail groups support passage of the Credit Card Competition Act, bipartisan, bicameral legislation that would require the largest U.S. banks that issue Visa or Mastercard credit cards to allow transactions to be processed over at least two unaffiliated card payment networks—the same process that has been used for debit card transactions for more than a decade. NACS members are encouraged to use the NACS Grassroots link to urge passage of the Credit Card Competition Act.