> On this basis, the Commission concluded that Mastercard's rules prevented retailers from benefiting from lower fees and restricted competition between banks cross border, in breach of EU anti-trust rules

The following will be extremely unpopular here, however, it's a bit interesting that the EU is, in the case of private businesses, interested in preventing "restricted competition," however, when it comes to taxes, the EU continually criticizes Ireland for low corporate taxes. Essentially the EU is opposed to tax competition.

The EU parliament has accused Ireland of being a tax haven and damaging the economies of its neighbors. While now, Mastercard is being accused of harming the EU economy by preventing competition. Mastercard gets fined for preventing competition (a correct decision in my opinion,) while strangely, Ireland also gets condemned for attempting to have lower taxes. Ireland, Hungary, and Bulgaria are promoting competition and they're in "trouble" while Mastercard is restricting competition and they're in "trouble" with the EU as well.

So the EU Parliament is effectively acting like Mastercard by attempting to prevent tax competition which would lower prices for consumers far more than anything Mastercard could come up with. If the EU actually cared about competition and lower prices for consumers, then they'd let members set tax rates to whatever they want, but instead they want to "harmonize" tax rates -- essentially destroying the competitive advantage of lower tax locales. The countries that are harmed the most by tax competition are the ones that have highest taxes and public obligations -- yet Ireland, Hungary, and Bulgaria are supposed to raise their taxes to compensate for the fiscal decisions of France, Spain, or Italy?

"The EU’s tax commissioner Pierre Moscovici said in November that the Commission was considering using extraordinary powers to strip EU states of their veto power on tax matters to break resistance over blocked legislation."[1]

So the EU tax commissioner wants to essentially force EU member states to comply with a "harmonization" of tax rates, despite some members opposing such a move and now the EU is fining Mastercard for attempting to "harmonize" interchange fees? That's hypocrisy, assuming the reason for the EU fine is to protect competition and/or lower prices for consumers. The difference is that businesses can more easily stop accepting Mastercard than they can change governments. It's worth noting that Pierre Moscovici is French and France has some signifiant headwinds in terms of regulatory and taxation attractiveness for companies. Punishing Ireland, Hungary, Bulgaria and other countries with significantly lower taxes serves to benefit high tax countries such as France.

So good for the EU for punishing Mastercard -- let's hope that they now turn to punish themselves for attempting to prevent competition with taxes. To be clear, I'm not anti-tax, I'm anti-tax harmonization and the reason is that tax harmonization essentially subsidizes bad fiscal policy. So countries like Ireland lose a competitive advantage simply because Spain can't balance its checkbook.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hungary-ireland-taxation/...