> The draft legislation, “Keep Big Tech Out Of Finance Act,” describes a large technology firm as a company mainly offering an online platform service with at least $25 billion in annual revenue.
This legislation is clearly aimed at Apple. Today Apple Pay and a Goldman Sachs credit service. Tomorrow a credit card offering if their own to compete with other Eurocard/Visa/MasterCard services.
Facebook is only establishing an alternative currency, which major banks will be participating in if it gets off the ground.
Libra is not a threat as long as Facebook plays well with regulators and various nations’ tax offices. In addition, Libra will be run by a spin-off company, not directly by Facebook.
Apple is potentially going to cut EMV out of the loop.
There isn't a definition provided for platform utility in this bills text, but the first mention I saw of the "platform utilities" term was from Warren, which was referring to select category of companies with this definition:
Companies with an annual global revenue of $25 billion or
more and that offer to the public an online marketplace, an
exchange, or a platform for connecting third parties would be
designated as "platform utilities."
It looks like PayPal is at around 13B in yearly revenue so they would 100% not be included for revenue bar alone, but not completely sure how I would read if they fit into the category based on the rest of the definition.
A limit of $25 billion in global revenue? This reads like legislation drafted by large banks to secure their moat against newcomers with enough heft to actually make a dent in their market share. I don’t think this will facilitate competition or protect the consumer in any meaningful way.
$25B is the point that Warren has been targeting for a few months now, not just for banking-related services. She says that at $25B, the company is sufficiently large that they control a significant portion of whatever industry they are as well as the economy and people's lives. The goal is to target companies with too much influence and reign them in with regulations and/or breakup. Again, this number is being used for any industry, not just banking and tech (though tech does seem to be the focus at the moment).
It's weird though, because something like ACH desperately needs to be replaced. It's slow, and compared to whatever they have in the EU, it's slow and embarrassing. Not saying it needs to be blockchain (I'd prefer it isn't), but taking lessons from it would be beneficial. In the past ~30 years, the American business ecosystem cares less and less about standards and more about pushing their own standards/formats and not giving a fuck about interoperability.