Germany is looking into PayPals terms for merchants

News Summary

  • If merchants are prevented from taking into account the different costs of the various payment methods with corresponding surcharges or discounts, other and new payment methods can hold their own less well in the price and quality competition or not even come onto the market.
  • This “ex ante” regime will flip the classical antitrust protocol — whereby market power must be assessed and investigation precedes remedy — by applying, up front, a set of fixed rules on platforms designated as competitively significant “gatekeepers”.
  • We will now examine what market power PayPal has and to what extent online retailers are dependent on offering PayPal as a payment method.
Veteran tech giant PayPal is facing an antitrust investigation in Germany where the Federal Cartel Office (FCO) has announced its looking into its rules on surcharges.The regulator is concerned [+4022 chars]