Not true. Visa and Mastercard don't make the bulk of the commission. When a merchant pays a standard 2.9% + $0.30 fee on a credit card transaction the issuing bank gets roughly 1.5-2.5% for interchange, which is the bulk. The processor or acquirer gets anywhere from 0.2-0.5% and the card network gets only about 0.1-0.15.
Also, PayPal does not lower a vendor's commission. If they pay with a PayPal cash balance, PayPal still charges the merchant a premium flat rate (often 3.49%) and simply pockets the entire spread. They don't pass the savings down. And consumer's don't have a Stripe account to pay from, Stripe is probably aiming for PayPal wallets via this move.
That would be quite a play. Stripe, PayPal, Venmo, Braintree, Xoom all under one umbrella. The Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) for online card-not-present (CNP) checkout on that is going to be absurdly high and this will take a lot of convincing to beat antitrust. They will probably have to unwind Venmo and Braintree.
What does machine readable mean? And what does easily accessible by AI agents mean? Can agents read regular web pages? As in, what is the difference between this and regular web pages?
As a 'software engineer' myself, I fully understand your position, but please qualify the statement about the software you work on. Either add 'efficiently' or 'at scale', because all that infrastructure you mentioned could definitely be built without your software. It was possible before your software and it sure would be possible without it, it just would not be as easy.
I am sure someone is going to dwell on that if not fixed.
you may be relying on AI to do the heavy lifting for you too much. If you are sending out agents, you should have strict rules around the recency of the data they are aggregating. Otherwise, you will end up with outdated and useless data.
No. They have it right. Brain drain, by definition, is emigration of educated and skilled labor out of country or region in search of greener pastures.
America losing foreigners in education institutions is not 'brain drain' in the classical sense. There is no emigration (the drain) involved. America receiving all those students and skilled labor over the years was brain drain.