Criticism
The European Union has repeatedly expressed concern over the dominance of MasterCard. In April 2009, MasterCard reached a settlement with the European Union in an antitrust case, promising to reduce debit card payments to 0.2 percent of a purchase. In December 2010, a senior official from the European Central Bank called for a break-up of the Visa/Mastercard duopoly by creation of a new European debit card for use in the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA). After MasterCard's blocking of payments to WikiLeaks, members of European Parliament expressed concern that payments from European citizens to a European corporation could apparently be blocked by the USA, and called for a further reduction in the dominance of Visa and MasterCard in the European payment system.
WikiLeaks published documents showing that American authorities lobbied Russia to defend the interests of Visa and MasterCard.
Read more about this topic: MasterCard
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)
“A tailor can adapt to any medium, be it poetry, be it criticism. As a poet, he can mend, and with the scissors of criticism he can divide.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)
“People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher—a Roosevelt, a Tolstoy, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It’s the surest path to obscurity. People get sick of hearing the same name over and over.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)