I think that's absolutely right, and I think your point is well made.
What our credit cards case focuses on is rules that are raising merchant acceptance fees of credit cards and making it more costly for merchants to accept credit cards. For most merchants, accepting credit cards is a necessity. And particularly for small and medium businesses, that can be a huge cost. One of the things we're hoping to do is challenge these rules and somehow mitigate the fees that merchants pay, which in a lot of instances they really have no choice but to pass on to consumers.
In answer to your question on whether mobile payments would fill the gap a bit, I think that is possible. I think there are a variety of payment methods that are competing in one form or another, whether it be cash, cheque, debit or credit cards.
As you observed, in many cases merchants pay significantly lower fees for accepting debit card transactions than for accepting credit cards. A credit card fee for a merchant may be up to 3% of the total purchase price, whereas for debit in this country, it's usually fixed at about 12ยข, regardless of the size of the purchase. However, in many cases consumers aren't aware of that, and consumers aren't aware that merchants may be paying higher fees.
Because of the rules imposed by Visa and MasterCard, in our view, merchants really don't have the ability to steer consumers to different types of payments. We suspect that if they had that ability, not only might it make merchant fees that are set by the credit card companies more competitive, it might also make these other methods of payment more of an option for consumers.