Last week, my firm (@AntimonopolyUS) filed this 68-page objection on behalf of a group of public interest organizations in response to a proposed class-action settlement in one of the Nation’s most important antitrust litigations. For more than a decade, America’s merchants have been fighting to break up Visa and Mastercard’s duopoly on payment card transactions and tear down their various anticompetitive schemes to raise the “swipe fees” paid by merchants (and, by extension, consumers) whenever someone uses a credit or debit card. Those fees operate like a ~2-4% sales tax on every non-cash consumer purchase, and amounted to a total of $198.25 billion last year — or about double what they were before the pandemic. A few months ago, attorneys who are supposed to represent a nationwide class of 20 million merchants asked a court to approve a settlement they secretly negotiated with Visa and Mastercard. As proposed, this settlement would trade away merchant’s antitrust claims for a mere 0.10% “rollback” in the average swipe fee (effective for just five years) and minimal, loophole-ridden changes in Visa and Mastercard’s policies that would leave their duopoly and their anticompetitive schemes in place. That would be bad enough, but the settlement’s impact is likely to be even worse. Since the settlement effectively allows Visa and Mastercard to fix their core price policies and restrict competition between them, it will probably *further entrench* Visa and Mastercard against upstart credit card networks—giving them *even more power* to raise merchant swipe fees after the five-year settlement period is up. As we state in the objection, “this is not a settlement that will deliver antitrust relief to merchants; it is a joint monopolization scheme masquerading as a settlement.” In effect, the Proposed Settlement asks the Court to become Visa and Mastercard’s price-fixer for a few years and thereby grant them a shared monopoly over the country’s payment transactions market in exchange for vague promises that they will use this monopoly to ameliorate — rather than exacerbate — their coercive taxation of the Nation’s merchants. Such a settlement is not only foolish; it is unlawful. As we argue in the objection, it violates the letter of the antitrust laws and the fundamental policy they embody. As Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote in one of his most eloquent opinions for the Supreme Court, “The antitrust laws are the Magna Carta of free enterprise” in this country. “If a decision is to be made to sacrifice competition” and abandon “the notion of free enterprise” in the payment card transactions market, or any market, the antitrust laws do not permit that decision to be made “by private forces or by the courts.” “Private forces,” Justice Marshall explained, “are too keenly aware of their own interests in making such decisions,” while “courts are ill-equipped and ill-situated for such decisionmaking.” That is why the antitrust laws commit all such decisions to “the judgment of the elected representatives of the people” — and forbids the Court from approving the Proposed Settlement.