The credit card companies' share of the entire economy is problematic, but few companies could handle the threats of fraud in e-commerce as well, for as little.

The credit card companies' share of the entire economy is problematic, but few companies could handle the threats of fraud in e-commerce as well, for as little. There's a very harsh tradeoff between ease-of-use and fraud protection, and it's not an easy problem to solve. Doing it for 3% is beyond most companies' (or governments') capacity. It may provide the incumbents with a healthy profit, but few if any newcomers would be able to get their costs low enough to survive on that.