> In my experience, huge companies do not make changes like this purely on the basis of newspaper columns. You'd think, but no. In my experience working at a l

> In my experience, huge companies do not make changes like this purely on the basis of newspaper columns. You'd think, but no. In my experience working at a large tech company, executives cared a lot about what the New York Times in particular thought. A piece published by them would have immediate attention from those executives, and it'd be our problem to respond, even if the original article wasn't well founded. Once I figured out how much leadership cared about NYT, I even justified one engineering decision based on "what would NYT say". And it worked. It doesn't surprise me in the least that MasterCard cares so much about what the NYT prints. > Political pressure? Regulatory pressure? You're on the right track. If you think (correctly IMO) that politicians and regulators read NYT, then pressure from these groups is going to come soon after the NYT piece is published. Best take action before that happens.