"every time I convince a Stripe customer to raise their prices ... we benefit directly" sounds like the exact words of an illegal cartel. While I doubt that that is Patrick's intent, if I were an antitrust attorney, this would convince me that the notion of payment processors as clearinghouses for price-fixing merits investigation.
This is a great example of how one can do something well-meaning at small scale (Advise tiny, tiny businesses that they would be better served having more confidence in their value) that can turn into something illegal at scale (Advise price leaders that they can safely lead by less and so-on).
A stripe customer is free to tell Stripe "Your fees are too high, and I'd prefer switching processors than raising prices".
I could be wrong. Is there an example of an illegal cartel, trying to persuade customers from whom it makes transaction fees, to raise prices? Surely this isn't a new thing under the sun.
Of course the customer can say that. And nowhere does Patrick suggest that taking his advice is a condition of continuing a relationship with Stripe. That's not the issue.
The issue is that coordinating pricing is illegal in any form. In any industry, each company could make more money if they knew their competitors would raise prices. Even calling a competitor to tell them that you are raising prices is illegal if they raise prices.
If there's even a single incident of two companies being advised to raise prices on products which compete with each other, it's about as close as it comes to an open and shut price fixing case. And this post makes it easier to prove because it suggests that companies know he's giving the same advice to their competitors. Whether that's said explicitly or not won't matter.
Ultimately consumers foot the bill. It's why antitrust legislation gets pursued in the first place.
It's the raising of prices in the absence of market forces that gives room for the payment processor to increase fees. Theoretically all payment processors benefit from advocating that their clients raise prices. If some companies raise their prices, no issue, but the coordinated effort to do it is where you "smell a rat".
It's then up to the litigating party to try to find collusion between companies to do this. This is like how the anti-competitive hiring practices of Google/Apple/Facebook/etc were surfaced. They all had a set of practices that stood out as anomalous and during the subsequent investigation it was found that they colluded with each other to set the market (rate for hiring talent).
It's probably not the case here...and also patio11 has little risk saying so while living in Japan where industries are highly vertically-integrated/monopolistic.
The idea that any form of price optimization among firms violates antitrust laws would put basically all management and marketing consulting at antitrust risk. This doesn’t sound plausible.
You will find that management consulting firms (and the companies that hire them) have fairly clear rules about how they approach and talk about pricing and competition to avoid the appearance of impropriety. Most notably, they would never ever: 1. Indicate that their advice always is to raise prices 2. They would never share the pricing advice they gave to a competitor.
I don't know if what Patrick does is problematic. It wouldn't surprise me if he was trying to be glib and his actual advice is more nuanced.
If one interprets it literally: Someone who receives advice from him to raise prices can look down Stripe's customer list and find its competition and feel confident that the competition will receive the same advice.
Again, I don't know what he does. All I know is that what he says if read by the right person would be sufficient to trigger their curiosity to ask for records of his correspondence and find out.
This is a great example of how one can do something well-meaning at small scale (Advise tiny, tiny businesses that they would be better served having more confidence in their value) that can turn into something illegal at scale (Advise price leaders that they can safely lead by less and so-on).