Brazil's government-run payments system has become dominant

Sometimes there's no point in having market solutions. You need one thing that works for everyone and is free. It's cheaper and easier this way.

The worst is a market facade for a government service. Examples in the US:

- Weather apps: various governments do the (very expensive) computing and provide the data for free. Private companies insert adds, or charge you. I use Yr, which is run by Norway and has no adds or fees. They are just sourcing public data [1].

- Taxes: the government does all the bookkeeping and enforcement, tax prep industry copies and pastes numbers into forms it lobbies to obfuscate.

[1]: https://hjelp.yr.no/hc/en-us/articles/360004008874-Weather-f...

Another variant is the "playing at shops" privatization, such as seen in the UK railway system. Lots of different, fragmented entities, none of which naturally corresponds to a train service as a whole, obfuscating where the money goes (it's the train landlords or ROSCOs).

Fun fact, before Pix, every bank was trying out different digital wallet solutions. It was a pain to go to a store and realize they support Bank A's digital wallet, which, not surprisingly, doesn't interoperate with Bank's B.

I went to buy açai at a shop one day and didn't have cash. Only way I could pay was with Itau's iti, but I only had money in my PicPay account.

Pix was a godsend that saved us from the thousands of different, non-interoperable digital wallets the fintechs were creating.

We had the same in The Netherlands. Several weather apps that requested to share all your data with a bunch of partners, had ads, etc.

Then our national weather institute launched their own app without tracking or ads, and the existing weather apps all immediately joined up to sue them over it. Thankfully they lost the case.

https://www.rechtspraak.nl/Organisatie-en-contact/Organisati...

They did the same to Norwegian rail. In fact, one of the main companies that got involved in the enshittification of Norwegain rail was British Go-Ahead Group.

Same happened in germany but sadly, dwd (the national weather service) lost. They _have_ to take money if you want their weather app.

DWD offers the app for 2,49€ one time payment.

https://www.warnwetterapp.de/katversion.html