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).