And nothing of value would be lost.

No kidding. Catch-22, right? Damned if you do, damned if you don't. And if you don't, then Amazon just stole 250 USD from you. Where hell are the regulators on issues like this?

Depends on how bought-in to the ecosystem you are.

Ebook / audiobook and other licensed-not-bought content may no longer be accessible.

(I avoid this problem by not shopping Amazon full stop.)

Doesn't matter if op's done with Amazon.

There absolutely needs to be some sort of law preventing companies of a certain size from being able to do this if customers decide to file a charge back.

What about a small claims court? Companies hate this because they have to send someone to defend themselves and can't automate that away.

I agree that small claims court is a viable venue for attacking large companies, especially if it's a coordinated effort between many people in many jurisdictions but can a small claims court force a big company to continue to do business with a customer that has conducted a charge back?

It's a tough one. A lot of charge backs are fraudulent, so this would open retailers up to more fraud.

The ability to do charge backs will probably disappear in future. When the system was created we didn't have the same ability to authenticate cardholders that we do today and many jurisdictions didn't have small claims courts.

That's fine, it would motivate large companies to develop alternative techniques to mitigate fraud which could benefit smaller as they could implement them.

I'm tired of these giant companies having their cake and eating it too. These companies have structured themselves in such a way that it's win-win for them, and lose-lose for the customers and smaller businesses around them.

With great power comes great responsibility.

> When the system was created we didn't have the same ability to authenticate cardholders that we do today

The problem is that for any of the new security features of cards to drive any of those kinds of changes the old mag-strip style of card authentication has to be deprecated and removed - which is likely not going to happen in the next 20 years.

Visa and Mastercard (and the layers between them and the merchant) have tried pretty hard to apply financial pressure (extra fees) to promote chip-only transactions and it still hasn't stopped mag-stripe from reigning supreme.

We're basically in an IPv4 and IPv6 situation in the payment industry =/