American Express Co.'s rules preventing merchants from encouraging customers to use less-expensive payments stifle competition, a lawyer for the U.S. government argued at the start of an antitrust trial, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. "AmEx has controlled the price and has excluded competition," Craig W. Conrath, a Justice Department lawyer, told U.S. District Judge Nicholas Garaufis on Monday in Brooklyn, N.Y. "AmEx does not have to worry that a competitor is going to come along with a lower price." The company prohibits businesses that accept AmEx from offering incentives, such as discounts, to customers who use cards from companies that charge less to process payments, including Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc. Those all-or-nothing rules, long an irritant to business, violate antitrust law, the government says.
