European Union’s General Court affirmed a 2007 European Commission decision banning MasterCard Inc.’s multilateral interchange fees because the fees inflated the financial institutions’ actual costs and thwarted competition. The court rejected MasterCard’s claims that the fees were objectively necessary to run its payment system, pointing out that it was unlikely that many banks would stop issuing MasterCard products without the fees. The court held that the multilateral interchange fee limits the pressure that merchants can exert on acquiring banks when negotiating the merchant service charge by reducing the possibility of prices dropping below a certain threshold. This was sufficient to show effects restrictive of competition. The court also held that the decision about setting the interchange fees was made by a group of companies, even though MasterCard went public in 2006 and ceased to be run by its founding banks. The banks still had the authority to make decisions about some key parts of how MasterCard’s payment system functions, and still had a strong interest in setting the interchange fees at a high rate.