No, the bill under consideration doesn’t call for that at all. The big issue has been that Visa and MasterCard won’t even sit down at the table to negotiate with merchant groups. Why are they afraid of even talking?
That's because V/MC doesn't get the interchange, the issuing banks do.
If you required them to negotiate with merchants they would have to negotiate with 20,000 banks that issue the cards.
Visa/MC takes .095% and 10 cents per transaction and this is fixed. Visa alone has over 1000 employees to make sure federally mandated fraud controls are followed to protect the customer so now the Gov't wants them to do this for free or at a loss ?