wayzel

They provide mostly non-overlapping features. Stripe = get paid. Plaid = connector into banking data (transaction history on a checking account, or the account # itself, for example). So, if you need to accept payments, or send money, you'd lean towards Stripe. If you instead wanted to get access to a user's financial data, such as if you are writing a budgeting app or personal financial management application, you'd lean towards Plaid.

"In the US, where there is no such requirement - the only way to access the bank account is to emulate a browser."

Not entirely correct. In the US, JPMorganChase, Intuit, and others have adopted the OFX standard (consortium-based, which provides #2) as a more secure, controlled API alternative to browser emulation.

In Europe regulation forced the hands of the banks to API-ify the data and make it accessible. In the US, as with many things, it is left to industry to sort out.

Plaid's implementation was aggressive (screen scraping, etc) but many banks are blocking that now and some, like JPMorgan Chase, have created APIs based on OFX (the industry consortium for secure data exchange) to allow controlled data access.

You, the customer, should always be able to choose which targets get to receive your data. Via OAuth mechanisms you grant them access without sharing your login/pw, and you can revoke at will.

I should have been more clear: those taxes relate to communication services (VOIP) that interconnect with the public telecommunications network, e.g let you call phone numbers. They are not taxes for Internet access. And yes, there are a large number of other more restrictive regulations. Sources here: https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-335228A1.p... (warning - PDF)

When VOIP and other communication services started to sprout in the 1990s the FCC let them coast without taxation for about a decade. They then reclassified all such services as common carriers so that they could be taxed as such. Common carriers must pay into various tax funds such as LNP (which funds citizens' rights to port their phone numbers between carriers), NANPA (which maintains the North American Numbering scheme), and USF (which subsidizes telephony buildout or services to areas that the private market would otherwise ignore). Most consumers see these as various charges as a roughly 20% up-charge on their bill.

The network effect is portable when the identities are preserved across products. For example, Facebook's separating out of FB Messenger was done while preserving the already built-up network effect.

I lived several hours downwind of these fires in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia at the time and remember well the sun being blotted out for weeks on end. You couldn't smell it in the air but the daytime sky was a deep toxic orange, and, it was eerily dim, just like during the moments of a partial solar eclipse. Then the oil slicks and dead jellyfish began covering the beaches and we were told to minimize our time outdoors (obviously). "Being outside is like smoking two packs a day," we were told. The scale of these fires is hard to fathom, but many hundreds of wells were lit. We heard stories of specialized Texan and Louisianan firefighters living through hell and high water putting them out. Bulldozers' steel frames were insufficient to withstand the searing heat when in close proximity to the blazing well heads, not to mention the enclosed cabins being impossible for a human to survive within. Among their methods were to rig controlled explosions to starve the fires of oxygen and to use large metal domes affixed to specialized hydraulic arms to lower them onto the well heads and smother the flames.