A lot of the fee goes to the customer's bank that funded the transaction, which is what enables Credit Card rewards programs. If you limit that fee (like the E.U. has), Visa et al. don't go out of business, but then you won't see any similar level rewards programs like we have here in the US (e.g. 2% back on everything, or 3-5% on specific categories, etc).
At this point, every local restaurant in my area is charging 2.9% fee for using a credit card. Let's just lower these processing fees, get rid of credit card rewards, and small businesses can stop charging fees for using credit cards for payment.
Such fees just encourages bad incentives. Such as terrible security because reimbursing people / financing organized crime is cheaper (cheaper for the bank, of course much more expensive for society).
