Which law applies to the transaction is what the card account is; not the transaction. TILA applies to credit cards, and EFTA applies to debit cards.
Whether you're costing the merchant more money with higher fees for credit transactions, or if this gets normalized to a debit transaction later on, I'm not sure. But either way it's ridiculous to "force" a credit card transaction on the merchant.
Even though the different transactions on a debit card may have the same legal status by law, banks typically apply "zero liability" to transactions processed by Visa/MasterCard, while holding users accountable for fraudulent debit transactions processed by ATM networks, up to $50 if you report within 2 days, then $500 within 60 days, and then unlimited customer liability after that.
There is no benefit to me to go with a debit transaction and the risk of significant liability if there is a data breach. So, I don't do debit transactions.
> either way it's ridiculous to "force" a credit card transaction on the merchant.
I do it more often because of the number of times I've been screwed by trying to use debit mode and end up with a non-functional gas pump or forced to reswipe with the mag stripe because they only support credit transactions from the chip.
Whether you're costing the merchant more money with higher fees for credit transactions, or if this gets normalized to a debit transaction later on, I'm not sure. But either way it's ridiculous to "force" a credit card transaction on the merchant.