Huh? I think you are quite on your own with that opinion.
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Dutch Antitrust Probe Targets Contactless Payments Like Apple Pay
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Should we also require retailers to sell competitions’ products?
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The problem is, the government feels left out because they don’t get a cut. That, and the useless agency that was set up to “protect” consumers have nothing to do so they made this up so they look like they’re doing something. This lets them keep their useless jobs for a few more years until they can start collecting their pension checks, paid for by the hardworking taxpayer.
I disagree on that, if you operate a platform that has a significant market share (and even 15% count as such) you need to provide a fair access. Apple makes a big fuzz about FRAND when it comes to patents, why is this different? Just because they are not the once benefiting from it? It's by no means reasonable to milk half or more of the revenue by just providing the "token storage" platform. It works perfectly fine in the US where credit card interchange can be over 3%, no one would argue if apple would take the same piece of the cake in Europe, but instead of 5% they take 50%+. And let's not forget, Apple forces banks not to charge for the functionality of Apple Pay, so banks are not even free in their offering by charging this to the end customer.
FRAND is an industry model and not part of a proprietary business strategy?
If people believe Apple Pay should be regulated it should be a two way street and regulate the banks to force their products to be accepted on Apple Pay.
Sorry, FRAND has no place here. When your business model is to be exclusive, to be different and to work FOR the consumer, the whole thing would be negated if some government says you have to let everyone in. It would be a decision against the consumer. Also, as a customer I could not care less how much the Banks or the CC companies pay Apple. I can use everything with my Wallet, bank, Paypal, Metro, Bike rental, loyalty cards, you name it. I do not care how it works, it has to work. Und I do not want anyone meddle with it when nobody complained.
The banks did not complain.
The customer did not complain.
Google (the competition) did not complain.
Not even the infamous CCC in Germany complained ( because it is safe)
so who cares?
The blocker for not providing access to Apple Pay is almost always the financials behind that. Apple is greedy on that front and in some aspects even anti-competitive (e.g. blackout periods for the launch with other wallets) in the terms they dictate. They charge a significant amount for active cards plus often the majority of the interchange. If Apple would pay for having cards on Apple Pay, banks should be forced to provide the access to card tokens to Apple. Banks are btw. forced to open up in Europe (PSD2), something similar will ultimately happen to Apple for the same reason banks were forced to open up: No fair and reasonably priced access to the platform.
Don't get me wrong, I myself believe that Apple Pay is the gold standard of wallets, but that doesn't mean their terms are by any means fair or shouldn't be changed.
Anti competitive is okay. Apple isn’t the first company or last to look out for its own interests, nor is greed confined solely to Apple.
So even if a bank doesn’t want its’ cards to be on Apple Pay, they should be forced by law? That’s the type of thing I think is regulatory overreach.
I agree with you, but actually you could use the nfc chip for things like that, with an nfc tag for instance. Siri Shortcuts has had that for a while now! Pretty cool. It’s just the nfc connected with secure information that’s locked down. (In good reason, IMO. I’d never EVER want anything Facebook pay or Google pay near my financials.)
I have no idea what on about? All these basic payments systems use the same industry standard at card terminal end, if the payment terminal accepts contactless they all just work as far as I'm aware? the only limitation I'm aware of was that some older systems did not allow big payments with secured contactless like Apple Pay, but here at least most do nowadays.
FWIW, Apple's documentation on Core NFC says there's "no support for payment related Application IDs". I take that to mean that the application can't emulate a Visa/MC/AmEx/Discover or similar, which would make sense as the Secure Element probably has control of those.
Of course, this would still exclude older iPhones with Apple Pay support. I'm not sure how many of those are around, though, but there is something to be said about having barcode/QR code be the standard to not have to worry about those.
Where do you get your information from? The margins, if any, are the big secret, nobody ever published solid numbers. The deals for Apple pay with each participating bank where negotiated way before the end user could use it. So there was no reason, no reason at all to agree to anything if it was not interesting for the banks or the CC companies.
Apple could not dictate scrap, Apple wanted something from the banks or CC companies, not the other way around. Wallet, like Maps, notes, the office suite, iMessage, Facetime, Garage Band ect are services to do one thing, sell more iPhones. Apple is a hardware company. When the negotiating went on, the general census was not really the money, but the data, the data (customer, what, where, when, location) that Apple did not want to share, as is traditionally the case with Apple.
The CC companies are all for it of course, as Apple pay can (and is) reduce fraud by a ton, thats cash money in Visa and co pockets.
The Netherlands Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM) today announced an investigation into contactless platforms on smartphones and the access that payment apps have to NFC capabilities.
According to the ACM, the software that's on some smartphones "only allows the developer's own payment app to connect to NFC communication," preventing third-party payment apps from also being able to use NFC capabilities.
Apple is not specifically mentioned in the press release, nor are any other smartphone manufacturers, but on iPhones, Apple Pay is the only payment method able to use NFC. Apple does not permit other financial apps to use NFC, which has resulted in disputes with some banks and financial institutions.
In Australia, for example, banks petitioned the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission in an effort to negotiate with Apple over Apple Pay. The banks wanted open access for the NFC function on the iPhones. The bid was not successful and NFC continues to be restricted to Apple Pay on Apple devices.
The Netherlands Authority for Consumers and Markets says that limiting NFC on smartphones "may stifle innovation with respect to payment apps" as well as reducing freedom of choice for consumers and businesses.
The ACM plans to investigate whether limiting the payment apps' access to NFC does indeed reduce freedom of choice, and if that is indeed the outcome of the investigation, there could be a penalty, such as a fine.
As Bloomberg points out, Apple Pay is also under investigation by the European Commission to determine whether Apple's terms, conditions, and other measures related to the use of Apple Pay distort competition and reduce choice and innovation. The EC too is concerned that Apple Pay is the only mobile payment solution able to access NFC functionality for payments on Apple Devices.
Article Link: Dutch Antitrust Probe Targets Contactless Payments Like Apple Pay
The banks need to devise a new business model...I don't give a rat's a** about freedom of choice for businesses, and if I didn't enjoy being in a closed ecosystem I wouldn't have chosen Apple products in the first place.
The Netherlands Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM) today announced an investigation into contactless platforms on smartphones and the access that payment apps have to NFC capabilities.
According to the ACM, the software that's on some smartphones "only allows the developer's own payment app to connect to NFC communication," preventing third-party payment apps from also being able to use NFC capabilities.
Apple is not specifically mentioned in the press release, nor are any other smartphone manufacturers, but on iPhones, Apple Pay is the only payment method able to use NFC. Apple does not permit other financial apps to use NFC, which has resulted in disputes with some banks and financial institutions.
In Australia, for example, banks petitioned the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission in an effort to negotiate with Apple over Apple Pay. The banks wanted open access for the NFC function on the iPhones. The bid was not successful and NFC continues to be restricted to Apple Pay on Apple devices.
The Netherlands Authority for Consumers and Markets says that limiting NFC on smartphones "may stifle innovation with respect to payment apps" as well as reducing freedom of choice for consumers and businesses.
The ACM plans to investigate whether limiting the payment apps' access to NFC does indeed reduce freedom of choice, and if that is indeed the outcome of the investigation, there could be a penalty, such as a fine.
As Bloomberg points out, Apple Pay is also under investigation by the European Commission to determine whether Apple's terms, conditions, and other measures related to the use of Apple Pay distort competition and reduce choice and innovation. The EC too is concerned that Apple Pay is the only mobile payment solution able to access NFC functionality for payments on Apple Devices.
Article Link: Dutch Antitrust Probe Targets Contactless Payments Like Apple Pay
Only in major markets that Apple prioritizes, where margins are high, and where local authorities are too disorganized to manage their own IT projects.
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You meant "corporate" choice, right? The consumer already has a lot of choices to use. And why would a user choose a third-party app over Pay? Because it'd be quicker, easier, and safer than pressing a button twice and placing the device next to the terminal? ;-) ;-) /s
See above.
Okay, though I think the following mentality is best regarding who to apply pressure to for overall benefits.
Agreed. If every store I visited accepted Pay, I'd certainly use it because even with Pay, I can choose which financial company to use i.e. get bonus credit, etc. To me, that'd be a win for everyone, companies and consumers alike -- well, as much as it can be. But no, each company wants to ruin it by trying to grab that extra bit.
Blanket statement. Many automatically side against apple, no matter the issue. However...there may be valid reasons, such as security that apple is not opening up the NFC except to authorized apps.
Exactly. I think most people here are not used to governments actually representing people rather than companies.
It sounds like a plus, apple acting as a project manager so that major transportation systems can use the iPhone nfc.
I forgot, the banks are our best friends with no greedy intentions one bit. This is an "investigation" of greed versus greed. So, no, no company's primary goal is to solely make your life better. It's a give and take on all fronts.
And I don't know how it is in the Netherlands, but the U.S. government would certainly side with banks because it helps politicians' wallets and they just use taxpayers' money to 'rescue' the banks anyway, if a problem arises.
Next year we will have it in Stockholm in Sweden too. A small market where we already have an own
NFC based system for public transportation, which will be changed/updated to work with apple and google pay too. This is more an issue with your local authorities than Apple I would think.
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Then maybe they improved it a lot after I ragequit using it, otherwise it's still convoluted and buggy. Every single SO answer on how to do – what should be – a simple thing in Swift has 10 different versions of the answer for different Swift revisions. Clearly Apple agreed with me several times that they screwed up all these basic aspects of the language or standard libs, and every time I revisit those answers, they have more versions!
Most distinctly I remember tuples were so broken in various ways that I just didn't use them, string manipulation was awful in many ways*, I had to mix usage of Swift arrays/dicts/etc with ObjC versions, there was still no proper package manager, type inference was poor (look at Rust to see it done right), the compiler was insanely slow, and the compiler segfaulted a lot in earlier versions.
* As an example, look how long the answer for getting a substring is. At least you can use subscript syntax (which is awful and confusing too) with them now, and at least you can call `.count` on them after you've read about this mess. On my dev team, we needed to manipulate strings in the app frequently, and I said it's hopeless, we have to make a helper that just stores strings as arrays of single-character Swift strings. The calm guy on our team who never bashes technology said lemme see, then tried to deal with Swift strings for a week, then said screw this and did what I suggested. Then a year later, both of said forget this entire thing, we're going to use React Native next time.
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That sounds good. Sweden is probably a good reference that I am sure the Dutch antitrust authority will look at.