The whole EU vs Apple DMA sage boils down to one thing: “unfair” is never defined, never clear-cut. I’m no fan of what John Gruber writes these days, but his observations of EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager are spot on:
what the EC has wanted all along is to force Apple not merely to open up iOS to other methods of distribution, but to force Apple to allow apps to be distributed through those non-App-Store channels free of charge. But they don’t want to come out and say, flatly, that they seek to forbid Apple from monetizing its IP from all developers on the platform, because that’s so radically anti-capitalist.
Open NFC is the payments version of DMA ‘open’ app store government regulation. The EU Marketplace Fairness Act (MFA) wants to forbid Apple from monetizing its Apple Pay IP and infrastructure from all developers who want to use the embedded secure element for NFC payments. iOS 17.4 Apple Host Card Emulation was Apple’s answer to EU demands that has now been formalized with a few more conditions.
Open NFC, HCE, is not about being open and never was. It is limited to EMV protocol payments and benefits EMV consortium member payment networks as they can use proprietary without paying for the privilege. It is also limited to EMV based payment app developers who have the necessary resources to deploy the necessary security protocols for cloud processing. These include: code obfuscation, rooting detection, anti-tamper and code integrity detection, anti-debug / anti-instrumentation / hook detection, device binding, white-box cryptography, and last but not least payment tokenization. Established EU based HCE payment services like Curve are, naturally, the first (and only?) to switch to Apple HCE.
The worship of ‘Open NFC’ as a worthy goal, in its current HCE form, is praying to a false idol. Open NFC is not about not creating or supporting EMV payment alternatives, it’s about extending the power and reach of EMV payment networks and the mega banking industry running them. It’s market politics with the banking industry demanding government regulation to get what they want. To wit, the VISA payment network is the largest in the world, moving over $15T in volume over 4.3B cards in over 200 countries. The big get bigger. In a world where NFC is increasingly defined as EMV and nothing else, anybody wanting to create open, innovative alternative mobile payment platforms is better off going with QR Code payment technology.
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