Tag: EU Antitrust

Killing the golden egg goose

Amid the swirling EU ‘iPhone must be open’ debate, there’s an angle for everybody. Every proponent, from software developers who want side-loading to payment networks and banks who want open NFC, to EU regulators who want ‘open market’ (yeah right), and especially software ‘security’ companies who want to sell endless fixes for endless security breeches engineered by… you know who, expect a bonanza. iPhone finally released from the Apple walled garden is gonna make everybody rich.

Japanese developers and tech reporter veterans are thankfully more detached and acerbic than passionately hysterical westerners who are more in love with passionate hysteria than clear thinking. Not that they love Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc., or don’t think they should be regulated in some way, they just seem more aware of practical reality. If you want to know what opening iPhone means look no further than this; Everyone’s favorite iPhone will fall prey to shitty antivirus software companies. A world where you throw money away.

Maybe shitty antivirus software companies and shitty bank payment networks will make more money from a heavily regulated and opened iPhone, in the short term, and it will be users who are forced to throw their money away because they don’t understand the complexity being forced on them. As Steve Jobs once said, customers are pay Apple to make those choices and strip away the complexity. Not anymore.

In the new world order there aren’t bundled hardware + software smart devices to choose from, users choose the hardware, then they choose the software. Good luck with that. In the long term, a new world where hardware and software can’t be sold as a closed bundle is going to break a lot of hardware development business models out there, not just Apple’s. All those passionate ‘open’ proponents better be prepared for hard reality when the cut open the iPhone goose that laid golden eggs, and find nothing.

My Cousin Apple Pay

So the EU is going ahead with ‘open NFC’ antitrust charges against Apple. As posted back in August 2020, the whole open vs closed debate is not easy to define. It’s probably easier to look at it from the simplistic App Store debate of letting developers bypass Apple’s in-app payment mechanism to avoid paying the ‘Apple Tax’, because that’s the box most people will understand.

We’ve already seen banks and Apple chafing over transactions fees on multiple occasions, the latest being ‘Banks Pressuring Visa to Cut Back on Apple Pay Fees‘ because Apple dared release their own credit card under the Mastercard brand via Goldman Sachs. German banks and Australian banks in particular demand the right to use iPhone NFC in their own payment apps instead of Wallet so they can harvest the user data they can’t get via Apple Pay and drop Apple Pay support all together in favor of their own proprietary payment apps (our exclusive card comes with our exclusive app). But there’s an aspect of the ‘open’ argument that will not be discussed by EU regulators, the banks and credit card companies.

I’ve been watching ‘My Cousin Vinny’ a lot recently. I love the courtroom scenes with Joe Pesci’s Vinny character turning the prosecution arguments upside down. There’s a key scene early on when Vinny uses a pack of cards to convince Ralph Macchio’s character to give Vinny a chance to defend him: ‘the prosecutors are gonna show you bricks with solid straight sides and corners, but they’re going to show them in a very special way’ so that judge and jury see bricks instead of playing cards, which is what ‘open NFC’ arguments are: paper card illusions.

NFC is just hardware, it’s worthless without the software protocols that drive it. NFC also has different definitions. The bank industry defines NFC as NFC A-B ISO/IEC 14443. The NFC Forum defines NFC as NFC A-B-F for device certification. On the protocol side the bank industry defines NFC as EMV because this is their industry standard created and managed by EMVCo (Europay-Mastercard-VISA initially, now collectively owned by American Express, Discover, JCB, Mastercard, UnionPay and Visa).

Are EU regulators going to argue that ‘open NFC’ is defined as NFC A-B-F on the hardware side and EMV, MIFARE, FeliCa protocols on the software side? Of course not. They will narrowly define their Vinny brick as NFC A-B and EMV, and maybe Calypso as the transit protocol is used in France for transit. Why would they do that?

It’s very simple. European banking interests don’t want to pay transaction fees to Apple, the Apple Pay tax. They want to cut out the middle man with their own exclusive apps and harvest user data. They don’t want inconvenient questions such as why there are all those different NFC standards and protocols out there, how this came to be and what really constitutes ‘open’. Why did the ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee choose Phillips NFC-A and Motorola NFC-B while shutting out Sony NFC-F? Was that part of creating an ‘open’ and level NFC playing field on the global marketplace? Of course not, it was about playing favorites while shutting Sony and Japan out of the game. Now they want to do the same to Apple Pay. I still think Junya Suzuki is right: the EU will never demand the same thing of Samsung Pay or Huawei Pay that they are demanding from Apple.

Sawada Sho tweeted a thoughtful question recently regarding the App Store in-app payment controversy. He pointed out that gaming and other platforms charge developers great deal of money for hardware and software access, nobody questions that. Apple offers a lot of access for a very low price, is it fair to demand free passage on the App Store because it is Apple? Sho san thinks the Apple transaction cut is a fair tradeoff. Some tech writers have occasionally asked the same basic question: what’s fair?

EMV, MIFARE and FeliCa all have licensing and certification fees that all customers (developers) pay. Apple has gone to a lot of expense licensing those technologies in addition to licensing a GlobalPlatfrom Secure Element that they build into their own Apple Silicon. Those costs are recouped by Apple Pay transaction fees and fund future developments like digital keys with UWB, ID and other Wallet goodies we’ll get later on in the iOS 15 cycle. I’ve said it before and say it again: Apple took the time and expense to build a first class restaurant and outsiders are demanding the right to use Apple’s kitchen to cook their own food to serve their own customers in Apple’s restaurant.

I guess EU regulators want to give those away free to EU banking interests and let them have their way in the interest of ‘open standards’ that they define and end up protecting the home turf. That sounds like a good deal to me.

The Apple Pay EU antitrust investigation

The EU antitrust investigation of Apple Pay boils down to this: does Apple have the right to be the gatekeeper of its Embedded Secure Element (eSE) in the Apple A/S Series chip, does Apple ‘own’ it? As of iOS 13 any Apple Pay eSE transaction that involves payments, transit, identity cards and contactless passes requires a PassKit NFC Certificate.

Apple has put massive effort and resources into making Apple Pay an easy seamless experience. Users don’t have to think about EMV, FeliCa, MIFARE, or NFC flavors. It just works. The price for using this is that 3rd party card and pass developers have to obtain a NDA PassKit NFC Certificate, reside in Wallet, and share a transaction cut with Apple. Apps are free to use iOS 13 Core NFC tag reading enhancements but NFC eSE transactions are not allowed, unless they have inner sanctum NFC Certificate access.

Australian banks fought Apple Pay in 2017 and complained to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), demanding that direct NFC access for their apps is a ‘right’ but lost. The EU antitrust investigation will likely follow a similar path and attempt to force Apple to: 1) allow apps to access the eSE for payment transactions without using Apple Pay or Wallet, 2) lower fees for the 3rd party players who use Apple Pay.

We’ll see how it plays out. We’ll also see if Apple has any iOS 14 Apple Pay changes in store. I agree with Junya Suzuki’s spot take, who’s knowledge of the payments market, the players and the technology is second to none, that the EU would never demand the same thing of Samsung or Huawei that they are demanding from Apple. In other words, politics.