Apple’s iPhone security may be damaged by the European Union as it looks to force Apple to open iPhone’s currently secure NFC to third-parties.

Javier Espinoza for Financial Times:

The tech giant will be accused of breaking EU law in the way it operates Apple Pay, a payments system that operates on hundreds of millions of iPhone devices, according to four people with direct knowledge of the matter.

The $2.5tn company would receive heavy fines worth up to 10 per cent of global turnover if the charges are upheld.

Investigators, led by the bloc’s powerful competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager, will accuse Apple of unfairly blocking groups such as PayPal and leading banks from accessing its mobile wallet system.

The charges expected to be announced next week relate to the NFC — or “near field communication” — technology that allows a user to pay by tapping their iPhone on a payments terminal. That personal device is linked to debit or credit cards through a mobile wallet.

Under the current system, Apple must approve third parties to process payments through its mobile system, saying it would breach the security and privacy of its users.

The timing of the EU’s announcement of charges could still slip, people close to the investigation warned, but added that the commission was determined to act soon.

MacDailyNews Take: Beware the unintended consequences of overreach by overzealous quasi-governments. If the EU files these charges, opening NFC to third parties, iPhone will likely become less secure.

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Let’s see who has the bigger cojones, Apple or the EU…will Apple tell the EU to pound sand and remove ApplePay if they’re required to open it up to third parties, or will they succumb to the unelected bureaucrats in Brussels. I think the EU will win, and Cook will fold…

The last time I checked Apple is a technology company, which means they might be able to have their cake and eat it too.

Let customers decide by opting in to letting 3rd parties access to secure NFC.

Letting customers decide? Are you high? Too many bureaucrats riding around with solutions that need to find a problem to fix!

oh boy, another inane attempt to preserve the status quo against innovators like Apple under the guide of anti-competitive policing. Just like the GDPR was designed to be so burdensome it has ended up favoring advertising and data brokers. Maybe if they focused on development instead of dreaming up more fairytale fines they’d have some software and services to be proud of. Europe is a joke when it comes to understanding matters of technology

The other side of the story….

The real reason Apple is a stick in the mud on NFC is that it wants to take monopolist-sized profits off of any financial transaction you make with an iPhone. Apple doesn’t have a good claim there. Apple didn’t make nor control the payment terminals, banking infrastructure, and telecom networks to make NFC payments a reality. They should not be allowed to carve their own little fiefdom by implementing software gates that increase complexity and costs on both merchants and the public. Apple, like other Big Tech companies, is essentially trying to implement “Plays For Sure” DRM on digital dollars, emulating TenCent, eliminating any competition in digital banking infrastructure. I don’t like it. The dollar or euro, etc are common market currencies that everyone in that market needs to have equal access, and the consumer should not be locked into Apple-only transactions in order to use standard NFC networks from an iPhone. To think of it another way, this is not that different from Apple declaring that its Wallet App will no longer service Visa credit cards, only Apple-issued Mastercard. Like your current credit? Tough, if you want to use an iPhone for banking, you must abandon your other credit cards. How would you like that?

If Apple can adhere to WiFi and GSM and Bluetooth protocols, they can manage NFC standards too. Would you still cheerlead for Apple if Apple chose to make all the other wireless protocols proprietary and workable only on Apple controlled communications networks? Would you prefer to have a different electrical plug and voltage for every house, in every state, based on the whims of different electricians and manufacturers and regional tradition? The USA thankfully got past the AC vs DC current wars long before you were born. Technically intelligent bureaucrats established standards that you’ve taken for granted your whole life. In this day and age, it’s annoying that certain nations, perhaps due to the lobbying of the richest corporations rather than the desires of the people, drag their feet in adopting what should be global standards.

Wild west corporate “break things fast” behaviour isn’t the best policy for stuff that affects trade. Most things at the margin (connectors, communications, measurements) must have standards to maintain sanity. The more global such standards are, the better. It saves manufacturers and consumers tons of money. It doesn’t mean that innovations stop, just as the gadgets you plug into the wall have evolved to be more sophisticated (for better or worse) over time.

Interoperability as ordained by those pesky bureaucrats has been VERY good to you, and you don’t seem to recognize it. Corporations are supposed to serve the needs of society, not the other way around. Just because Apple likes selling digital wallets doesn’t mean they should have the power to earmark your money to be spent only on Apple NFC networks, at higher costs of course.

Turn off the feature for the region and see how long they last. In the mean time, Apple can start work on making the changes within NFC to support what is required by the EU, thus allowing them to see if the EU folds by the time they finish it. If the EU folds great, close down the development and turn Apple’s secure NFC back on. If it’s too much of a hit to Apple’s bottom line, then the time spent in development was well spent and when the open NFC feature is up to Apple spec, they release it.

NFC, like any other wireless communications standard is supposed to be interoperable. If Apple has proprietary SW/HW to implement the NFC security on iOS devices, abstract them out and allow 3rd parties to use APIs to access the NFC HW w/o having to deal with any of Apple’s proprietary privacy/security add-ons.

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