PayPal lands on iPhone Tap to Pay in Europe

PayPal is wasting no time muscling in on Apple Pay in Europe, where it now offers tap to pay on iPhones as a replacement to the Apple Pay system.

This must be seen as a big victory for Europe’s anti-trust chiefs, who can gleefully enjoy the experience of having a US tech firm’s service now exploited by another US tech firm. Take that, capitalism!

Enabling innovation, one corporation at a time

What’s happened here is that Apple has been forced to open up the NFC chip on iPhones to third-party payment service providers, including PayPal. The impact is that rather than using Apple Pay when you buy things, you can now be using PayPal to buy things.

That means PayPal takes the micro-fee-payments, instead of Apple. It also means consumers can choose to use something other than Apple Pay. Which apparently some people want to do, despite the robust privacy and security of Apple’s service.

This is one of the big improvements bought in by the EU’s Digital Markets Act, a piece of legislation that seems to have been custom tailored to impact the business of big US tech firms, and for which Apple seems to be the primary target.

If you had a fertile imagination it’s easy to imagine the attempt as being what might happen if all the people from Blackberry, Motorola, Nokia, and Windows Mobile all got together to make laws to curtail Apple’s business, but that’s not going to be the case in the EU Commission, is it?

The enshittification will continue

This isn’t the first alternate payment system to jump into the frame on iPhones. It probably won’t be the last, particularly as Apple will open up NFC access on iPhones to third party services in many regions globally soon. The idea is that developers will be able to offer in-app contactless transactions for all kinds of things, including car and room keys and, eventually, government ID.

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