Pretty shit article.
The Australian Financial Review goes into a bit more of the ‘why’, such as Apple charging fees on top of Apple Wallet purchases or these companies not being regulated for transparency/hidden fees/etc the same way other financial institutions are.
A quick look at the draft legislation, has this as a stand-out not mentioned elsewhere
Introducing a new ministerial designation power that will allow particular payment services or platforms that present risks of national significance to be subject to additional oversight by appropriate regulators.
Which makes me think this is also pre-empting more all-encompassing systems employed in other countries, i.e. wechat style shit and protecting against fuckery from a certain large country located in East Asia.
While the ABC just has a slightly better generalised article compared to Reuters.
FYI: looks like there’s a typo in your draft registration link (an extraneous v at the very end).
I think this will tie in with updates to the CDR legislation coming soon. These digital wallets hide a lot of data from the banks. Bringing them under banking legislation allows banks to pull CDR data from the wallets as a condition of use.
Australia’s government said on Monday it would bring Apple Pay, Google Pay and other digital payment services under the same regulatory umbrella as credit cards and other payments as part of legislation set to be introduced to parliament this week.
This is complete nonsense. Does the government even know what it’s saying? Apple Pay just refers to a credit or debit card loaded onto your device. It’s already fully covered by all regulations that apply to the cards themselves.
They’re putting fees on top of your banks card and companies are forced to use their service on iOS. That needs to be regulated.
Literally the next sentence in the article:
Digital wallets […] have exploded in popularity but are not captured by Australian payments law.
The article doesn’t bother explaining what specifically the law does.
Yes, the next sentence is blatantly false.
This almost feels like they’re name-dropping Apple Pay and Google Pay to mask the fact that this is more aimed towards embedded payment systems like WeChat (along with AliPay and whatever hot garbage Musk intends to add to Xitter)?
I’m in favour of more regulation of big corporations, especially for financial services, so I’m not ready to dismiss this move as “complete nonsense”.
Apple/Google Pay is an additional intermediary that allows you to pay for things on your devices using your credit card. They charge fees over and above the credit cards, and have power over their respective digital platforms — for example, where and when you can easily use the service.
Now you might counter that they both happen to be pretty fair about that. They haven’t been using their power to unfairly exclude merchants or credit cards, and maybe their fees are fair. I don’t personally know. But the fact that they have the power to not be fair is evidence to me that there is something to be regulated there, independent of regulation of credit card companies.
Apple/Google Pay is an additional intermediary that allows you to pay for things on your devices using your credit card.
They’re not involved in the actually processing of payments though.
They charge fees over and above the credit cards
The merchant pays the same; they charge the issuing bank a fee. The Australian government already fretted about that years ago but got over it.
I wonder if it’s going to look at privacy. I don’t use Google pay or whatever it’s called, as I have zero interest in Google knowing every purchase I make. It’s probably not, but that would be nice if they looked at data privacy.
Google Pay can use PayPal, from what I remember.
We want to make sure the increasing use of digital payments occurs in a way that helps promote greater competition, innovation and productivity across our entire economy.
If we are to take this stated goal at face value it would seem to be a good thing. Getting ahead of the curve before the tech giants find a way to turn these products against us.
The problem is a lot of Australian’s will not take this at face value especially in the current climate of the movement away from physical cash. It’s hard to give them the benefit of the doubt that they are doing this to protect the Australian people with the lack of any sort of harm or complaint. Feel free to point out if there’s something I’m not thinking about regarding this point.
Personally, this smells extremely fishy to me and the most likely explanation in my mind is that they want to kneecap the tech giants and allow our financial sector to push in this space. I can’t imagine CBA, ANZ, etc particularly enjoying their control over this space being eroded. They have every opportunity to innovate in the space but they’re clearly lacking the drive to do so. Instead of improving competition by forcing the big banks to step up, they’re knee capping actual innovation.
Yeah, I wonder what they’re actually doing. Are they making it safer, or just shitty they aren’t taking a cut, and changing it so they can skim off the top.
Apple Pay and similar services make payments more secure by completely hiding your actual card number from the merchant, meaning it is literally impossible to compromise your card number (can’t steal what’s not there in the first place) and it does so without introducing any new vulnerabilities or parties to the transaction.
Cool to know! What I’m wondering, though, is what changes the government are making, specifically. Why do they think it’s bad, and what are they changing.
At this point it doesn’t actually seem like they’re proposing any specific changes at all. The draft changes some definitions in a way that Apple Pay is included as a “participant” and gives the Reserve Bank of Australia regulatory authority over it under the Payment Systems Regulation Act. Considering the fact that Australia is the country that first pushed the link tax (basically a way to make Facebook give money to Rupert Murdoch and friends just because), I’m not terribly optimistic.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
SYDNEY, Nov 27 (Reuters) - Australia’s government said on Monday it would bring Apple Pay, Google Pay and other digital payment services under the same regulatory umbrella as credit cards and other payments as part of legislation set to be introduced to parliament this week.
Digital wallets from the likes of Apple (AAPL.O), Google (GOOGL.O) and WeChat developer Tencent (0700.HK) have exploded in popularity but are not captured by Australian payments law.
“We are modernising Australia’s payments system to ensure it meets the needs of our economy now and into the future,” Treasurer Jim Chalmers said in a statement.
“We want to make sure the increasing use of digital payments occurs in a way that helps promote greater competition, innovation and productivity across our entire economy.”
Legislation is set to be introduced on Wednesday or Thursday, according to Chalmers’ office.
The amendments will also give a relevant minister power to subject a system or platform to special oversight in the event it presents a risk of “national significance.”
The original article contains 251 words, the summary contains 168 words. Saved 33%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
