GNU Taler

by Marc Stibane

Thought experiment

Imagine an airport which issues a frequent traveller card which millions of
passengers have signed up for. This Airport demands from the shops in the
airport mall to either only offer their traveller card for payments, or any
other payment method, but not both. So if merchants offer alternative payment
methods to customers, they may not offer the airport traveller card.

This would be ridiculous, right? We expect that every merchant can offer their
customers all payment methods they want – some merchants only accept cash,
some accept debit but not credit cards, some accept all cards you can think
of. An Airport should never demand that shops in their mall wanting to offer
the traveller card are not allowed to offer other payment methods. Would the
EU allow Visa or Mastercard to impose such exclusion rules on merchants who
want to accept their credit cards? Definitely not.

AppStore Rules

But that’s exactly what Apple demands from app manufacturers in their mall:
App manufacturers must decide whether their apps either offer ApplePay only (in
which case millions of users can pay easily with just two clicks) or whether
they use an alternative payment service. They are not
allowed to offer their users to choose from both ApplePay and alternative
payment services.

This means app manufacturers have no real freedom of choice. Since millions of
customers already have signed up for ApplePay, app manufacturers in the Apple AppStore
cannot really afford to exclude them as potential customers. App manufactuers should
be able to freely choose one or multiple payment service providers (ApplePay
and/or 3rd-Party) to offer their customers. Users would then have the choice
for each payment, which of the offered payment methods they want to use now.
And of course, zero fees should go to Apple if the choice is not ApplePay.

Apple itself does not eat their own dogfood

The Apple Store, where Apple sells its own hardware, offers multiple payment
methods. Customers in the Apple Store can pay not only with ApplePay, but
also with debit or credit cards, bank transfers, or PayPal. Apple knows it
would loose sales if it offered only one payment method.

Here, the gate keeper Apple offers ApplePay and other payment methods
simultaneously, and lets customers choose how they want to pay for each order.
App manufacturers in the AppStore may only offer either-or, but not both. In
this situation, alternative payment providers have zero chance to be chosen
instead of ApplePay, since few app manufacturers would risk to loose their
ApplePay customers.

Fair competition!

Countries should require Apple to let app manufacturers offer all payment methods
they want (incl. ApplePay) simultaneously, so the end customer can decide
which payment method to choose for each individual payment. We hope EU’s
Digital Market Act will allow the commission to establish such a rule in Europe.

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