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The European Commission announced on Friday that “Camel“It is ready to agree to provide systems competing with its Apple Pay payment service in the European Union, indicating that it will evaluate this proposal submitted by the giant American company accused of undermining competition in contactless payment systems via its phones, according to a report by the French Press Agency.
The Commission said in a statement that “in order to allay the Commission’s concerns about competition,” Apple proposed giving third-party providers access via its iPhones to the “NFC” function that allows communication between devices and payment terminals in stores.
To make a payment, users will have the freedom to choose between Apple Pay and other services.
This commitment will be valid for ten years throughout the European Economic Area (i.e. the 27 EU countries plus Iceland, Norway and Liechtenstein). This will affect all iOS users who have Apple devices in these countries.
The European Commission, which is responsible for monitoring competition in the European Union, announced that it invites all interested parties to submit their comments on the commitments made by Apple within one month.
The European Commission accused Apple in May 2022 of obstructing competition in contactless payment systems on its phones. Brussels opened an investigation in June 2020 after complaints from European banks.
The solution proposed by the giant American group stipulates allowing systems competing with its internal Apple Pay system to access the NFC function for free “thanks to a set of application programming interfaces,” according to what the Commission explained.
The Commission stressed that “Apple will create the necessary application programming interfaces to allow equivalent access to NFC components” with technology that allows “payment credentials to be stored securely,” Agence France-Presse reported.
The “Apple Pay” service is currently the only payment service via Apple devices, as the group has never allowed other application developers to work on its devices.
From the beginning of next March, Apple and five other giant digital groups (Alphabet/Google, Amazon, Meta/Facebook, Microsoft, and ByteDance, the Chinese owner of TikTok), will be subject to the new Digital Markets Law, which includes stricter rules to stop anti-competitive practices in the European Union. .
