Law professor Adam Levitin has an interesting, nay, fascinating
observation about a side effect
of Apple Pay : to
wit, Apple may have just become a regulated financial institution,
which I'm fairly certain wasn't what they intended.
The tl;dr: Anyone who offers a financial service (which Apple
Pay obviously is) puts him/her/itself under the purview of the
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, whose writ includes
preventing “unfair, abusive, and deceptive practices” by said
entity. The fun part is that there is no limitation
on what practices are covered. Check
out Market
Watch 's analysis of
Dr. Levitin's detailed article.
Now go choose your favorite gripe about Apple, and think about whether it
should be considered unfair, abusive, or deceptive.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Saturday September 13 2014, @02:46AM
It would seem that the vast and impressive Death Star that Apple is, has a thermal exhaust port after all.
BRB. Getting popcorn.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Fnord666 on Saturday September 13 2014, @02:49AM
(Score: 5, Insightful) by mrchew1982 on Saturday September 13 2014, @02:54AM
Exactly this! Paypal gets away with murder, I wish that they would change the rules and make Paypal a bank so that they had to abide by strict banking regulations...
(Score: 2) by monster on Monday September 15 2014, @02:16PM
At least in Europe, they are [wikipedia.org]:
(Score: 5, Insightful) by frojack on Saturday September 13 2014, @03:06AM
Exactly.
PayPal, Google wallet, Western Union, Walmart Money Transfers, and several others.
To write this kind of story and assume that Apple's lawyers are too dumb to avoid falling into that trap, takes a special kind of arrogance.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Nerdfest on Saturday September 13 2014, @03:43AM
... Apple *has* a special kind of arrogance.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Saturday September 13 2014, @04:00AM
Really? So why aren't that companies I named regulated as financial institutions then?
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by nyder on Saturday September 13 2014, @04:28AM
Lobbying?
(Score: 2) by frojack on Saturday September 13 2014, @06:24AM
Yeah, cuz we know Apple would never stoop that low....
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1) by Marty on Sunday September 14 2014, @08:19AM
Paypal is a registered ADI in Australia, so it is regulated as a financial institution. http://www.apra.gov.au/adi/Documents/cfdocs/PayPal-auth-and-conditions-2006.pdf [apra.gov.au]
(Score: 1) by captainClassLoader on Monday September 15 2014, @08:51PM
In the comments to Dr. Levitin's original post, someone brings up Google Wallet, and Levitin agrees that it probably should come under CFPB regulation as well.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Horse With Stripes on Saturday September 13 2014, @06:34AM
The author of TFA must be high because Apple is not offering any financial services. Has anyone here looked at what Apple Pay actually does? It is just a credit card manager that transmits your card number via NFC (at retail locations) or auto-fill (online transactions & apps). How can you tell? Just read their website:
(Score: 2) by frojack on Saturday September 13 2014, @09:38PM
Has anyone here looked at what Apple Pay actually does?
That's even less than Google Wallet does.
Google does all of that, plus gives you a Google branded Debit Master-Card, (with google acting as the bank account on that master card). Tap and pay works at many places. You can put a bunch of money in your google wallet and not actually deal with a bank card at all.
Plus it allows money transfers between individuals. Holds all your gift and loyalty cards too.
I can only assume the professor is a total Apple fanboy and has never had an android phone in his life.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1) by Marty on Sunday September 14 2014, @08:56AM
It is just a credit card manager that transmits your card number via NFC (at retail locations) or auto-fill (online transactions & apps)
So they'll be subject to PCI, which is almost as bad as financial institution regulation...
(Score: 2) by Tork on Saturday September 13 2014, @03:07AM
Yeah, because if there's one company out there that wouldn't have the legal foresight to put themselves in an unwanted situation, it's Apple and their rag-tag legal department.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 3, Funny) by davester666 on Saturday September 13 2014, @03:41AM
Totally. Apple never plans ahead. They are the queens of "winging it".
(Score: 1) by j-stroy on Saturday September 13 2014, @04:47AM
The relatively tiny & insanely priced expansion option for the solid state only internal storage on new MacBooks should be criminal. There is no viable option for market price spinning disk TB internal storage. There is no drive bay at all! Inb4 SD expansion, cloud and external drive.
Making a slimline only MacBook model line has put a hold on me and many others who require internal storage equal to existing models from buying one. It's a huge cash grab plain and simple. Crooks.
Oughta be a law somewhere that covers this.. Such as antitrust, EU sanctions similar to the micro USB charger law etc.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Nerdfest on Saturday September 13 2014, @05:01AM
You can just *not* buy a MacBook. Unfortunately the Apple Pay (I still get a kick out of the name they picked) thing may be a different story. It may work out that the only NFC payment many stores will accept is Apple Pay rather than an open, low barrier to entry solution. That should not be legal. The payment system forces people to use their phones, and the phones force people to only use Apple hardware and software (store). Think Apple is going to let another contactless payment system be installed on *their* phones? I highly doubt it.
(Score: 2) by ragequit on Sunday September 14 2014, @01:07AM
I currently have one of those mac book pros.
my-mbp:~ me$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity iused ifree %iused Mounted on
/dev/disk1 465Gi 174Gi 291Gi 38% 45660070 76186238 37% /
devfs 336Ki 336Ki 0Bi 100% 1170 0 100% /dev
map -hosts 0Bi 0Bi 0Bi 100% 0 0 100% /net
map auto_home 0Bi 0Bi 0Bi 100% 0 0 100% /home
This includes an 80GB Windows VM, 10GB linux VM, 40GB of music.
It's a portable. easily stolen. What could you possibly need that much on board storage for?
You need to connect an external to back it up. Why not just keep your HD Buffy collection on an external and move what you need when you need it?
The above views are fabricated for your reading pleasure.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Saturday September 13 2014, @03:06PM
You should be reading up on what's going on. Wal-Mart and other retailers are working on a payment system that completely bypasses credit card companies, whose high fees have been a sticking point with retailers for a long time. And something Wal-Mart backs has some weight behind it. This isn't some startup trying to get a cut of every retail transaction, this is the biggest retailer trying to cut out credit card companies.
So Apple has this iPhone pay thing, and anyone on the credit card or bank side of the industry is getting behind it for the same reason that the RIAA members companies signed up for iTunes: a pittance is better than going out of business entirely. The problem is, retailers don't want to buy NFC equipment. Their margins are low enough without buying special equipment to make money for Apple. So there's a mismatch of priorities here with retailers wanting one thing and credit card companies wanting something else.
Keep reading and following this story. The next 5 years will be interesting (in the Chinese sense) for retail payments. Major players are fighting for a smaller and smaller profit margin. The Dollar General - Family Dollar - Dollar Tree soap opera is part of the shakeout since they can't compete with Wal-Mart. (I think the merger is just one last huge payday for managers and owners, before all dollar stores go kaput, but that's probably my cynical streak.) Sears/K-Mart and Radio Shack are just about done. In a few years, we're going to see another huge shakeout of stores similar to the downfall of Circuit City and regional department stores. (Anyone remember Kings, or am I just getting old?)
I don't have any Star Wars analogies, but I keep thinking there's a parody of Steely Dan's "Hey Nineteen" in this somewhere. "Hey nineteen, that's Kings department store / she don't remember where I used to shop".
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by opinionated_science on Saturday September 13 2014, @05:24PM
and then we have Bitcoin. Which is directly accepted by Overstock.com. And can be passed on by PayPal now.
It is entirely plausible that if sufficient Apple users start using the system, it could be more rapid than a few years...
(Score: 2) by tibman on Sunday September 14 2014, @11:38PM
Bought some networking gear off Newegg last week and was pleasantly surprised to see a BitCoin payment option.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.