EU to Build No-Fee Payments Service Like Visa/mastercard and Apple/google Pay

Or new compliance obligations, such as recently the new need to provide a source of fund if you buy a watch worth more than 10k€. The watch seller has to then pay a specialized company to analyze it, the customer loses time on trying to get the documents, you leak private data to unknown parties and compliance agents will know everything about you. So much for the "privacy".

You mean VISA cards, with a few extra apps (that's what, say, Worldcom is, an app on a VISA card) the data sent over Cisco equipment to IBM compatible servers with encryption via chips developed through VISA by American manufacturers?

I still see some issues there.

Oh, and VISA had to demand Worldcom be moved to Switzerland, to prevent EU countries from let's call it "using it in negotiation" against each other.

And I'm going to go out on a limb here and predict that in a few years, or as soon as the Ukraine war ends one way or another, central banks are going to demand SWIFT moves out of Brussels as well. Call it a shot in the dark.

I get that it's become difficult to trust the US recently for the reason we all know. But you shouldn't forget: these institutions need to be trusted by every central bank ... and "trusted by every central bank" is not the EU either (well it especially isn't France or Germany, who effectively control the EU)

I think the EU (both as a union and as member states) are at risk of the USA doing shenanigans here, particularly due to Project 2025 cutting out the checks and balances that ought to slow down the Executive branch, where the USA moving as slowly as it normally would, would give the EU time to move.

But also, I do also think the various European governments are taking the threat of the US doing nonsense things seriously, and are doing the things to mitigate those risks as best as possible.

False.

Consider the MVP of a house: walls, door, roof.

Walls without a roof, without a door but simply a hole where a door might go, will let animals (or thieves) wander in, and be cold at night and not keep the sun off you in the day.

A door without walls or a roof… is an art installation.

A roof, supported by pillars without any walls or door, will keep you dry and will keep the sun off, but not keep the wind out, nor animals, nor thieves.

What the EU has done here is like any one of those three: necessary, not sufficient.

If the EU ordered the creation of handsets (it doesn't have the power to do so, it's much closer to being a glorified free trade agreement with a light sprinkle of democratic self-updating to the rules of that FTA, than to being a federal government), but forgot to make a payment system, this would also still fail.

It also has to make office software and email systems, as demonstrated by the result of USA sanctions against ICC judges.

> And EU countries have already demonstrated ... they had a near-monopoly on everything really. On chips, interconnects, cell phones, cars, optics, planes, satellite internet, ... but they traded it for a bit of money.

Oh god no. We never had anything like a monopoly on most of those things, and still have one on some others.

We had — still have — decent players in aerospace, and it's more that SpaceX has outcompeted everyone worldwide including other USA companies than like the EU being behind. The EU's planes are still going fine, but Europe was never a monopoly there in the first place. Pre-Starlink satellite internet was always a joke (or emergency fallback), but the players were never monopolists. ASML and Zeiss are still even now major supply-chain players, but that's the closest the EU has ever been to a monopoly on this stuff (Zeiss more than ASML).

You could say we had and lost leads in interconnects though. Perhaps, though it's borderline, early mobile phones.

> But I must ask: given that this doesn't make 1 mm progress towards their stated goal ... qui bono?

Consider that you may be wrong.

Meanwhile, on my linux PC with full root access, because I am the admin, this somehow isn't an issue. No, attestation is not needed. It never was before, and it still isn't, especially because it is NOT required on systems that have way more chance of being set up insecurely. There's nothing stopping me from viewing the source code of the page. There is nothing stopping me from taking a screenshot. There is nothing stopping me from doing anything. I am root on my machine, and that's ok there. Why is remote attestation required? Why the hell would I even want google to "vouch for me" as a european?

It's a supranational institution that dictates laws to States, with a budget and coercive powers against States. Whether it's a proper state or not doesn't matter.

> conceptualised in the EU

No, in Europe. No EU bureaucrat conceptualizes things.

Just to add to the conversation, personally I back and forth a bit on which things should be public or private owned, farms especially.

My general reasoning is that when a "best" solution is known, monopolies tend to form; monopolies tend to extract as much economic rent as possible; I'd rather economic rents be extracted by a government for the purpose of national benefit rather than personal enrichment.

Conversely, when there is no known "best" solution, a free market allows a range of entrepreneurs the opportunity to try their ideas in the hope of cornering the market.

I think water is probably in the first, but with a caveat that this is a high-level thing and it's fine to have hundreds of different companies trying to figure out the best ways to make and install municipal pipes, that work is contracted to by local governments.

Food? I dunno, weather is still a massive dice roll for farming output. Perhaps nationalisation would work, perhaps subsidies, price regulations for inputs and floors for outputs, are the least wrong way to do this. But I'm extremely uncertain.

When fiber arrives, there is a 3 months waiting period before any company can provide the service. This is intended to give enough time for everyone to prepare an offer.

When I got mine, I called the regulation authority (Arcep) who gave me the date and hour my line opens. On that day I called my preferred provider who told me "it is coming! we will call you!" and then the one who laid the cable who told me "we can come in 2 days". I chose the latter.

A few years later the preferred one finally made its way to my area...

No. That's false. The EU was supposed to bring peace. The EU "single market" is a mean to achieve peace, not a goal in itself.

So yeah, depending on what market your institution is from, you might see an increase in regulation. But changes are, once you expand beyond national borders, you have less regulation to deal with as compared to before the EU.

But the results are here : we are at peace, and compared to the rest of the world, we are in good health, we live in overall great conditions and we are pretty much free. I'm not saying we don't have to fight to enhance things or to at least keep them like they are. I'm french so I know what it means to protest against basically everything ;)

I'm not saying we couldn't have done it better. But it's important to acknowledge what we really have before trying to get better things.

They explicitly differentiate themselves from crypto assets, and the only party issuing them seems to be European Central Bank.

Doesn't sound like crypto to me either

It's great Thailand has this, but I still fail to see how EU trying to copy Thailand (for a definition of copying) makes you lose faith in the EU. You would rather not have this no-fee payment system in the EU? How is this at all a negative thing?

I don't think I've seen a European debit card that offers charge back. You can often get your money back in case of fraud or timely-reported theft of your bank cards, but it's not easy.