Re: The case for registration as a technical specification

On Wed, Jul 15, 2015 at 11:36 PM, L. David Baron <dbaron@dbaron.org> wrote:

> On Monday 2015-07-13 15:53 -0700, Adrian Hope-Bailie wrote:
> > Browser can take on this role if the user hasn't explicitly configured
> > another wallet and I'd recommend that the standard makes it mandatory to
> > allow users to pick a wallet other than the browser.
>
> That doesn't seem sufficient to cause wallet software to come in to
> existence, especially if most (but not all) of the browsers ship
> with built-in wallets tied to their own payment services.  If such a
> situation with no freestanding wallet products were to happen, what
> allows browser makers who don't have payment services to remain
> competitive in the browser market?


Personally, I still think there should be some kind of system wallet
consisting of payment instruments known to the device. Phones would support
expose the Google/Apple respective payment schemes tied to the secure
element on the device. And if you have the PayPal app installed it would
somehow register itself with this system-specific wallet. All browsers (and
potentially non-browsers) on such a system would have access to these
instruments, and Firefox users could use Google/Apple Pay as payment
instruments.

I think mandating being able to install non-building-browser wallets feels
arbitrary and won't necessarily force anything to happen. A non-cooperative
vendor could always just ignore this part of the spec. However, I suspect
current browser-vendors-who-are-also-payments-vendors would like as many
people to use their payment products as possible, and making such
instruments somehow available to all browsers on the system will be in
their own best interest.

This is not 100% in line with what is being describing currently and
technically I don't know how to square these corners. But I think this is
something that can be worked out later and doesn't need to block the
charter.

Brett