While the Apple Pay stuff is great, it's a proprietary walled garden. It's designed to further Apple's goals as a corporation and not necessarily We The People Of The Web's goals.
The big question is, "Why is it so difficult today?" Why do you have to be Apple to launch one of these payment systems? Why isn't it simpler?
If we've learned anything from the history of the web, it's that when you put the power of this stuff into the hands of developers and designers, they both do amazing things with the technology.
The first design criteria for anything that's done through the World Wide Web Consortium is, "No centralization. Centralization is bad." We've got a number of design criteria going into this.
You can't have high-value payments until you solve the way we identify ourselves online. [...] Identify is a big part of this. There are a set of specifications around identity and how you prove who you are online.
We're building something for everyone that uses the web. It's a big responsibility. It's 2.5 billion people. To put that in perspective, if every single iPhone gets converted over to an Apple Pay device, we're talking about 60 million people in the US.
A lot of the web payments work that we're doing is focused on enabling new business models for independent folks on the web that create stuff.
One of the hardest things we've had to do over the past four years is convince web developers and web designers that they're capable of making this kind of change. They're capable of participating in the work. They're capable of building something in the financial industry that can be a really positive force.
The big question is, should you be in control of your identity online or should you delegate that responsibility to some large, gigantic corporation?
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