The Australian government has been considering new laws that would tighten the regulation of digital payment services by tech giants such as Apple and Alphabet’s Google. Treasurer Josh Frydenberg stated that he would “carefully consider” that and other recommendations from a government-commissioned report into whether the payments system had kept pace with advances in technology and changes in consumer demand.
Services such as Apple Pay, Google Pay and China’s WeChat have grown rapidly in recent years but they are not currently designated as payment systems, putting them outside the regulatory system. Frydenberg stated in an opinion piece, “Ultimately, if we do nothing to reform the current framework, it will be Silicon Valley alone that determines the future of our payments system, a critical piece of our economic infrastructure.”
The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) earlier this month called for global financial watchdogs to urgently get to grips here with the growing influence of ‘Big Tech’ and the huge amounts of data controlled by groups such as Google.
