Americans have this whole idea that all their payment woes somehow apply to the whole world. Just recently, John Gruber wrote a lengthy treatise excoriating Europe for trying to force Apple to open up their NFC access. His whole argument was that Apple created the tap to pay market and was due its monopolist rent-seeking because of that. The reality is so different from what is happening in the US that Gruber looked like an Apple fanboy trying to defend the capitalist monopoly from [he checks his note] democracy.

Europeans and Canadians actually prefer to use bank-issued cards with NFC chips instead of phones, because it arrived first and is far more convenient.