Why should they pay for a licence? Once a technology reaches such ubiquity, there's a strong case for it being part of the technical infrastructure of that society. To me, that means that governments have a responsibility to ensure that the technology is widely available, and arbitrarily locking it behind commercial licences does not help achieve that. To the extent that patents and licensing provide an incentive to develop such technology, it's beholden on governments to foot the R&D bill in some other way.

Using this sort of logic Windows would be mandatory and paid for by the government on all your 90s, 2000s laptops.

I see your point, but at the same time fracturing product lines into a million micro-SKUs also isn’t great and should be discouraged.

The "standard" in question here is NTT Docomo's Osaifu-Keitai, which is used only in Japan and requires both licensing and a special flavor of Sony's Felica chip:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osaifu-Keitai

I can't really fault Android manufacturers for not wanting to pay extra for every phone in the world to get a bit of proprietary tech that's completely useless outside Japan.

No surprises here, it's Sony. The same company that use propertiary memory card on PS Vita.

The same company that has a weird dichotomy between sometimes using other industry-standard data formats, but at times either succeeding (UMatic, Betacam, Professional Disc, Video8/Hi8) and sometimes failing (Betamax, Memory Stick) to have a dominant media storage standard. And sometimes they have products that accept industry standard formats (I have an older prosumer camera from Sony that supports SD, Memory Stick Pro Duo, and a proprietary flash format that is mostly used to record two formats at once, and they made plenty of VHS VCRs).

Why the F should an interoperability fundamental like NFC require any such thing as a license in the first place??? It's utterly absurd to have ever allowed such a condition, despite it being a fact that everyone has been just living with for decades. If there is a problem, it is very definitely not thanks to anyone failing to pay a license.

FeliCa isn't NFC -- it's a close standard but it's technically different enough and has different requirements that it has licensing attached because it wasn't made freely available. It's technically also called "NFC-F". FeliCa predates NFC's wide adoption in consumer electronic devices because it was in use in Japan in the early 2000's.

What do the international android phones support and does it require licensing?