With Google’s strong push behind host-card emulation and endorsements from Visa and MasterCard Worldwide, mobile operators, SIM vendors and TSMs are resigned to living with the technology, even publicly supporting it–up to a point.
They are trying to put a positive spin on the potential HCE juggernaut, calling it good for the NFC ecosystem, good for consumer adoption and good for attracting more application developers to build innovative services–even though it is bad for their NFC business models.
Isis, the joint venture formed by three of the big four U.S. mobile carriers, decided after Google’s announcement and after it was clear that the big payment networks were eager for an alternative to their NFC SIM cards that it would be wise to publicly embrace HCE. They have been putting that message out.