Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Google is a different story—or at least the ISIS telcos may think it is. In a simple marketing battle—”whose mobile wallet do you want to use?”—Google will likely roll over the mobile operators, and they know it. That’s part of the reason none of them have come to terms with Google, which says it’s in discussions with all of them. If the ISIS operators already have Google Wallet on their phones, the ISIS mobile wallet would have to be dramatically better to make headway. That seems unlikely.

But what if Google decides to go ahead and offer Google Wallet on the operators’ Android phones anyway—and what if the operators push back? It wouldn’t be hard for mobile operators to offer Android phones without Google Wallet installed, but they would have to take unusual measures to block customers from downloading the app if Google made it available. And if the operators did that, the whole mess would probably end up in court.

In the meantime, retailers who are already facing the possibility of supporting three different mobile payment schemes—and in the stupidest of scenarios, three different mobile payment POS devices on their counters—could be caught in the middle of that fight.

What happens when a customer walks in with a phone whose mobile-wallet app worked fine at another store 20 minutes ago, but doesn’t work now? It’s not ISIS or Google or Apple that customers will blame. It’s the chain that will take the heat.

And explaining to that customer that 20 minutes ago the phone was just mimicking a contactless payment card, but now it’s actually performing as a full Google Wallet, which is being blocked by the carrier—well, do you really want your associates trying to say that to an already irritated customer anyway?

All of that is at least six months away, and all chains can do is wait to see if a real fight breaks out. In the meantime, Apple could enter the mobile wallet field in early 2012 with something that at least uses the same POS devices as Google, which would make it impractical for ISIS to force retailers to accept another on-counter POS device. Or Apple might so completely swamp the market that Google would change its protocols to match Apple’s version, with mostly the same result for retailers.

In the best of all worlds for retailers, all three major U.S. mobile-payments players might decide to use the same POS and protocols. That would make life simplest of all for retailers—but you’ll probably be waiting for that one for a long, long time.