HN user
I think it's rather to do with the fact that the Dutch language corner of the Internet is relatively super small when compared to the other well connected European nations like Germany or France. We tend to mingle with the English language platforms more.
because there is zero standardization For the Netherlands, you could not be more wrong. By law, all public transport companies for Trains, Metro, Tram, Bus, Watertaxies are hooked into the exact same NFC payment platform, the OV-chipkaart. Recently, they rolled out debit/credit card payments on these readers nation-wide.
Additionally, all public transportation companies provide standardized service information including live updates (often required by the law). Any journey can be fully planned on 9292.nl.
Innovation? Contactless payment have been a thing for years in the EU. First on physical cards, then on android. Apple locking down NFC access for wallet apps is nothing more than a forced monopoly.
On your single point of failure. That might be true, but certainly isn't these days.
Networks have grown so large and complex that the only reasonable way of managing them is through SDN, and a small mistake in configuration might results in a cascading effect on the whole infrastructure.
That's also true for the entire (western) internet. We've ended up with a centralized market where a few key players, e.g. cloud providers/CDNs/DNS (Amazon/Google/Microsoft/Akamai/Fastly/Cloudflare) can easily break large parts of the internet. See Akamai outage in July.
Uber could pull out from NL, and not be missed, as the country is not super car dependent to start with. Taxi's (or uber like services) are rarely used here. People mostly walk, bike or take public transport.
As for the implosion of the gig economy, I doubt it too. We've had a neo-liberal gov for the last 12 years, and they've pushed the gig economy (successfully) within the boundaries of north western EU social democracy (Dutch: ZZP).
What we are witnessing here is the courts pushing back on companies abusing the system. They can't have it both ways; wanting flexible workers with those kinds of wages, with demanding 'contracts' akin to employee contracts.
Although you are correct. Apple does deny access to the NFC contactless for payment applications.