Don Park writes about “Bill My Phone”, an approach to enable payments to be charged to your phone bill. Seattle-based ECharge tried to do something similar a few years ago (without the 3D-Secure idea).
The business issue here is whether the phone companies want to take on this kind of business — historically, when I’ve talked to them, they’ve been afraid of the responsibilities associated with managing credit risks for goods/services other than telephone minutes. Bill Me Later is setup specifically to do real-time credit decisioning — something the phone companies are clueless about.