Oh it's much worse than that. They only accept member fees paid by SEPA transfers. As in Single Euro Payment Area. Don't live in a country that uses the Euro or is part of the EU? Your money isn't welcome here.
SEPA is essentially just a specific subset service set of a SWIFT international bank transfer. Or in other words, the interface of SEPA is a subset of parameters in SWIFT transfer. And it mandated IBAN numbers on stragglers in EU.
The cellular carriers very obviously already have a system like this for location tracking.
Their tower dumps contain enough metadata to determine all the people who spend most workdays at office buildings in McLean Virginia. And then, of course, where those people sleep (i.e. charge their phones) at night. It takes positive effort to erase that data, and believe me, it's being erased. The powerful people don't want it to exist.
So yeah, there is already a system for doing this kind of thing. It will be extended. Plebs like you and me don't get to use it.
The problem is that these towers and metadata are hackable by China and Russia, and now you understand how dangerous it is to run Huawei and ZTE etc in your critical infra.
Unless you have positive evidence, I'm gonna guess that the "powerful people" aren't that organized or that on top of things. But, sure, they'd like to be.
Or they're trying to distract attention from the fact that they've already sold out 100% of the fab capacity available to produce these chips for the next two years.
So really, they lose nothing. They've already booked sales of everything there is to sell. So might as well now turn attention to those who might be customers two years from now, and make them feel like the wait will be worth it.
What a dumb policy.