Australian Officials Accidentally Reveal Google As Responsible For Anti-eBay Filing
from the jockeying-for-position dept
Last month, we wrote about plans by eBay in Australia to ban all non-PayPal payment solutions from the auction site. This has set off quite a firestorm, especially from folks who don't particularly like PayPal. Australian regulators are looking into the matter, and have asked for comments from anyone interested, some of which it's posting online. Most of the comments come with the name of the individual and/or company who sent it in -- but a few were posted anonymously, at the submitter's request. However, it appears that regulators didn't do a very good job scouring for metadata, as someone who looked more closely at the PDF file discovered that it clearly says "Submission by Google re eBay" in the metadata (found via Slashdot).While this has some wondering if "tensions" are escalating between the two companies, I think it's safe to say that tensions were already quite high between the two companies concerning their competing payment solutions. After all, when Google first launched Google Checkout, eBay quickly banned it from use on the site, claiming (with a straight face) that Google wasn't trustworthy enough, since it didn't have a track record of payment solutions. Then, you may recall a year ago, that Google (childishly) planned a "protest" outside of eBay's own user conference, which resulted in eBay removing all ads from Google for a little while. Considering that eBay is Google's largest advertiser, this was no small move. So, somehow, I doubt the fact that Google filed a comment against banning other payment systems in Australia is going to be seen by either party as an "escalation" of the tension between the two companies.
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Filed Under: anonymity, australia, google checkout, metadata, paypal
Companies: ebay, google
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when paypal freezes and active account for 30 days *because of* a single questionable transaction, all of your other *unrelated* transactions are automatically put on hold. if you run many transactions throughout the week, you will inevitably come account a transaction which paypal deems 'questionable', no matter how good you think you are as a seller or buyer.
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Don't rely in meta data
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paypal is becoming a monopolistic daemon
if we allow PayPal to become a monopoly it will start harassing sellers and buyers. in the general interest of everyone we should promote alternative payment gateways. Even google checkout is not seller friendly. Margins charged are also unreasonable. More competition is needed in the online payment space to force back these unruly payent gateways.
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Re: paypal is becoming a monopolistic daemon
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Paypal
Paypal are dodgy as hell, and seemingly invulnerable. They are like the Taxman - they do what they want and ignore you, you have NO comeback. Paypal want to run like a bank with the benefits that brings, but don't want to be regulated like a bank.
WHEN are Google going to finally launch a competitor to ebay?
COME ON GOOGLE! With all the anti-seller changes eBay have recently made, I can pretty much guarantee you could have 1/2 of ebays sellers within the first month or two. Once you have more sellers/items than ebay then that's ebay screwed. And by god do they deserve to be screwed.
The only thing Ebay has going for it is that is where all the sellers are, but they want somewhere else to go...
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PayPal is VERY Shady
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Re: PayPal is VERY Shady
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I will never use Paypal
I contacted Paypal, and despite them admitting that the mistake was their fault, they would not refund the money they took because it was not an intentional error, and they had no mechanisms to make such a refund. Now I'm not going to go through all of the hassle of consumer groups to get around $2.20. But I find that disgusting. 100,000s of people use Paypal if they "accidently" switch free account holders to premier accounts they'd make a lot of money, knowing that no one(sane) is going to spend the amount of time needed just to get back $2.20). I haven't used them since.
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Do No Evil?
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