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.

Filed Under: anonymity, australia, google checkout, metadata, paypal
Companies: ebay, google

eBay Exec Explains How Not Using PayPal Is Like Dealing Heroin...

from the work-on-those-analogies-a-bit dept

Down in Australia, eBay has apparently decided to require sellers to use eBay-owned PayPal for electronic transactions, blocking out a number of other solution providers in the space. Understandably, this has upset a bunch of eBay customers who, for whatever reason, prefer other payment solutions (often because they've had bad experiences with PayPal). eBay's Australian execs, to their credit, decided to hold a "town hall" meeting to discuss the changed proposal -- and it didn't go particularly well, from the sound of it (thanks to an anonymous reader for sending that in). Apparently, the booing and hissing started early (well, late, because the eBay team opened the doors quite late) and things just spiraled downhill from there. But the key point of ridiculousness was when regional VP Simon Smith explained the reasoning as follows: "We're not allowing people to offer unsafe choices, just like in this democracy you can't go out and buy heroin on the streets." Now, you can understand what he was saying... but, clearly, there's a bit of a difference between using a non-PayPal electronic payments solution and dealing heroin. And, of course, if this were really about "protecting" buyers and sellers, then shouldn't eBay at least offer a path for third party providers to become "certified" as being safe?

Filed Under: auctions, australia, paypal
Companies: ebay, paypal