Slashdot Mirror
Google Accidently Revealed As eBay Critic
Xiroth writes "In what could cause an escalation of tensions between the two internet giants, an anonymous critique of eBay's upcoming move to accepting only PayPal as the payment method in Australia has accidently been revealed to have been submitted by Google thanks to PDF meta-tags."
If you pay attention, you'll notice that the "brazen reposting" was done by the ACC, not Google.
And I don't see this as astroturfing. Posting anonymously is different from posting under a fake identity. Not to mention they're both tangential to whether or not Google has a point in their submission.
For all of you saying this was Google's mess up... please RTFA:
The Australian competition watchdog has accidentally revealed Google as the anonymous source of a submission that is highly critical of eBay's proposal to force its users onto the PayPal payments system.
Google didn't mess up, the watchdogs did.
They have a payment system and the technical capabilities, time for Google Auctions. Fuck ebay.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
It's not unethical. What is unethical is not allowing users to use any other form of payment (aside from COD). Why would an online merchant who already has a merchant gateway (credit card processing) account have to pay PayPal's ridiculous fees? There is absolutely zero technical reason for the prohibition, and aside from check/MO/cashier's check fraud, adds zero to the overall safety of transactions.
They are the defacto monopoly in the online auction space, and are using that weight to shut out competitors in another market (payment processing.)