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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."
It has to me, twice. Once as seller once as buyer.
I got the 'confirmation' from PayPal. I got the guaranteed address. I shipped with a tracking #. The CC was stolen. No matter. PayPal deducted an instant $900 from my account because of some wording loophole.
$2k G5 3 years ago. Opposite situation. I was the seller. Seller was long gone but Hurray for Paypal. They were able to 'recover' $150. (This prompted me to get a credit card so if anything ever did go wrong I would have full recourse through Visa)
I guess the enemy of my enemy (and eBay is every law-abiding citizens' enemy) is my friend, so in my eyes Google still does no evil.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
As someone who has bought and sold science fiction first editions on eBay for nigh on a decade now, and who currently has eBay feedback over 1000, I hope that this finally spurs Google to launch an eBay auction competitor to eat eBay's lunch. (Or, as you newfangled kids say these days when you're not getting the hell off my lawn, I hope Google drinks eBay's milkshake.)
The reason is that eBay has gone from being bringing buyers and sellers together to treating them like pinatas to be beaten with a stick to extract the maximum amount of money from them. Fees have only gone up, the changes made to feedback have been asinine, and eBay has let their core auction business language while they've been trying to turn themselves into an inferior clone of Amazon.
It's gotten so bad that I've reduced my listings by 98% since the new fee structure was announced (and most of the remaining 2% are books another writer asked me to sell on eBay on consignment)> It's simply insufficiently profitable for me to deal there anymore.
Since Google already has the infrastructure in place, I hope they come out with a Google Auctions, radically undercut eBay's fee structure (free for the first two years might do it), and either make eBay's repent or else drive them under entirely.
Why not? Certainly Google has enough computing infrastructure to run an auction business as big as eBay's without even noticing the loading, and I know they're smart enough to create an auction system from scratch.
Lawrence Person
Lame Excuse Books
http://home.austin.rr.com/lperson/lame.html
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Bullshit. Nobody has accused Google of hiding their identity from the ACCC, who are the ones who have to make the decision. The ACCC just removed Google's identity from the public record.
Moreover, nobody is accusing anyone of lying about who Google's submission came from.
Actually, we know exactly why Google wanted the submission to be anonymous to the public, and it had nothin to do with fraud.
The ACCC inquiry, if you recall, is to determine whether or not eBay should be granted an exemption from Australian trade practices law so that they can require everyone to use PayPal on eBay Australia. Everyone knows that eBay is using Australia as an experiment to see if they can get away with imposing this on the rest of the world, too. Google Checkout is in direct competition with PayPal elsewhere, but not in Australia yet.
Google wanted to submit anonymously to avoid hard questions about whether or not they were planning to roll out Google Checkout in Australia any time soon. To their credit, Google has been very up-front about this since the story broke.
(Disclaimer: I am not connected with Google, but it was a close family member of mine who "discovered" the PDF metadata.)
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});