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Google Accidently Revealed As eBay Critic

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the that-was-some-other-search-site dept.

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."

2 of 259 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Does anybody still use eBay? by 0100010001010011 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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)

  2. Re:Heh by Pseudonym · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It's posting in a way that's intended to deceive the reader into thinking the message is by an average citizen and not paid propaganda. It's fraud.

    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.

    Think it doesn't matter? It does, or they wouldn't do it.

    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.)

    --
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