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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."
so does it really prove that the document came from Google? Of course, they might be the one but who knows...
They called me mad, and I called them mad, and damn them, they outvoted me. -Nathaniel Lee
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.
Because google is using word to submit their semi anonymous critiques... shameful shameful
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.
maybe.
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)
> So did someone finally figure out whether it was dead or alive?
Well...yes and no.
Eventually you'll run into someone who decides they don't like something and the magic words with PayPal are "not as described" - it doesn't matter how accurately you actually did describe it since PayPal does not check or even care. Anyone can return anything, regardless of your policy on returns and get a full refund - screwing you out of the shipping price in the process. (accepting returns is usually a good policy but not in all cases) Worse, sometimes the "buyer" will ship you a box with nothing in it (keeping the item) and PayPal will give them their money back as soon as they provide "proof" of shipping. As for PayPal's seller's "protection", it's nearly worthless and PayPal puts so many stipulations in that they can basically weasel out anytime they want to. (and believe me they do)
PayPal wants to be a bank without being regulated like one. They also implement a lot of poorly thought out policies that could only be fair if they could/would inspect the merchandise - but they don't and never will. I don't have a problem with their service overall but it should be used with a strong dose of caveat emptor.
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
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.
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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.)
I don't know about unethical, but it definitely is anti-competitive. eBay does have a monopoly in the online auction business. That there are other online auction businesses is little different than MS saying they're not a monopoly because of Apple. So, that the move is anti-competitive would have a good chance of standing up in court. If eBay thinks they're so powerful that this needn't concern them, I'd say that's pretty arrogant; Google may be the search giant rather than the online-pay giant, but they're still pretty powerful.
I dream of a better world... one in which chickens can cross roads without their motives being questioned.
It's coming up on two years since the slashdot article announcing that Ebay bans Google checkout payments.
I'd be pissed too if Ebay pretty much implied that shitty little companies like propay.com can handle high dollar business transactions better.
Of course the lack of features or policies is probably not the reason at at all. Paypal is probably just scared of having it's market share shoot straight through the floor.
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/
We always knew it was dead or alive.
The problem with Google's posting of an opinion, that many probably agree with, is that the use of ad-hominem is so prevalent and accepted that, these days, it is impossible to state something factual and verifiable, or reasonable and well thought out, without it being automatically colored by what people's perceptions of your motives might be.
People have just given up even attempting to think. They judge quickly based on sound bites and prejudices, they no longer contemplate the validity of an argument before forming an opinion.
Astroturf.
I do not think it means what you think it means.
They aren't advertising anonymously.
Google is criticizing an anti-competitive move that will hurt consumers as well as Google and pretty much everyone other than Ebay.
If they want to do so anonymously because they have advertising accounts with ebay, I don't see anything sinister about that.
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De facto: in actuality, if not actual legal definition. Market share is a key indicator of monopoly status. Using that market share to create an artificial barrier to entry (into payment processing, not auction sites) is an abuse of that status.
To put it another way, requiring use of PayPal could easily be argued to amount to unlawful bundling of a service that is not strictly necessary to eBay's auction business.
Granted this is all from a US legal standpoint, rather than an Australian one.
And I don't see this as astroturfing. Posting anonymously is different from posting under a fake identity.
Bullshit. 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.
Astroturfers are lying scum and should be in jail.
Companies should have no right of anonymity and it's about time the law caught up with them. All communication by corporate entities should be clearly identified as such. Corporations have a privileged legal position and with that privilege comes responsibility. In particular, transparency and accountability.
Think it doesn't matter? It does, or they wouldn't do it.
Corporate tools will claim that readers will not give them a fair hearing if they post under the corporate name. Well hello, guess why. If corporations were trustworthy they wouldn't have a problem.
Others will claim that the message should be evaluated independent of the messenger. Self serving nonsense, context is very important in evaluating the veracity of a message.
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Paid marketers are the worst zealots.
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.)
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