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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."
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)
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
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.)
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.
Did you actually RTFA ? Google provided the governement with a document (original form is unknown, as the governement can save it as a doc, if you'd have seen the title you'd understand) and the 'watchdogs' made a pdf out of that document, which used the original government provided filename as the title.
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});