Australian Officials Accidentally Reveal Google As Responsible For Anti-eBay Filing
from the jockeying-for-position dept
Last month, we wrote about plans by eBay in Australia to ban all non-PayPal payment solutions from the auction site. This has set off quite a firestorm, especially from folks who don’t particularly like PayPal. Australian regulators are looking into the matter, and have asked for comments from anyone interested, some of which it’s posting online. Most of the comments come with the name of the individual and/or company who sent it in — but a few were posted anonymously, at the submitter’s request. However, it appears that regulators didn’t do a very good job scouring for metadata, as someone who looked more closely at the PDF file discovered that it clearly says “Submission by Google re eBay” in the metadata (found via Slashdot).
While this has some wondering if “tensions” are escalating between the two companies, I think it’s safe to say that tensions were already quite high between the two companies concerning their competing payment solutions. After all, when Google first launched Google Checkout, eBay quickly banned it from use on the site, claiming (with a straight face) that Google wasn’t trustworthy enough, since it didn’t have a track record of payment solutions. Then, you may recall a year ago, that Google (childishly) planned a “protest” outside of eBay’s own user conference, which resulted in eBay removing all ads from Google for a little while. Considering that eBay is Google’s largest advertiser, this was no small move. So, somehow, I doubt the fact that Google filed a comment against banning other payment systems in Australia is going to be seen by either party as an “escalation” of the tension between the two companies.
Filed Under: anonymity, australia, google checkout, metadata, paypal
Companies: ebay, google
Comments on “Australian Officials Accidentally Reveal Google As Responsible For Anti-eBay Filing”
PayPal Sucks, Used it once, never again!
Re: Re:
I’ve been using PayPal since 2002 and have never had a problem with it.
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Actively using paypal for many transactions, or just having low-usage/dormant account with paypal? There is a huge difference between the two.
when paypal freezes and active account for 30 days *because of* a single questionable transaction, all of your other *unrelated* transactions are automatically put on hold. if you run many transactions throughout the week, you will inevitably come account a transaction which paypal deems ‘questionable’, no matter how good you think you are as a seller or buyer.
Don't rely in meta data
I wouldn’t rely on the meta data to establish the authenticity who made a submission. I could make a sumbission and put whatever I like in the meta data of a pdf file!
paypal is becoming a monopolistic daemon
we started using paypal for receiving and sending payments for our free technology press release site. i didn’t bother to withdraw money till my funds reached a certain limit. paypal is a major source of revenue for running our business. but now paypal will not allow me to withdraw fund without verification. i have used 6 different banks and cards but paypal is still not successfully verifying my account, in one instance i found that paypal is misspelling the country name INDE instead of INDIA at the time of sending the credit card address for verification. naturally the bank declines the transaction and cancels the verification process. i contacted paypal one week back and still they have not responded back.
if we allow PayPal to become a monopoly it will start harassing sellers and buyers. in the general interest of everyone we should promote alternative payment gateways. Even google checkout is not seller friendly. Margins charged are also unreasonable. More competition is needed in the online payment space to force back these unruly payent gateways.
Re: paypal is becoming a monopolistic daemon
That is sort of the point; if you are unhappy with PayPal, who do you call? I’ve used them for years, and have only had one incident, but that one made my blood boil. Had there been an alternative, I’d have switched and likely still be with them.
Paypal
If you’re lucky enough not to have had a problem with Paypal then please don’t come on here and just state that Paypal are excellent, no problems – just wait, and keep using it, and eventually they WILL screw you over on something.
Paypal are dodgy as hell, and seemingly invulnerable. They are like the Taxman – they do what they want and ignore you, you have NO comeback. Paypal want to run like a bank with the benefits that brings, but don’t want to be regulated like a bank.
WHEN are Google going to finally launch a competitor to ebay?
COME ON GOOGLE! With all the anti-seller changes eBay have recently made, I can pretty much guarantee you could have 1/2 of ebays sellers within the first month or two. Once you have more sellers/items than ebay then that’s ebay screwed. And by god do they deserve to be screwed.
The only thing Ebay has going for it is that is where all the sellers are, but they want somewhere else to go…
I keep reading about paypal accounts being hijacked… I don’t think I’ll ever have one.
PayPal is VERY Shady
The Security Now Podcast recently did a spot where PayPal routes you through DoubleClick for almost every action you take on their site. This in effect sets up a first person relationship with Double Click allowing them to put tracking cookies in your browser regardless of how you have your 3’rd party cookie settings set. In other words, Paypal intentionally took steps to bypass the wishes of consumers requesting not to be tracked by turning off 3’rd party cookies. This coming from a site with so much financial information on their users. It’s scary…and they need some competition to put them back in their place.
Re: PayPal is VERY Shady
Adblock is your friend (well, if you use Firefox).
I will never use Paypal
I did use Paypal occasionally, not often, but haven’t for around 3 years. I was incorrectly charged a fee when having money transferred to my account. I discovered that my account had been changed from a free account to a premier account.
I contacted Paypal, and despite them admitting that the mistake was their fault, they would not refund the money they took because it was not an intentional error, and they had no mechanisms to make such a refund. Now I’m not going to go through all of the hassle of consumer groups to get around $2.20. But I find that disgusting. 100,000s of people use Paypal if they “accidently” switch free account holders to premier accounts they’d make a lot of money, knowing that no one(sane) is going to spend the amount of time needed just to get back $2.20). I haven’t used them since.
Do No Evil?
It is obvious Google has fallen from its high pedestal of ‘Do No Evil’ and become an underhand Evil Empire