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."

Re:Good.

[robot_lords_of_tokyo]

How is it unethical to use your own checkout system? Is it also unethical for a merchant to accept Visa and deny my very own Bongo card?

Re:Does anybody still use eBay?

[0100010001010011]

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)

Re:I can also produce a pdf with the same title

[Televiper2000]

It's also possible that it was written by someone within the ranks of Google who isn't officially representing his corporate masters. I'm wondering of Google hasn't already submitted something similar officially. They have both the interest and credentials to do so.

Re:Heh

[mwvdlee]

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.

pdf file created from MS Word doc?

[hansraj]

From TFA:

Translated it means that the PDF was created from a Microsoft Word document with the filename "204481916_1_ACCC Submission by Google re eBay Public _2_.DOC".

Didn't Google use a version of Ubuntu internally? Probably not a real question given the size of Google but nevertheless...

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

My eBay feedback 1000, still rooting for Google

[Nova Express]

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 [rr.com]

Re:Good.

[mortonda]

Great quote from Ocean's Eleven:

"I may be biased but that doesn't mean I'm wrong!"

Re:PayPal requires caution

[LVSlushdat]

I used to sell refurbed computers/laptops on ebay. I described them endlessly, and in the end, I only accepted Postal MO and cashier checks, no PayPal on those transactions, as the units were As-Is. I did give a 14-day DOA/money back warantee on them, and only had to refund one system that appeared to have gotten jiggled in shipping, and just wouldnt boot.. The buyer shipped the system back and I refunded his $$.. No sweat.. But PayPal doesnt care what YOUR terms of service are, they refund, often without you even communicating with the buyer on the problem.. I used PP for small stuff and it is truely convienient, until you get zinged by them... Fortuantly, in my time with eBay/PP I never got zinged...

Re:pdf file created from MS Word doc?

[ELProphet]

I use Ubuntu. I don't use OpenOffice.org. I find myself more productive using Office 2007 Word, Powerpoint, and Excell, so I bought myself a copy of Office 2007 and put it on Wine. Does it run perfect? Not quite, but I still prefer it. I'm sure that many in Google's middle management feel the same, esp as Office is targeted directly at that market.

Re:Good.

[jlarocco]

The definition of "monopoly" is not "large and popular". There are thousands of online auction sites. There are no barriers to entry into the online auction field. Any "web developer" worth the title could hack together a functional auction site in a couple days. The only downside is those other sites don't have as many users as eBay, but there are ways around that if you really dislike eBay.

If you keep using eBay, even though you think they're doing something wrong, how will they know you disagree with them? In fact, if you keep using them, they don't even care what you think. Making PayPal mandatory and seeing a 10% decrease in revenue means something. Making PayPal mandatory and having a bunch of people cry doesn't.

Unless you own a lot of eBay stock, you don't get to decide how they run their business. Your only options are "Use eBay" or "Don't use eBay".

It's kinda funny how every day people on here whine that companies only care about money, yet everybody avoids using it against the companies like we're supposed to.

Re:My eBay feedback 1000, still rooting for Google

[Anonymous Coward]

Me too. I used to do a substantial amount of business via eBay. We were at around £5000 a month in sales (~$10000) before we stopped. They suck. Huge fees, no customer service and you get it in the ass if a customer feels like committing fraud. I'm lots of people think 'take your business elsewhere'. Problem is that there is no elsewhere. It's a chicken and egg problem; nobody uses other auction sites because nobody uses them... Google could side step this due to their huge, established, user base.

Re:I can also produce a pdf with the same title

[Anonymous Coward]

It's also possible that it was written by someone within the ranks of Google who isn't officially representing his corporate masters.

No it's not. Read the document and you will appreciate that it was prepared by a team of high-priced lawyers. Individuals don't have those kinds of resources.

Re:Heh

[cheater512]

Its the ACCC, not ACC. :)

Australian Competition and Consumer Commission.

Re:Heh

[Pseudonym]

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.)