In this episode you’ll hear what I think about the Prime Minister’s Christmas Message, which doesn’t hold a candle to my own Christmas Message from 2008, let alone the Queen’s Christmas Messages, such as Her Majesty’s 50th such message in 2007; the NRMA’s claim that petrol pricing is too hard to predict and their call for an inquiry; the fact, or supposed fact, that Twitter gets more news mentions than Facebook, even though the latter is much, much bigger; and a really, really stupid tweet from Shahira Abouellail, whose blog is called fazerofzanight.

You can listen below. But if you want all of the episodes, now and in the future, subscribe to the podcast feed, or even subscribe automatically in iTunes.

If you’d like to comment on this episode, please add your comment below, or Skype to stilgherrian or phone Sydney +61 2 8011 3733.

[Credits: The 9pm Edict theme by mansardian, Edict fanfare by neonaeon, all from The Freesound Project. Photograph of Stilgherrian taken 29 March 2009 by misswired, used by permission. Mark Zuckerberg news item from NewsyTech.]

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets and in the media and places — and what a productive week it has been!

Articles

• You know super-fast ain’t so super: Optus, and…
• ACCC says Optus pitch is misleading, for ZDNet.com.au, both covering the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s case in the Federal Court in Sydney against Singtel Optus for allegedly misleading or deceptive advertising. I particularly like Optus’ lawyer saying that broadband is not a bottle of shampoo, and the argument that even if an advertisement is technically misleading in and of itself this can still be “cured” with more information later in the sales process. The judge’s decision is expected early in the coming week.
• Turnbull v Conroy: how Coalition broadband plan stacks up, for Crikey, comparing the Coalition’s new broadband policy with the Labor government’s National Broadband Network.

Podcasts

• Patch Monday episode 62, “Why can’t Labor sell the NBN’s benefits?”. I reckon that Labor has been crap at selling the concept of the NBN. After running through the week’s NBN-related political news, I cover some ideas for broadband applications that might help sell the thing.
• A Series of Tubes episode 118. Karl Horne from Ciena talks about that company’s views on traffic growth and network architecture, and I rabbit on about the spate of anti-NBN scare stories in The Australian, the new USO (Universal Service Obligation) inquiry, and the ACCC’s proposed inquiry into ADSL wholesale service prices.

Media Appearances

• On Monday I was interviewed by community radio’s current affairs program The Wire about the NBN. An audio file is available.
• On Wednesday I did a quick spot on ABC Radio Statewide NSW with Paul Turton, covering the ACCC v Singtel Optus hearing and also the death of Limewire’s file sharing service. It wasn’t recorded, sorry.
• On Friday I was interview by Melbourne’s SYN Radio about — you guessed it! — the NBN. I’ll see if I can get hold of an audio file.

Geekery

• We finished a batch of updates for the website at Nolans Road, including adding the new home page and some pages for Dee Nolan’s lush new book, A Food Lover’s Pilgrimage to Santiago De Compostela. Nothing earth-shattering, just some routine updates to an existing site.

Corporate Largesse

• HTC threw a more-than-adequate BBQ with plenty of drinks for the Australian launch of the HTC Desire HD smartphone. The venue was the Astral Bar and Restaurant at Star City Casino.

Elsewhere

Most of my day-to-day observations are on my high-volume Twitter stream, and random photos and other observations turn up on my Posterous stream. The photos also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags.

[Photo: Sydney CBD at dusk, taken from the Astral Bar and Restaurant on level 17 of the Star City Casino in Pyrmont.]

• Formal Methods in Modern Critical-Software Development | The Abnormal Distribution: I needed an explanation of Formal Methods in programming, and this one ain’t bad.
• Telstra admits to exchange access deception | iTnews.com.au: It turns out that, yes, Telstra did tell other ISPs there was no room in their exchanges for their broadband equipment, when there was.
• Narrate Your Work | Scripting News: Dave Winer nails it. “Twitter is at least a dress rehearsal for the news system of the future.” His catchphrase “Narrate Your Work” resonates with me: that’s precisely how I use Twitter, and it’s a sensible work practice for any distributed team.
• Are you still marketing like its 1999? | Media Hunter: Online is now your customer’s “number one media priority”, because they spend more time online than with newspapers or TV or radio. Is it yours?
• On Language – How Fail Went From Verb to Interjection | NYTimes.com: An excellent summary of the history of FAIL.

• The Australian Sex Party: “The Australian Sex Party is a political response to the sexual needs of Australia in the 21st century. It is an attempt to restore the balance between sexual privacy and sexual publicity that has been severely distorted by morals campaigners and prudish politicians.”
• Measuring the Information Society: The ICT Development Index 2009: Australia is ranked #14 based on figures from 2007. In 2003 it was at #13.
• Ho Hum, Sweden Passes new anti File Sharing Legislation | Perceptric Forum: Tom Koltai’s analysis of that new Swedish law: It’ll make no difference long term.
• As Sweden’s Internet anonymity fades, traffic plunges | Ars Technica: A new Swedish law that went into effect 1 April makes it possible for copyright holders to go to court and unmask a user based on an IP address. Sweden’s Internet traffic dropped 40% overnight.
• Study: online sexual predators not like popular perception | Ars Technica: This survey rejects the idea that the Internet is an especially perilous place for minors, and finds that while the nature of online sex crimes against minors changed little between 2000 and 2006, the profile of the offenders has been shifting — and both differ markedly from the popular conception.
• What Is Fail Whale?: The complete history of the Twitter’s error-bringing Fail Whale, along with all the art and craft it’s inspired to date.
• Voda/Hutch merger rattles ACCC | ZDNet Australia: Australia’s competition watchdog tonight issued a strongly worded statement of concern that the proposed merger of mobile carriers Hutchison and Vodafone could lead to increased retail prices on mobile telephony and broadband services.
• All the news that’s fit to tweet | guardian.co.uk: The Guardian has also announced a new 140-character commenting system. “You’ll never again need to wade through paragraphs of extended argument, looking for the point, or suffer the unbearable tedium of having to read multiple protracted, well-grounded perspectives on the blogs you love.”
• Share This Lecture! | Viddler.com: Mark Pesce’s annual lecture for “Cyberworlds” class, Sydney University, 31 March 2009. About the significance of sharing across three domains: sharing media, sharing knowledge, and how these two inevitably lead to the sharing of power.
• Twitter switch for Guardian, after 188 years of ink | The Guardian: One of the better April Fools’ Day pieces. I particularly like the extracts from the Twitterised news archive. 1927: “OMG first successful transatlantic air flight wow, pretty cool! Boring day otherwise *sigh*”
• Flappers, wine, cocaine and revels (Pt II) | The Vapour Trail: A few hours after five Melbourne girls were arrested for vagrancy in late March 1928, the headline of Melbourne’s Truth broadcast their misdeeds: “White Girls with Negro Lovers. Flappers, Wine, Cocaine and Revels. Raid Discloses Wild Scene of Abandon”.
• A Blacklist for Websites Backfires in Australia | TIME: Time‘s take on the leak of the Australian Internet censorship blacklist portrays it as a joke and a scandal. There are some factual errors in the story, but this looks like how it’ll end up being perceived internationally.

I wrote about this previously, though I didn’t mention that eBay gave up in face of such clear opposition — the 700+ submitters and the ACCC, that is, not me! However Lauren Weinstein writes that in the US eBay has announced that PayPal (or credit cards) are to be the required mechanism for all transactions.

He says:

eBay is also making other changes to de-emphasize auctions entirely by making fixed-price sales more attractive — essentially undermining the basic auction model on which they built their business, and turning eBay even more into Just Another Online Store in many respects.

There are numerous alternatives to selling on eBay. I’ve wondered why so many eBay auction sellers have been willing to be fleeced for so long by eBay’s increasingly callous practices toward this bedrock group.

However as Scott Howard observes:

The difference is that in the US people probably won’t notice or care if this goes ahead.

Banking in the US is for the most part years behind where it is in Australia — and the concept of transferring money into someone else’s account is completely foreign to almost all Americans, and Cheques (err… checks!) still rule as the primary form of payment for anything other than small payments.

Even EFTPOS is only just starting to take off — and then only by banks marketing the cards as “check cards” (which are generally actually just Debit Visa or occasionally Mastercard cards).

The nett result of this is that the vast majority of sales on eBay in the US are already either PayPal, COD or occasionally (non-PayPal) credit card. Without the additional option of a fast/free/easy payment method like direct deposit, PayPal has already won here.

Hat-tip to Professor Roger Clarke.

[This was me in Crikey yesterday.]

Thank the gods I don’t work for the ACCC! The poor sods have to read 700+ public submissions on eBay Australia’s plan to force sellers to use PayPal — which they own. As Crikey reported, this could breach the “third line forcing” provisions of the Trade Practices Act.

Being a lazy geek rather than a tireless public servant, though, I can skim for juicy tidbits. They reveal a widespread fear of eBay bullying.

Greg Walter, for instance, runs online payment system Qpay. He dismisses eBay’s claims that PayPal is the safest and, wearing my moth-eaten network security hat, I tend to agree. But eBay sellers often fear being cut off if they use PayPal’s competitor: Qpay has just one solitary eBay seller as a customer.

Bully or not, eBay is unquestionably Australia’s biggest online-only marketplace. With almost 6 million customers it dwarfs its nearest competitor Oztion with barely 250,000. New entrants BidSell and eSwap are even tinier.

Oztion saw a 22% rise in numbers following eBay’s PayPal-only announcement — proof, says eBay, that there’s genuine competition. But Philip Leahy of the Professional eBay Sellers Alliance reckons Oztion won’t last. It’s an “eBay clone”, he told the ACCC, and there’s “a belief” that once they get a bigger market share eBay will sue them into oblivion. Paranoia?

Even the Reserve Bank has weighed in. Requiring PayPal could make it harder for new online payment systems to establish themselves, restrict merchants’ ability to negotiate lower fees, and restrict consumer choice. Reading between the lines, the central bank sees its role as ensuring that money flows smoothly through the economy. Delays and fees are friction in the pipes which must be engineered out. Computers and network efficiencies should cause transactions costs to fall. eBay’s plan causes them to rise. Markets FAIL.

eBay’s 15-page response omits mentioning their claimed $2.6 billion contribution to the Australian economy. Instead it’s all harmless little eBay. “eBay transactions comprise only [redacted by ACCC] of all online retail transactions in Australia. Given that online retail transactions themselves represent only a part of the online payments market, eBay’s contribution must necessarily be considerably smaller than that.””

The ACCC’s decision will be known mid-June, just before eBay’s planned 17 June start of the PayPal-only regime.

Stilgherrian blogs at stilgherrian.com and is still trying to sell his old crap on eBay.

I’ve written about this at length previously, both here and in Crikey [1, 2], with plenty of interesting comments from readers. And I’ve just written a piece for Crikey today, to be published around 2pm Sydney time.

Meanwhile, you can read some overview pieces at Auction Bytes and The Sheet. And you can see eBay’s full 15-page response at the ACCC website: it’s the second submission on the page, from “Applicant”.

To make things just that little bit more interesting, yesterday Telstra’s Sensis division announced a free auction site at Trading Post.

[Update 1250pm: The story will now run in Crikey tomorrow (Thursday). Busy news day, apparently.]

Here’s how I first described the scenario:

Imagine that you’re Alice, proud owner of the new shoe shop at your local Westfield. Bob is buying a pair of brogues. As Bob opens his wallet, suddenly Frank Lowy appears. “There’s some terrible con-men around,” he intones gravely. “Let me handle that.” He grabs Bob’s cash and pockets a fiver. “I’ll give you the rest next Wednesday,” he says, and disappears.

Alice, understandably, is mightily pissed off.

Sellers on eBay have been mightily pissed off overnight too, because the world’s biggest online marketplace has just pulled the same stunt. From 21 May, all eBay sellers must offer PayPal as a payment method. And from 17 June — unless the buyer is physically collecting the item from you or for a few big-ticket categories like real estate and motor vehicles — they must pay you via PayPal.

Now as Alex Willemyns pointed out, Alice could just set up shop elsewhere. Bob could choose another shoe store. However since Westfield and eBay both dominate their respective markets, that could well be a poorer choice.

The ACCC has also pointed out that eBay must prove that the public benefit from this move outweighs the detriment of what could be a breach of the “third line forcing” provisions of the Trade Practices Act. eBay has requested immunity from legal action. The ACCC is accepting public comments until 2 May.

Today’s Reserve Bank angle is interesting. As The Age reports:

The Central Bank has long called for buyers and sellers to have as much choice as possible in what payment systems they use and strongly opposes any moves that reduce competition in the market…

The Reserve has expressed support for new methods of payment that could act as competition for international card schemes. New methods could give merchants and customers more choice about how they make and receive payments.

A 2006 speech by an Assistant Governor of the Central Bank, Philip Lowe, documented the growth of alternative payment schemes overseas that had not yet been adopted in Australia.

For example, a number of countries had adopted “online debit” schemes that allow customers to transfer money directly from their bank account to the merchant without needing to use a credit card or scheme debit card.

Reading between the lines — and without doing any further research on the point — it seems to me that the Reserve Bank sees its role as ensuring the money flows as smoothly as possible. Delays and fees are friction in the pipes which need to be engineered out.

Computers and network efficiencies should cause the cost of transactions to go down. eBay’s move causes them to go up. Market FAIL.

Now PayPal isn’t necessarily evil. Indeed, for small businesses setting up an online presence, they’re often the most cost-effective way to accept credit card payments, and the easiest to set up technically.

But delays and fees are certainly the problem. eBay sellers don’t like PayPal’s extra transaction fees of 1.1 to 2.4%, nor the 5 to 7 working days it takes to access your money. If a transaction might be “risky” (PayPal’s call), they can freeze it for 21 days. During this time, says their Product Disclosure Statement, “Any money in your PayPal account will be pooled with money from other holders of PayPal Accounts and deposited by PayPal with a licensed bank.”

In other words, PayPal banks your money and earns interest. You don’t.

According to a CNN report, US PayPal users can keep their account balances in a Money Market Account — provided they remember to opt in. Australians don’t have the choice.

PayPal also has a poor reputation for dispute-handling. The internet is littered with stories about people’s accounts being frozen without warning, about consumer credit rights being ignored because PayPal claims their terms of service over-ride them — at paypalsucks.com and screw-paypal.com and here for starters.

eBay is spinning this as being “for your protection”. Their announcement uses words based on “safe” 6 times, “protect” 12 times, and “secure” twice. But then bullies demanding a percentage of your business takings has always been called a protection racket.

The CEO of PayPal competitor Paymate, Dilip Rao, isn’t impressed with the security spin either. “eBay have presented no data to show that Paymate is a less safe way to buy or a less reliable way to sell on eBay compared to PayPal,” he says. Ironically, Paymate was created by eBay Australia but sidelined when its US parent bought PayPal.

eBay is burning bucketloads of goodwill here. So far their response is to tough it out. But any online business can be replicated with a few programmers, and goodwill is your only real asset.