A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets. I have no further explanations to add.

Podcasts

• Patch Monday episode 117, “Is anonymity online your right?” A conversation with Scott Shipman, eBay’s global privacy leader, about online reputation and trust, data breach-notification laws, the behavioural targeting of advertising, eBay’s AdChoice technology for controlling that targeting, some of the clever things you can do by data mining eBay’s sales data, and how you might create the online equivalent of an untraceable cash transaction.

Articles

• Want data? Scoop up those lost USB keys, CSO, 7 December 2011.
• When is a journalist not a journalist?, ABC Drum Opinion, 9 December 2011.
• Turnbull overstating the uncommercial NBN case … mostly, Crikey, 9 December 2011.
• Govt’s DisasterWatch: the ’9/11 of apps’, ZDNet Australia, 9 December 2011.

Media Appearances

• I was a panellist on the Technology Spectator “webinar” [ugh!] “Board with security?”, which looked at why company directors need to understand information security a bit better and how they might go about it. The recording hasn’t been posted online yet, but I’ll put a link here when it is.
• On Thursday night I was interviewed by ABC Radio News about a report by the Australian Government Competitive Neutrality Complaints Office, part of the Productivity Commission, into claims that the National Broadband Network’s grenfields fibre rollouts breached certain government policies. Exciting stuff. Sound bites were used on Friday’s morning’s AM program in a story headlined Government brushes off NBN criticisms.

Corporate Largesse

None. And I thought there’d be a bunch of corporate parties this week. But I spent most of the week at Wentworth Falls instead.

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: A slender-billed cuckoo-dove, photographed at Bunjaree Cottages in the Blue Mountains. There's a lot of bird life up here.]

[Update 10 January 2011: These books have now been sold.]

For sale right now on eBay: my copies of Edward Tufte’s first four books on data visualisation: The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Envisioning Information, Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative and Beautiful Evidence.

This is the first of a whole bunch of things I’ll be selling over the next few weeks. Yes, partially it’s because I have to move house. But it’s also because I’ve decided to make good on the comment I made at a lunch with the people from Blurb — that books I haven’t even opened in six months are simply wasting space on my shelves and are of no use to anyone. They’re an asset in a coma.

This also relates to a point I’ve been trying to make for the last couple of years, with varying degrees of success: that digital media allows us to separate to creative content — a novel, say — from the container it was traditionally published in, i.e. a book. One version was a Crikey article, Literature? What’s that got to do with the price of books? The core issue is that the pleasure people enjoy from reading the novel, with its characters, settings and plot, is a separate pleasure from the tactile sense of turning pages and feeling the paper, or the satisfaction of collecting objects. I don’t deny anyone any of these pleasures, but they’re no longer necessarily interlinked.

But I digress…

Having read Tufte’s books and absorbed their message, there’s no need for them to sit idly on bookshelves. They’re not something I refer back to. And I have no need to reinforce my sense of self-worth by displaying them as tribal markers either.

You can bid for these books directly at eBay.

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.

Anti-competitive behaviour news story of the day: With a few minor exceptions, eBay will require all payments to be made via PayPal — which they own. I’ve just written a piece for Crikey, which will appear around 2pm Sydney time which is now online.

News from the BBC today that 3-year-old Jack Neal used his mother’s credit card to buy a £9000 pink Nissan from eBay.

“Rachael Neal, 36, said her son was quite good at using the computer, the BBC reports. Well, yes.

The seller of the car, Paul Jones, co-director of Worcester Road Motors in Stourport-on-Severn, near Kidderminster, Worcestershire, said he had been “amused” by the bid. It’s the first time they’ve sold a car on eBay.

He saw the funny side of the event, and has re-advertised the car.