Category: Internet

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eBay Australia making even fewer friends over forced PayPal

eBay Australia isn’t exactly making friends by requiring its sellers to use eBay-owned PayPal to receive their money. No more direct bank deposits, cheques, money orders or your own card merchant account. I’ve written about this twice for Crikey [1, 2], but today there’s more news: the Reserve Bank might weigh in against eBay.

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.

Continue reading “eBay Australia making even fewer friends over forced PayPal”

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Laurel Papworth on 9am

Social networks guru Laurel Papworth was on Channel Ten’s 9am with David and Kim this week. Have a look, ‘cos it’s interesting to see how out of touch mainstream media professionals are in all of this. I write about that in my comment to Laurel’s post.

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Government releases broadband tender documents

The government has released the tender documents for the national 12Mb/second broadband network. As Richard Chirgwin notes, “I don’t think the minister will get 98% of the population, since that last 8% covers a very big geography. And I think that October for announcing the winner is a very slow process. And that a 5 year rollout is a real snail’s pace. But things have started…”

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My submissions for Australia 2020

For various reasons I didn’t have much time to write submissions yesterday. Yet I’ve said so much about still believing the Australia 2020 Summit to be important — despite plentiful shortcomings — that I felt obliged to write something. In 500 words or less. So I wrote from the heart…

What emerged were two pieces:

  1. For the governance topic: Managing continual, rapid change with a clear framework of values [PDF].
  2. For the topic on “the economy”, which is where discussions of broadband policy ended up: Broadband: It’s about symmetry, not speed [PDF].

I’m well aware that they don’t really provide a properly-researched, well-argued case. Nevertheless I hope that in some way they’ll help influence debate. Comments appreciated — perhaps over where the submissions themselves are blogged.