Wow and I thought Google were the Mr nice guy of internet companies. Recently they've shown themselves to be just as bad as the worst of the rest.

Way to go eBay, don't let Google bully you!!

I've used PayPal for some years. Never had a problem with it - until after eBay bought them out. Now I'm hesitant to use PayPal, because they *debited* my bank account for a credit that was due to me from PayPal, causing an overdraft situation. I was only able to get it resolved after threatening to walk the 6 blocks to the Federal Reserve offices and filing a complaint there.

Go on, Google - find some other way to bring pressure. eBay needs to have some sense beaten into them.

I wonder what does "Freedom" have to do with Google Checkout.

I rarely use eBay anyway, it seems like many stuff auctioned there is b0rked, as some user commented about buying a movie only to find out it was pirated.

Still, I don't see why eBay should give in to the Google bullying. Hell, Google's been into a lot of stuff lately, they could bring up their own online auction system!

The owners of the petition website want a donation by ... wait for it ...

PayPal!

Certainly in the UK it would be a case for the monopolies commission as eBay are denying the users freedom to use their competitors. Obviously this could be complete nonsense as it's only a gut feeling! I always thought PayPal was a decent system until the case when I saw a payment arrive in my account so I sent off a Mac Mini to the buyer, only to find the payment "Reversed" by PayPal. If the buyer had not been so honest I could have been in real trouble. I would rather use Google's payment portal than eBay's any time.

They've screwed up so many things for goons. Somethingawful.com had a hurricane katrina fund for their servers and some other things (because the servers were in new orleans) and paypal froze the account saying it is a scam. this is happened also to the goonfleet web store and they froze the account (meaning we couldn't get our purchases) until an obscene amount of documentation was provided.

Paypal sucks.

Whatever happened to the likes of no-cash, fast-chex etc etc, you never hear of them now.

I'm a big fan of google with what its geiven me for fre, email, online apps, calandar etc, and I can use it all from anywhere, but I do fear its big brother watching of everything I do so it can tempt me to spend money with targetted ads.

On the other hand, ebay, its become the biggest UK auction site and has no competition from anywhere, since yahoo left the building, so why cant they just back down over this, the auction going via them still gets them a cut of the proceeds.

Just greed.

I'd love google to start free google auctions..................

Finally, "freedom" no longer means what people once thought it meant. Don't we all like celebrating "freedom" with "free food, free drinks, free live music" ... and sometimes "free war".

You listening, Stallman? "Free as in 'freedom'" no longer has any meaning left. Gotta stick to "Free as in 'beer'".

You listening, Orwell? You missed the "Ministry of Freedom", making sure that citizens get their free music 24/7.

And of course, Paypal sucks. I stopped using them even before the e-bay buy when they demanded a copy of my passport. WTF?

They are perhaps the only gang to seriously be able to take on ebay - and ebay needs some serious competition - its getting damned expensive to sell on ebay.

All they'd need to do it have it use google checkout, and make it free to use for a year, then keep the prices lower than ebay after that. Sellers (and therefore buyers) would flock to google from ebay if google ran it as a loss-leader initially.

Such a threat would likely have ebay allow people to checkout through google checkout just to prevent it from happening...

Nigel

Now there's a tough choice to make with whom to sympathize.

F*** 'em all. Both of these companies suck. Today's Google is the Microsoft of tomorrow (i.e. big shitty company with no regard for product quality or customer service) and eBay is quite possibly the biggest steaming pile on the Internet.

Here's my prediction: eBay revenue falters, Google buys eBay, the Internet sucks more, and the world goes back to the way it was before the "Information Age". You know, the time when companies actually produced innovative products that weren't "virtual".

Death to IT and to the Internet, it can't happen soon enough if you ask me. (well, I'd rather wait 3 more months until my options are fully vested, but after that, death to them all)

Paypal is a huge cash market, its a bank, it is able to run interest on all transactions in its own favor. Another thing is that Paypal has so much cash stashed away that it hardly needs to debit credit cards to process transactions. eBay of course wants to maintain control over this. And Google itself would definitely like a piece of the pie.

Google might not have been playful trying to throw this anti-eBay bash in Boston, but probably didn't think about the consequences. I think eBay was very right to retaliate pulling its ads. Google knows they are in the wrong, eBay has all the right to do whatever they want with their service (within reason).

Don't expect anything to come out of this... its business as usual.

The money Lowtax was raising was going towards the Red Cross, but Paypal wouldn't allow it because it couldn't see what SA was 'selling' and froze the account. They gave him the opportunity to transfer the account holding to the United Way, but Lowtax didn't like the amount of money that charity skims from donations. He ended up refunding the donations in disgust and asking people to donate individually.

Did anyone else find this paragraph somewhat mind-bending?

'But yesterday, after eBay removed all its ads from Google's US-based AdWords network, the Google team had a change of heart. "eBay Live attendees have plenty of activities to keep them busy this week in Boston, and we did not want to detract from that activity," read a new blog post. "After speaking with officials at eBay, we at Google agreed that it was better for us not to feature this event during the eBay Live! conference."'

I've been using eBay & PayPal for many years now and have had relatively little problem with PayPal (none with eBay, apart from the odd halfwit user), I liked eBay's original online payment method (BillPay) but as soon as they bought PayPal they canned it. I signed up early on to NoChex here in the UK and took a few payments through that service but despite offering it in listings I rarely get users paying by that method (I think it's twice in the past 3 years).

However eBay relies too heavily on PayPal for paymends and if PayPal decided they no longer wanted me as a customer I'd have to look to other methods of sending & receiving 'online' money for eBay auctions, NoChex isn't a very good PayPal substitute because it's not so well known and practically everyone uses PayPal to receive money, so in that situation I would welcome a Google payments method because everyone knows Google and wouldn't really hesitate to pay or receive using that method.

I can understand eBay's reluctance to allow Google checkout for auctions but for those who can't use PayPal it would be an ideal alternative.

> Death to IT and to the Internet, it can't happen soon enough if you ask me.

Did they let Ted Kaczynski out already?

I've been duped by the paypal buyer protedcion idiocy; Bought a graphics card from a scammer (obvious now I look back on it), and he promptly took the ~£200 out of his paypal account and scarpered.

What did Paypal do? They got me back £3 and closed the call. Total joke. What's even better is at the time I didn't have a credit card, so wasn't covered by the bank either.

I don't use eBay or Paypal anymore.

A plague on both their houses. But I find the cries of "freedom" from coporate giant Google to be rank hypocrasy. I hope whichever amateur marketing goon thought the party would be a good idea gets to walk the boardroom plank.

Ebay needs some serious competition, and Google is probably the only outfit large enough to take it on.

Yes, any tom dick or harry can set up a plausible looking auction site, that part of it is just a bit of software and a lot of servers -- but it will take a lot of additional resource to handle all the buyer protection, seller protection and trading standards issues. Only a company the size of google stands any chance of setting up any plausible rival.

But without serious competition, ebay has become far too complacent. Though full of rules designed to ensure fair play, ebay is far to willing to bury its head in the sand when something is bought from a supposedly UK seller, arrives broken and the seller refuses to refund unless the buyer returns it to China at their own expense. All serious violations of both ebay rules and UK law, but ebay hides behind its own waffle and procedures designed primarily to ensure that ebay isn't accountable for its persistent and intentional failure to enforce its own rules.

I remember seeing QXL.com a long time before eBay; and QXL was backed by Hollywood Super-Cop Bruce Willis!! Maybe Google should team up with QXL, and stick it to eBay/PayPal (PayPal btw have not upheld both the claims I made for against sellers sending rip-off gear described as new, so I don't use PayPal anymore, even though I have a 147 eBay rating). QXL, QXL; yippie kiyaa eBay!

Google may not be a saint in this respect, but having had my own merchant credit card account, used Paypal, and used Google checkout, Google is the closest to a real merchant account. Well, except that it prohibits quite a broad range of items that it considers blacklisted products.

Paypal really only pretends to be better than a real merchant account with its false "Buyer/Seller Protection" claims, but in reality, they seem to not protect anyone except for themselves. If you doubt it, read the TOS very carefully if you doubt this, any hint of a chargeback for any fraudulent reason, the so-called Seller Protection Policy dissolves...if the seller is a fraud and the buyer doesn't have the recourse of charging back a credit card against Paypal, well, there's no Buyer Protection if there's not enough money in the seller 's account to "recover" for the buyer.

Forcing buyers to use only their own electronic payment service (mention "google checkout" in a listing, it will be removed for violations of TOS by eBay), when there is an alternative that isn't appreciably different in terms of safety and security is flagrant abuse of their auction market position. Can anyone say, "Time for a DoJ anti-trust/anti-competitive investigation"? I knew you could. This is far more overt than what Microsoft did, it's there for every consumer to see.

Intel V AMD

Nvidia V ATI

PC V MAC

eBay V Google

Same s**t - different bottle. Neither is a "people's champion" or "Mr. Nice Guy". Both wants slice of the pie.

The fatter they become the louder they explode...so keep on munching market....=)

Does that mean that the first three pages of my search results when hunting for consumer items won't be links to eBay any more? if so then it's the best thing that Google have ever done.

I use moneybookers myself... I don't trust either google or ebay/paypal

Their privacy policies leave much to be desired so no thanks. Also

moneybookers seems to be quite nice atleast for me.

I can wire the funds to my moneybookers account and spend it no need

to expose any account information to them. Last I heard paypal wanted

a ton of informations like a CC etc...