Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
Most users with credit cards don’t bother to use clearing
systems like PayPal when they buy online because it adds unnecessary
complexity and added costs to the purchase (sellers must recoup their
PayPal costs in the selling price). For the seller, restricting sales
to PayPal account holders only could significantly narrow their market
reach and lower their margins.
On the issue of fees and charges, it is easy to
understand why eBay wants to force its users to buy and sell
exclusively through PayPal. eBay, which already substantially increased
its fees and charges in January this year, wants to do so again by
stealth. Forcing users to conduct transactions by PayPal is a brazen
attempt to double dip into users’ pockets.
The problem for eBay is that what it is attempting to do with PayPal in
Australia resembles very closely what Microsoft has already been stung
for in the EU – except Microsoft is arguably less culpable because the
products it integrated into Windows were free and competition was still
allowed! Integrating PayPal with eBay to the exclusion of other payment
systems is akin to Windows users being forced to buy Windows Defender
and prevented from using another security package. Needless to say,
antitrust regulators would have something to say about that!
eBay is by far largest and most powerful online auction site and
marketplace in the world. It has a dominant market position and many
users from substantial merchants to home-based businesses to one-off
consumers with a used bicycle to sell have come to rely on it to
conduct transactions. Forcing eBay users to use PayPal exclusively is
an unnecessary restriction of their trade. Therefore the ACCC has no
choice but to reject eBay’s request for immunity from prosecution under
the Australian Trade Practices Act.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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