Google exposed as “anonymous” eBay complainant in Australia

By Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Saturday, 31 May 2008 16:15

Opinion and Analysis

When a 38-page anonymous submission to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) was filed arguing against eBay’s request to force Australian eBay users to only use PayPal, questions buzzed over who the complainant was. An unhappy Australian eBay user analysed the PDF’s metadata and discovered it was prime suspect No.1 – Google!

The secret’s out, even though the ACCC has already removed the offending metadata from the PDF it published from an “anonymous” complainant, because once the Internet knows, it’s a secret no longer.

David Bromage, from Australia’s capital, Canberra, analysed the metadata from a detailed 38-page submission to the ACCC, and discovered that "Microsoft Word - 204481916_1_ACCC Submission by Google re eBay Public _2_.DOC" was contained within, indicating that not only is Google or its lawyers users of Microsoft Word (instead of Google Docs), but is very likely the “mystery” complainant in question.

Bromage made his findings public in the comments section of an AuctionBytes article by Auctionbytes blogger Ina Steiner entitled “Mysterious ACCC Filing Has eBay Sellers Playing Detective”, which itself suggested that Google was the likely filer, although it had no evidence, at the time, to back up that assumption.

Steiner has since written a follow up article entitled “Oops! Google Outed in Objection to eBay Oz Policy”, suggesting Google made the suggestion because “eBay prohibits sellers from accepting Google's Checkout service as part of its Safe Payments policy, and apparently Google is concerned a move toward a PayPal-only policy in Australia would impact its market share.”

The ACCC, stung by the discovery, has already removed the offending metadata from the PDF submission, and while the original PDF was available to download from an online file service called SaveFile, the link now comes up with an “invalid file session” message.

However UK tech news site, The Register, has made a copy of the original Google PDF submission available here, where Google as the presumed author is still plainly visible when clicking 'File', then 'Properties' and then looking at the original document's title before it was converted into a PDF. 

What has Google said in response to far, and what of a multi-year agreement signed in 2006 between Google and eBay? Please read on to page 2.