First, a quote, regarding the public meeting held by the ACCC with regard to eBay trying to force everyone to use PayPal for everything:

eBay Australia managing director Simon Smith, visibly frustrated by the number of barbs fired in his direction, read from a prepared statement and would not answer any further questions.

That pretty much sums up Simon Smith's management style right there. Fact is, this is the man who compared not offering PayPal to selling heroin and said, more or less, that consumers are too stupid to know which payment plan they want to use, so eBay has to decide for them, for their own good. His style has always been "read from a statement and then stonewall, while looking frustrated and perplexed when people are upset and angry." He is, in my opinion, just as utterly clueless as the rest of eBay management, and he's extremely patronising (there, there, little consumer, you just let big Daddy eBay look after you).

And elsewhere, EBay Is Ordered to Pay $63 Million in LVMH Lawsuit.

The thing I love most about this one is this part of eBay's statement:

... today's ruling is about an attempt by LVMH to protect uncompetitive commercial practices at the expense of consumer choice and the livelihood of law-abiding sellers ...

Hmmm. Really? Sort of like mandatory PayPal is uncompetitive commercial practice at the expense of consumer choice and the livelihood of law-abiding sellers?

There you have it, folks. Corporate black pot calls corporate black kettle black.

Oh, and speaking of eBay, lots of good reading on the ACCC site. I particularly recommend the submissions from OZtion and this anonymously published submission (disregard that they apparently used Comic Sans in a formal legal submission; some people just really don't understand how to use fonts).

A couple of years ago, I saw this coming. Well, not the specifics, but I could see that eBay was about to go down the gurgler. I didn't expect it to be this entertaining, however...