PayPal makes its mark, anonymously

A pretty big business has gone to the trouble of devoting a lot of research time on the merit of eBay's plan to make customers pay through PayPal and, judging from the structure and presentation of the submission, engaged a high-end law firm to write and lodge it.

But whose submission is this? The entity in question is too modest or too embarrassed to say.

Only a handful of the almost 600 submissions to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission on eBay's plans are professionally prepared, to the extent that they reflect a knowledge of competition law and the detail of the payments market.

The Australian Bankers Association, the Australian Payment Clearing Association and BPay all made submissions.

No bank made a submission to the ACCC in its own name, though it would be highly unusual if the anonymous commentary was from one of them.

There are three key themes to Anonymous' submission.

One is that PayPal really operates in the market for peer to peer payments, a narrower definition not embraced by the banking entities (who argued PayPal operated in the market for online payments).

A second theme is that eBay is utterly dominant in the relevant market for online trading, and that buyers and sellers who use eBay's platform have nowhere else go to.

A third is that eBay is conning everybody in their assertion that pushing PayPal on customers will improve buyer protection. According to Anonymous' analysis, eBay customers already enjoy all eBay have to offer on that account, and making PayPal mandatory as the payment mechanism won't change that.