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Originally Posted by Snowman
Or that eBay got wind of the fact that there were plans in the works at PWCC to leave eBay completely and set up their own auction platform, so eBay retaliated in classic eBay fashion. Who knows why they actually did it, but to cut ties so publicly in the way that they did sure makes one wonder.
One thing is certain though. The premise of the email was clearly bullshit. eBay has never given two shits about shill bidding in the past. This was most likely about something other than cracking down on shill bidding. Perhaps the FBI was breathing down their neck and the legal team felt they had to make a drastic move to cover their asses. Or perhaps they wanted to damage the brand of a soon-to-be competitor who was already on their way out the door. I think those are the two most plausible scenarios. Time will tell. If it is cracking down on shill bidding though, surely that will become apparent via further actions against shill bidding. And if it's the FBI breathing down their neck, that will become apparent once all these indictments start rolling in (any day now... any day now...). But if neither of those things happens, then the scale begins to tip quite heavily toward them just trying to damage the brand of a competitor. Stay tuned, IMO.
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It is definitely NOT about just damaging the PWCC brand. Taking a dump on a competitor to damage their brand is called "trade libel" (publication of matter disparaging the quality of another’s property, which the publisher should recognize is likely to cause pecuniary loss to the owner. The tort encompasses ‘all false statements concerning the quality of services or product of a business which are intended to cause that business financial harm and in fact do so. (City of Costa Mesa v. D’Alessio Investments,LLC (2013) 214 Cal.App.4th 358, 376) and if a $10 billion company does it just to thwart a competitor it will find itself on the receiving end of a massive lawsuit. The fact that eBay did what it did publicly and loudly means that it has solid evidence in hand sufficient to allow their corporate counsel to greenlight a statement that is otherwise textbook trade libel.