rohitj - 7:23 pm on Jul 6, 2006 (gmt 0)

Good for ebay. With identity theft rampant all over the place, Google needs to prove that they can handle secure financial data. Quite frankly I don't think their adwords billing infrastructure is proof enough that they're capable of moving into the same type of turf as PayPal--which has something like 60 million accounts and a lot of experience handling fraud and identity theft. You're no longer talking about billing just tech-savvy webmasters and small businesses but thousands of others who may have very limited experience using computers.

As for removing eBay from the index or adwords, that's just not going to happen. It'd ruin all credibility they have of trying to keep the index unbiased and protected from business interests. Would be just another bad PR campaign amid China and pagerank lawsuits. And it'd be a fair assumption to say that their adwords arrangements are sealed by some tight contracts, specifying when ads can be pulled and when they cannot.

[edited by: rohitj at 7:50 pm (utc) on July 6, 2006]