A while back I wrote about a lawsuit, possibly with unethical motives, that was filed by Ebay against Craigslist. In the suit, Ebay claims that the people in charge of Craigslist, a popular internet classifieds site, have actively tried to reduce Ebay’s influence as a minority shareholder in the company.

WSJ’s Marketwatch had this to say about the suit:
The countersuit escalates an ongoing struggle between one of Silicon Valley’s biggest Internet players and a smaller, but strategically important partner that’s been reluctant to both embrace eBay and cash in on its own popularity.

Craigslist is one of the most popular websites in the united states, mainly due to it’s ease of use, and the fact that most of it’s features are free to use except for a minimal charge for real-estate and job postings. The company still manages to profit in the several hundred million dollar range, without the large fees and massive overhead of some of the larger job listing websites.

WSJ:
In its own suit, Craigslist counters that eBay has “engaged in conduct designed to harm Craigslist, its users, and consumers.” That conduct includes “unfair competition” and attempts to “treat Craigslist as if it were one of eBay’s subsidiaries,” according to the suit.

This is a very revealing look into the corporate culture of Ebay, and Cragislist. It appears Craigslist feels threatened by Ebay, and is growing tired of their attempts to strong-arm them out of the market for online classifieds.

Personally I think that Ebay should just let craigslist go. As a Google exec said recently, (paraphrased) “we do well when the internet is healthy.” Ebay has nothing to gain by squashing Craigslist.

When I’m trying to sell something on the internet, I’ll usually try craigslist since it’s easy and free but doesn’t have any mechanism for bidding so I’ll usually have to high-ball the price and then negotiate, and even then it’s sometimes difficult to sell things because people have no obligation to complete the transaction and will often flake out.

So basically this results in a situation where I will use Craigslist to sell inexpensive things, or things in high demand, and Ebay for things I want a good price on that are likely to get bidded up and might be difficult to find a serious buyer for.

WSJ:
The company alleges that after eBay bought a Dutch classified listings site in 2005, eBay executive Garrett Price said, “We just purchased the largest classifieds site in the Netherlands for $290 million, what do you think we would pay for the largest classifieds site in the United States?”

But then I guess ebay sees things differently, since they have huge bank accounts ready to drop the hammer on companies which they think can benefit their brand.

The one problem here though, is that if one day I logged onto Craigslist and it had a huge Ebay logo at the top and had all of the bulky features of Ebay I’d probably delete the bookmark and never go back there again as would many of the people like me who use it solely for it’s simplicity and ease of use.

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