Over the weekend, Paypal became the latest company to cut off Wikileaks' account, saying that it was a "terms of service" violation -- the same excuse Amazon gave. Of course, Wikileaks had been using Paypal for quite some time before this, so it seems pretty clear that the reasoning was (yet again) political pressure put on American companies, threatening them for working with Wikileaks. What's funny about all of this, of course, is that it's only going to serve to give Wikileaks more attention, and drive up demand for competing services to these US companies overseas. In an effort to "stop" access to information that is widely accessible, all the US is really doing is (a) promoting that information more while (b) harming the reputation of American companies.

After the story a few weeks ago about Paypal suspending the account of Wikileaks, and blocking it from removing money in the account, many people pointed out how risky it is to leave any money in a PayPal account. It seems that situation is getting worse and worse. PayPal has apparently halted personal payments in India, and aren't allowing merchants to remove money from their accounts. And the reasoning is... not particularly clear as to why:

"Personal payments to and from India and transfers to local banks in India have been suspended while we work with our business partners and other stakeholders to address questions they have about the service...."

Apparently, this has been going on for over a week, which has to be seriously frustrating to many merchants, but a seriously good thing for various PayPal competitors.

Wikileaks is an incredibly useful and important site, but there are many (mainly in the government) who would prefer it go away. It's somewhat upsetting to find out that PayPal has (for the second time) frozen all of WikiLeaks' assets. Apparently, the last time this happened it took nearly six months to resolve. That seems problematic:

Paypal has as of 23rd of January 2010 frozen WikiLeaks assets. This is the second time that this happens. The last time we struggled for more than half a year to resolve this issue. By working with the respected and recognized German foundation Wau Holland Stiftung we tried to avoid this from happening again -- apparently without avail.

Update: Wikileaks has now removed this message from its website, so it appears that things have been resolved. I'm a bit confused, however, as to why Wikileaks continues to use PayPal given this issue.

Gas prices have gone down quite a bit since highs last summer, but it still shouldn't take long for anyone to realize that charging someone $81.4 billion (with a b) to fill your gas tank is a mistake. Yet, that's what happened to Juan Zamora when he put what he thought was $26 worth of gas into his car using a PayPal debit card. And then the best part: PayPal customer service people weren't ready to believe him, arguing with him for at least 10 minutes, before realizing that, perhaps, there was a mistake on PayPal's part.

You may recall earlier this year that eBay experimented with requiring customers to use eBay-owned PayPal for payments on eBay auctions down in Australia. However, public backlash, combined with government threats convinced eBay to hold off for the time being. However, folks over at Slashdot are noting that eBay has now changed its terms of service in the US to push more people towards using PayPal. Specifically it's no longer allowing checks or money orders for payments on most items, saying that electronic payments, merchant accounts or direct payment for in-person exchanges are the only options. However, as the Slashdot post notes, in the electronic payment space, eBay then blatantly says it will not allow Google or Amazon's payment programs to operate on eBay because they compete with eBay.

While eBay may be allowed to do this, it definitely seems like a good way to shoot itself in the foot. If customers don't want to use PayPal, they're simply going to bypass eBay entirely, and use an alternative. That not only cuts eBay out of the transaction, but also the listing fee. eBay tries to position this as being about making the experience better for both buyers and sellers, but that's clearly untrue. Instead, it seems like eBay is afraid to compete on the merits with its payment solution, knowing that many, many users are increasingly fed up with PayPal. Yet, rather than fix PayPal, the company's response is to ban the competition.

You may recall that eBay execs were trying to require the use of subsidiary PayPal for payments in Australia -- which resulted in a bunch of protests. That, in turn, resulted in the Australia Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) saying that this probably broke the law. Not surprisingly, eBay has now agreed to indefinitely delay the plans to require PayPal, saying that it would wait for a final ruling from the ACCC. Of course, it still seems like a situation where this would present another opportunity for eBay competitors to try to steal customers away from eBay.

Plenty of other companies have tried to take on PayPal and discovered that it was a lot harder than it looked. Even though there are a lot of folks dissatisfied with PayPal, most attempts to compete with it have fallen flat. Even Google's efforts haven't really made a huge dent. However, could Amazon shake things up a bit? Over the years, it's done a few things to put its toes in the water of personal payment systems, and now some are predicting that it's gearing up to launch a full on PayPal competitor in the next few months. The analyst who wrote that report notes that Amazon isn't "just another" PayPal competitor, suggesting that its knowledge and experience with online retailing will allow it to create something better. It would certainly be an interesting fit with other "web services" that Amazon has been offering lately -- and would even tie further into Amazon's existing knowledge and scalability. That said, for whatever reason, this market has been a tough one to crack, so we should probably wait and see what the specifics are (if any) before determining its likelihood of success or failure.

Slashdot points us to the news that Australian regulators have slapped down eBay's attempt to require users to use PayPal as a payment system, noting:

"Given eBay's position as Australia's leading online marketplace, the notified conduct will substantially reduce competition to supply online payment services to users of online marketplaces more generally. The ACCC acknowledges that having PayPal as the only payment provider has the potential to deliver some benefits to users, such as increased buyer protection insurance in certain circumstances. However, the ACCC believes that consumers are in the best position to decide which payment method is most suitable for them."

eBay's plan to ban all other payment system received a ton of negative publicity when first announced, so perhaps Australia's response isn't all that surprising. However, is it really necessary for the Australian government to step in? The anger from eBay users was quite strong, and you would think that the end result would be eBay users leaving for other online e-commerce options -- and that, alone, should be enough to get eBay to reconsider this decision. eBay shouldn't need to have the Australian government tell it that restricting payment options is a dumb idea. Consumers were already doing so. And, if we go by the ACCC's own words, it supposedly "believes that consumers are in the best position to decide" which e-commerce platform is most suitable as well.

Down in Australia, eBay has apparently decided to require sellers to use eBay-owned PayPal for electronic transactions, blocking out a number of other solution providers in the space. Understandably, this has upset a bunch of eBay customers who, for whatever reason, prefer other payment solutions (often because they've had bad experiences with PayPal). eBay's Australian execs, to their credit, decided to hold a "town hall" meeting to discuss the changed proposal -- and it didn't go particularly well, from the sound of it (thanks to an anonymous reader for sending that in). Apparently, the booing and hissing started early (well, late, because the eBay team opened the doors quite late) and things just spiraled downhill from there. But the key point of ridiculousness was when regional VP Simon Smith explained the reasoning as follows: "We're not allowing people to offer unsafe choices, just like in this democracy you can't go out and buy heroin on the streets." Now, you can understand what he was saying... but, clearly, there's a bit of a difference between using a non-PayPal electronic payments solution and dealing heroin. And, of course, if this were really about "protecting" buyers and sellers, then shouldn't eBay at least offer a path for third party providers to become "certified" as being safe?