Whitman steps down from eBay

MEG Whitman, one of the original commercial warriors of the online world and a genuine industry legend, is to step down as president and chief executive of auction house eBay at the end of March.

She will be replaced by John Donahoe, currently president of eBay Marketplaces, which accounts for more than 70 per cent of the company’s global revenues.

When Ms Whitman joined eBay in March 1998, the company was a US-only online auction house with just 30 employees and 500,000 registered users – and revenue of $4.7 million. Today, the company has hundreds of millions of users worldwide, more than 15,000 employees and nearly US$7.7 billion in revenue.

“With humor, smarts and unflappable determination, Meg took a small, barely known online auction site and helped it become an integral part of our lives,” eBay founder and chairman Pierre Omidyar said.

In addition, eBay announced that Rajiv Dutta, currently the President of PayPal, has been named Executive Vice President of eBay and will also replace Mr Donahoe as President of eBay Marketplaces. Mr Dutta has also been elected to the eBay board.

Dutta is a 10-year eBay veteran who has previously served as the company’s chief financial officer, and president of Skype, eBay’s communications business. Since July 2006, Mr Dutta has successfully led PayPal to achieve more than US$65 billion in payment volume and three consecutive quarters of accelerating revenue growth.

Scott Thompson, PayPal’s current chief technology officer, will replace Mr Dutta as president of PayPal.

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Google attacks EU over DoubleClick

GOOGLE has gone on the front foot in a bid to have its proposed US$3.1 billion takeover of internet advertising firm DoubleClick approved by the European Union, attacking the EU over its handling of the acquisition.

Reports from Europe say the company is deeply unhappy that members of the European Parliament are trying to have privacy issues around the handling of personal information considered by EU competition regulators.

Google maintains privacy and information handling issues are not the purview of competition regulators, and are an entirely separate issue.

The US regulator, the Federal Trade Commission, approved the deal in December after more than six months of consideration.

At that time, Google chairman and chief executive Eric Schmidt said the FTC ruling sent a clear message that the proposed takeover posed no risk to competition.

The company is clearly miffed that some European parliamentarians, together with privacy advocates, are pushing privacy and information handling issues into the competition deliberations.

Reports from Europe say the privacy advocate contend that the volumes of data collected by Google routinely as part of its business gave the company a competitive advantage, and that privacy and competition could not be separated as issues.

After a European Parliament hearing to consider the impact of the internet on personal privacy issues heard from a series of privacy advocates, Google’s global privacy counsel Peter Fleischer went on the attack, according to wire reports.

“People (are) trying to take a privacy case and shoehorn it into a competition law review ... I can understand that people continue to peddle this theory in Europe after having lost in the United States,” Mr Fleischer said.

In its decision, the FTC said in a written opinion that privacy concerns played no role in its merger review.

At the time, Google’s Mr Schmidt acknowledged the FTC opinion, but added that Google was committed to user privacy.

“For us, privacy does not begin or end with our purchase of DoubleClick,” Mr Schmidt said. “We have been protecting our users' privacy since our inception, and will continue to innovate in how we safeguard their information and maintain their trust.”

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Google starts selling online storage

GOOGLE has started selling additional storage capacity online, a service initially aimed at users with large multimedia storage requirements for photos, music and video.

But as the company pushes its web-based productivity services Docs & Spreadsheets into the small business markets,

Google announced it would charge US$20 (A$23.60) for 6GB of additional storage, US$75 for 25GB, US$250 for 100GB and US$500 for 250GB.

The company said the additional storage could be used across different Google products, from its Gmail email service to its Picasa photo sharing service.

Picasa Web Albums software quality assurance engineer Ryan Aquino said on the official Google blog the additional storage service would soon be extended Docs & Spreadsheets.

“The Picasa team is pleased to tell you that in a few hours we'll be rolling out extra storage that you can purchase to use across several Google products (today, Picasa Web Albums and Gmail; soon, other applications like Google Docs & Spreadsheets),” Mr Aquino wrote on the Google blog.

“That will help make storage really useful, like letting you upload lots of full resolution images to Picasa Web Albums. When you reach the limit of free storage (i.e., 1GB for Picasa Web Albums, 2.8GB for Gmail), consider this your overflow solution,” Mr Aquino wrote.

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