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Justice Department investigating eBay (first it was MS...)

Date: Fri, 04 Feb 2000 10:46:23 -0500
To: politech@vorlon.mit.edu
Subject: FC: Justice Department investigating eBay (first it was MS...)
From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>

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http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000204/wr/ebay_probe_1.html

Friday February 4 3:26 AM ET

  Justice Dept Examines eBay Practice - WSJ

  NEW YORK (Reuters) - The U.S. Justice Department is examining online 
auctioneer eBay Inc's
  (NasdaqNM:EBAY - news) efforts to limit software probes of its web site 
by other Internet
  companies, often for comparison shopping, the Wall Street Journal reported.

  The probe centers around the burgeoning use of ``shopping bots'' and 
``crawlers'' used to comb the
  Internet to find the lowest price for a product, the Journal reported on 
Friday.

  The software is widely used by comparison-shopping web sites or search 
engines to index content
  available on sites across the web or gather information on about the 
competition, the Journal said.
  The programs can be benign, intrusive or even destructive.

[...]

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