大象传媒

Craigslist vs eBay: It's war

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 14 May 08, 08:54 GMT

When Jim Buckmaster, Craigslist's incredibly laid-back CEO, dropped into the 大象传媒 earlier this year, we briefly discussed the stake held in the classified listings site by eBay.

Not a problem, was Jim's line, they don't try to influence the way we do business. Which seemed pretty relaxed of eBay, since shows no sign of wanting to maximise profits or indeed of worrying at all about shareholder value.

Wow, how things have changed. First eBay slapped a lawsuit on Craigslist, accusing its executives of actions that "unfairly diluted eBay's economic interest by more than 10%", and excluding eBay representatives from company meetings. Now with its own lawsuit, charging eBay with this extraordinary :

"Unlawful and unfair competition, misappropriation of proprietary information, deceptive passing-off, business interference, false advertising, phishing attacks, free-riding, trademark infringement, trademark dilution, and breaches of fiduciary duty."

Phew - at least they left out grand theft auto and jaywalking.

The real cause of the conflict is eBay's decision to start the vigorous promotion of something called . It's a classified ads site now operating in many countries, including the US. So eBay has parked its tanks on the lawn of a company in which it has a major shareholding.

What's more, the lawsuit alleges that eBay chose as the director to sit on Craigslist's board an executive who was involved in Kijiji, and tried to exploit its access to confidential information about the company in its promotion of Kijiji.

Whatever the truth behind this unsavoury corporate battle - and you can be sure eBay will have a very different version of events - one thing is clear. There are two contrasting cultures in Silicon Valley - the laid-back, "let's try this and see if it works, but hey, dude, we're having fun" spirit of Craigslist, and the serious, shareholder-value driven ethos of the likes of eBay and just about everyone else.

Putting the two together was always bound to lead to an explosion at some stage.