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

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

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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