"At this time the matter has been fully reviewed, your account will remain suspended. While your account is suspended, you are prohibited from registering under a new account name or using eBay in any way. Please also keep in mind, eBay reserves the right to suspend accounts opened by anyone in the same household of a suspended member, or by any other associates of a suspended member. Although any future emails from you will be read, unless they contain additional information regarding this account suspension, we will be unable to respond."
This struck the reader as being awfully heavy-handed on eBay's part. "So I and my family and 'associates' are barred from eBay for life? My life, or even my family members lives, since, even after I die, they are still my family? The scarlet 'A' hangs over even them for how long? It seems ludicrous -- even murderers and other felons know how long their sentences will be for. If I knew why I was suspended or given a chance to defend myself, it might be different. Keeping the online world safe is a noble cause, but it seems that eBay is going too far."
And since he doesn't know why eBay considers him an associate of the 2004 account, who else could be banned under this imperial rescript? "What constitutes an associate?" the reader wondered. " We have DHCP cable service in this area. So if anyone in my neighborhood gets assigned an IP address eBay associates with me, will eBay close their accounts too? I am not going to be very popular in town. Can I bring things to a friend to sell for me? What about the storefronts -- are they associates? I feel like Kevin Mitnick, like I'm not allowed to touch a computer. But at least he knew when his sentence would be over, and why he was arrested. I haven't been arrested, but the eBay police have me locked up pretty effectively anyway."
Of course, eBay is a private company and has the right to not do business with anyone it decides is a bad guy. If a company treats its customers unfairly, we are told, the marketplace will correct it. But what about when the company is the marketplace, as eBay is for so many online buyers and sellers. Is it fair they can be put in e-commerce jail by association and without any appeal except to their jailers? It would seem to me that to do its job, the open marketplace eBay aspires to be has to be a lot more open than it is.
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