[LINK] ACCC squibs action over on-line buying cartels

[stewart carter]

David,

the articles and excerpts you've posted from various sources serve only to 
reinforce my point that there has been no indication that the ACCC will 
take a different attitude to the US Federal Trade Commission over emerging 
on-line B2B buying cartels like corProcure, Cyberlynx etc.

These cartels appear, prima-facie, to be anti-competitive, and to allow 
large companies to collude in squeezing better prices from their smaller 
suppliers. But like the FTC, the ACCC is sitting on its hands and doing 
nothing, as the BRW article confirms.

Likewise the articles fail to substantiate your original claims that 
Cyberlynx and corprocure are 'unique in the world'.

Sure, CommerceOne is a market-maker, and in that sense a neutral entity, 
but its marketsite.net, like the sites operated by cyberlynx and 
corprocure, spans across various industries.

As horizontal markets, they are different from the industry-specific or 
vertical on-line exchanges such as Covisint in the US auto industry, or 
this weeks ausmarkets.com in the Australian banking industry.

But they raise the same public policy issue, and the same concerns for 
smaller-businesses in particular: namely that big businesses are ganging up 
to screw them by forcing them to trade through proprietary on-line 
marketplaces.