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

[rsedc@urgento.gse.rmit.EDU.AU]

On Fri, Nov 10, 2000 at 11:43:36AM +1100, stewart carter wrote:
> David,
> 
> I don't buy your expertise in trade practices law. The ACCC doesn't have to 
> wait for an application for authorisation before it acts, and so to that 
> extent I don't accept your excuses for the ACCC's inaction. Nor do I think 
> its inaction is any different in its impact from the FTC's decision to do 
> nothing viz Covisint, officially.

I have never claimed to be an expert in trade practices law. This
discussion started when I made an off the cuff comment on some other
message that large B2B hubs in Aus are different from others and wondering
if it was the TPA. I quoted statements from ACCC, I never directly state
what ACCC will do, I said the differences might be because of the possible
differences in approach from ACCC and FTC.

You suggested that there is no difference in impact from FTC and ACCC.
Whereas I suggested that FTC's position is partially known since
instances of conditional official blessing have been established and
there are already some operational multi-corporation B2B hubs to show
the possible acceptable behaviours in US, and that the position for ACCC
on such hubs is still unknown as it has not conditionally blessed nor
opposed the developement of the three largest hubs here. Only time can
tell if any of these hypotheses are valid and we'll just leave it at that.

However, whichever way ACCC will act in future does not change my main
issue on why corProcure and Cyberlynx were developed that way, and does the
'perceived' position of ACCC 'at that time' influnce the outcome.

> Similarly your partial list of large on-line marketplaces is a list of 
> announcements, rather than a list of marketplaces. And a good few of those 
> in your list may look like they were set up by large corporate consortia, 
> but in fact they are the outcome of efforts by vendors, notably Oracle and SAP.

So are the nature of the two Australian hubs in discussion. If none
of the partial list of announcements from US have similar structure to
that from Aus, will the model similar to that in Aus suddenly appear and
overwhelm the earlier models?  Why the two largest hubs in Aus (before the
announcement of AusMarkets) are different from them?  corProcure was also
reported to be 'pulled together' by SAP, so why is it not the same as the
others? The systems from Ariba, CommerceOne, Oracle or SAP do not appear
to have any major influence on the number or type of ownership, industry
type, or on the trading of the owners' core or non-core business.

If the environments in US and Aus are similar, surely by probability
some of those hubs will be similar to the two in Aus. The only counter
example you can raise is that of marketsite.net whose single owner is
not a active buyer or supplier in the hub and thus it is not relevant
nor comparable in scale to those in discussion. If you consider that Coca
Cola buying bottles is the same as Coca Cola buying stationary, we'll just
leave it at that. There is no point cross-debating about differnt things.

> There is good reason to believe that some may never even turn a 
> transaction, not least because some of these marketplaces appear to overlap 
> and undercut each other.

Real transaction happening in future is an unknown and it is dependent on
many factors. Servivability was not my main issue of discussion, unless
you are suggesting that in Aus, B2B hubs on stationary and office supplies
trade are less risky and so local hubs are developed accordingly. (Note:
I am not trivialising stationary and office supplies trade. With AU$8
billion pa projected sales from one hub this could be a heavy traffic
important site.)

--
David Chia,
RMIT University