Within a few weeks of the attack, glimmers of eBay's traditional optimism had returned. Now it was tempered with a new resolve to show that an ever-growing global community could be built on trust. Already, eBay gets 14% of its business from non-U.S. subsidiaries in countries from Germany to Korea. Instead of retrenching abroad, eBay officials vowed to press on with expansion plans that will eventually include China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.
"We've got a vision that we call 'global economic democracy,' " explained Matt Bannick, head of international operations. "Think of someone making baskets in Belize that are ultimately sold in Germany. That person may get just $1.50 a basket, if there are the usual layers of middlemen between him or her and the ultimate buyer in a shop in Hamburg. But what if the seller and buyer could find each other on eBay? Then maybe the basket maker could earn something much closer to the full $40 that the basket is worth."
Such dreams have been on Bannick's mind for more than a decade. In 1989, he was a diplomat for the State Department, and his first posting was to Germany, as the Berlin Wall was coming down. On that assignment, he rejoiced to see the openness and freedom of Western democracy triumph over communism. But even then, he brooded about what could go wrong.
Today, Bannick is one of eBay's great optimists about world harmony. He has run eBay's international business for a year, and on his business trips to Europe, he meets Italian Vespa dealers who track their eBay feedback ratings in just the same way that Barbie-doll collectors in California do. He hears stories about Belgian postcard collectors who make friends with similar hobbyists in Florida, thanks to an introduction on eBay.
"As I spend more time on the job, I realize that different parts of the world are more similar than I thought," Bannick says. "People everywhere like to trade things. They like to get good deals. They like to develop good reputations. This is a global trading community, not just an American phenomenon."
Yet elsewhere at eBay, people know that it will be a hard fight to keep the online-auction site pleasant and safe -- and that the battle isn't completely won yet. In the past three years, eBay has hired its own full-time fraud investigators to root out cases where bogus sellers are cashing buyers' checks without delivering the goods. Fraud rates have dropped, but it still isn't possible to thwart every rogue operator ahead of time.
EBay has also drafted and redrafted an increasingly strict "Offensive Materials" policy. The goal: to stop people from selling Nazi memorabilia, photos of lynchings, or anything that promotes hate, violence, or racial intolerance. But for every outrage that eBay keeps off of the site, a new problem area surfaces every month or two.
Old-timers may find such interventions jarring. When eBay was founded in 1995, it had a thoroughly libertarian bent. "If something was legal for sale," Whitman recalls, "it was legal on eBay." The company's founders and early employees took pride in not limiting what buyers and sellers could do. There was a presumption that the eBay user community would steer the company in the right direction.
That might have been appropriate four years ago, when eBay's user community was tiny. But as eBay's community surpassed the size of New York City, Whitman realized that the company's responsibilities had changed. By the end of 1998, for example, eBay had become a meaningful outpost in the firearms trade, with hundreds of weapons for sale. Buyer scrutiny was minimal. But at a meeting in January 1999, Whitman and eBay board member Howard Schultz (who is also the chairman of Starbucks) led the push to get guns off of the site. "Having them up there just wasn't appropriate," Whitman says. "It didn't fit in with the kind of company we wanted to be."
In the spring of 1999, Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado was racked by more than a dozen deaths as two students opened fire on classmates. None of the firearms involved had come from eBay. But as the implications of that event sunk in, eBay became ever stricter about what it would sell.
Firecrackers and police badges were banned. Tobacco products were declared off-limits, and wine sales were severely restricted. And new software, which would automatically search for sale listings that included keywords associated with "hate commerce," was released. Those listings would then be purged from the site, and a customer-service specialist would review them to see if there was any reason to allow such a listing.
Even after September 11, painfully unwelcome listings popped up on eBay. Within hours after the collapse of the twin towers at the World Trade Center, a few people began offering building shards for sale. It didn't take eBay long to decide that such listings would be banned from the site "out of consideration for the many victims of this tragedy."
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