Imagine our ancestors, living in caves and listening to the noises of the night.

“What was that Bruce?” asks the missus.

“Shhh, not so loud Myrtle. There are two huge ugly monsters outside trying to kill each other,” says the bloke. “But there’s nothing we can do about it. Better we stay out of the way and see who wins.”

“Let us pray to Ack, the god of fair play to save us,” suggests Bart.

“We can try,” replies Bruce. “But I fear these behemoths are beyond control.”

Quick, grab the remote and fast-forward a few hundred thousand years. Hit the stop button! What you do see? Groups of people sitting around chatting, enjoying their leisure time? The gentle whirr of electric vehicles, rolling through a moist and fertile landscape under a cool blue sky?

Whoops, you’ve gone too far. Rewind a hundred to 2008. Ah yes, back to the present – the ugly desiccated cacophony.

Today’s monsters are the cybersaurs. Turn on your computer and they leap out at you. There is one that knows everything and one that sells everything. I refer of course to Google and eBay.

There is a battle being fought right now for supremacy in the jungle. The auction monster wants to force us to use its merchant division PayPal, rather than our own banks, so as to cream the market to the max. One of the nastier aspects of PayPal is having to give it the authority to withdraw funds from your bank account.

The modern ‘god’ of fair play is the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission. After receiving many hundreds of complaints, the ACCC has delivered a 39-page ruling saying there are, ‘substantial anti-competitive detriments’ and that these ‘outweigh any public benefit’.

The response from eBay thus far has been to say: “Well that’s just too bad.”

One of the more detailed submissions to the ACCC, arguing against eBay, had the author’s name withheld. But a savvy computer chap from Canberra used a word processing program to look at the invisible meta-data inside the PDF file of the submission as published on the ACCC website.

Lo and behold: it was from Google. Since then, a few faces have reddened, the file has been cleansed and the bag retied; but it’s too late, the cat is out. It seems that Google is building its own on-line payment scheme with a view to getting a cut of the auction action.

These two cybersaurs have gone from nowhere to everywhere in less than ten years. It looks like we, along with our government ‘consumer watchdog’, will just have to sit back and watch them slug it out.

Type in ‘happiness’: Google gets you 103 million hits and eBay has 99 items for sale. Type in ‘money’: Google has 1.22 billion hits and eBay has 1745 things to buy.

That says it all really.