Published on Newswire, July 19 2000

Online auction sites like to boast that they sell everything, from cut-price electrical goods through to collectable baseball cards valued at millions of dollars. When it comes to one category, however, it seems that such promises ring a little hollow for Australian consumers.

While adult products -- magazines, videos, sex toys, even domain names -- represent a substantial percentage of the booming online auction business, you wouldn't know it if you visited ebay.com.au or auctions.yahoo.com.au. Faced with uncertainty over how local laws will treat such transactions, the Australian branches of global auction sites have chosen a simple tactic: block them off.

eBay, the dominant provider in the global online auctions market with an estimated 12 million customers, provides the most striking example. The online auction provider appears to be taking Australia's censorship laws so literally that buyers can't browse adult products which they could legally buy in any shopping mall.

While eBay includes an 'adults only' category among its options, and it boasted more than 40,000 items when Newswire checked it out (under the guise of a US shopper) earlier this week, eBay users registered with an Australian address can't browse any of those items. Instead, they are presented with this stark message: "In conformity with your national law, you may not buy or sell in this category."

Selling pornographic videos is banned in all Australian states, but eBay has also extended the ban to numerous other items which can be legally bought and sold in Australia by adults. Thus, Australian users aren't able to view bid on magazines which they could legally buy in newsagents, adult products which are freely offered by other online services such as AdultShop.com, adult domain names which could be purchased via any domain registration service, or even lingerie which could be sold in any shopping mall.

However, because the blocking is based on the categories items are entered in, it's not particularly consistent. Australians are barred from all items in eBay's 'Adults Only' category, but similar items which are listed in other categories aren't blocked. Adult magazines listed as such are unavailable, but similar material on a CD-ROM listed under the 'Memorabilia:Celebrity' category can be accessed and bidded on by Australian users. Adult domain names listed in the 'Adults Only' category are blocked, but the same domains offered in the general domain area are allowed. A novelty vibrator featuring the cult Sanrio character Hello Kitty can't be viewed in the adult category, but the identical item in a Japanese animation category is freely available.

According to local eBay managing director Allison Deans, the decision to block the adult categories was a straightforward move designed to eliminate possible legal troubles. "Some of the items that would be legal for trade in the US would be illegal to sell in Australia," she told Newswire, noting adult videos as a particular problem area. "We don't have the capacity to block on an item-by-item basis, so we have to do it by category." However, this begs the question: why not just block the specifically illegal categories (such as videos), but leave the legal ones (such as clothing) alone?

In fact, eBay does have a limited capacity for identifying individual products. Presented with the examples of inconsistent categorisation cited above, Deans said that eBay's regular auction monitoring would soon eliminate them. "Those items would be picked up and reclassified," she said. (Not inevitably, it seems; several of the auctions mentioned above reached their conclusion without visible intervention by eBay staff.)

While online censorship laws in Australia require R-rated material to be protected by a password system, this isn't a problem for eBay, as it already has one in place. People who want to browse the adult categories have to log in with their user IDs, and under-18s are barred from registering in the first place. As an added protection, eBay demands that users provide credit card details to confirm their age. Yet even when such mechanisms are implemented, the Australian operation won't allow buyers in.

eBay is not alone in its approach, even if it has taken it to extremes. Yahoo, the other major auction provider in Australia plugged into a global database, also recognises the problem. The Australian interface to the Yahoo auctions site doesn't offer direct access to the adult category available on the parent US site. However, if users carry out an appropriate search, such items will be displayed and can be bid on. Like eBay, Yahoo restricts signup to over-18s, and demands credit card details for verification.

And if there was a problem with adult videos being sold? "As per our terms of service, users may not sell illegal items, and if they're brought to our attention, we'll remove them from the service," Yahoo Australia PR manager Anna Featherstone said. Featherstone declined to comment on the differences between Yahoo and eBay's approaches.

In an increasingly regulated online world, caution in the adult domain may be understandable. eBay's global success, and its local connections with the Packer-controlled ecorp, would make it a prime target for criticism if it became a major conduit for porn in Australia (notwithstanding the success of other adult-oriented products from elsewhere in the Packer stable, such as ACP Extra's Picture and People magazines). However, in the cut-throat atmosphere of the e-auctions scene, it seems surprising that eBay and Yahoo have gone to so much trouble to restrict their potential business. This is particularly the case when a slightly more balanced solution -- blocking below the Adult level in categories with potential problems -- seems readily available.

Perhaps paranoia is the explanation. To date, the Australian Broadcasting Authority, which administers online censorship, has shown little interest in attacking prominent commercial sites for adult content. Are the auction providers worried that they might be the first?