Now the dust has settled on ebay's announcement of ticket sales being withdrawn - the truth emerges:
LONDON (Reuters) - Internet auction site eBay ended a sale of free Live 8 tickets on Tuesday after Bob Geldof, the organizer of the awareness-raising concerts, labeled the site an "electronic pimp" and urged people to swamp it.
Tickets to the star-studded London show, which aims to pressure world leaders into fighting poverty in Africa, were given away to the winners of a text lottery. But they immediately started appearing on eBay for hundreds of pounds.
Geldof criticized the site and urged people to swamp it with bogus offers of tickets or massively inflated bids.
"What I would ask you to do tonight is to get on eBay and mess up the system," he told Sky News.
"Everyone should go on and pretend they have got tickets for Live 8 ... otherwise go on and bid ridiculous amounts of money for the tickets already on the site," said the feisty Irish rocker.
His appeal did not go unheeded. Within minutes bids which had been running in the hundreds of pounds surged to 10 million pounds.
eBay, which earlier on Tuesday rejected Geldof's call to end the sale saying there was nothing illegal about it, capitulated.
"eBay has decided to not allow the resale of Live 8 tickets on the site," a spokesman told Reuters.
"We have listened to eBay's community of users and the message has been clear -- that they do not want the tickets to be sold on the site. Once we are made aware of any Live 8 tickets being resold they will be taken down," he added.
Is this not typical ebay "doublespeak" They try to "pretend" they respond to public opinion, when in reality they couldn't care a !@*&!
I am not wholly in agreement with Sir Geldorf's views, but he has clearly demonstrated how you get ebay to respond to legitimate criticism - frighten it!
The lesson will not be lost on others .....
On the radio today (yup I still listen to it!) one of the panel said what he actually asked for was the "world army of hackers to bring this site to its knees" Now I can't find any other comment of like ilk on Google, so presume the panelist misheard him asking everybody to swamp it with bids.
Anybody heard the original speech?
Rant against ebay's morals? You bet - you should have seen their slow response to the Tsunami tragedy - people had really to "put the boot in" to get some sort of response. (In contrast to their rapid & positive reaction to 9/11)