October 21st, 2008
eBay Bans Ivory Sales Worldwide
By Michael Santo
Editor-in-Chief, RealTechNews
It’s been well over a year since eBay was criticized by International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW). At the time, the IFAW found over 2,000 ivory items for sale on eBay.
On Monday, eBay announced it was banning all ivory sales, worldwide. As Richard Brewer-Hay said in the announcement:
In reviewing this issue, eBay has consulted with a number of organizations, including World Wildlife Fund, International Fund for Animal Welfare, the Humane Society of the United States, and the US Fish and Wildlife Service. The team concluded that we simply can’t ensure that ivory listed for sale on eBay is in compliance with the complex regulations that govern its sale. So, to protect our buyers and sellers, as well as animals in danger of extinction, eBay has decided to institute a global ban on the sale of all types of ivory. This global ban will be effective January 1, 2009.
It should be noted that this comes in the wake of the IFAW’s new report, Killing with Keystrokes: An Investigation of the Illegal Wildlife Trade on the World Wide Web (.PDF), which once again damned eBay.
The new report noted that while last year eBay instituted a policy banning cross-border sales of elephant ivory products that policy has failed:
Yet a year after the announcement of the ban, eBay was found responsible for 83% of all ivory identified by investigators and a full 63% of all trade in this investigation, a significant amount of which shipped internationally.
Upon hearing the news, IFAW said they will strictly monitor eBay to ensure the ban is in place and successful.
Congratulations for doing the right thing, eBay.
LZW says:
I stopped going to ebay when the site turned into a flea market instead of an auction site.
Ebay was a good idea at first, especially with all the old computer junk that could be found on there… It was like a yard sale or huge junk sale but now it’s full of warehouses and retailers trying to dump their overstock merchandise.
They are changing into an overstock dot com copy cat site… It’s all about the e.
I’m sure there’s still some junk on there but the days when you could get an old HP server that once cost someone $30,000 for $50 are over!
October 21st, 2008 at 9:14 pm
EBay Widgets says:
thats great news they should have never sold it in the first place
November 3rd, 2008 at 2:32 pm