Having seen the video but not the small print I'm hard pressed to see how this really differs from pay pal from a users point of view. The differences appear to be that google is integrating its user accounts, search engine and advertising arm into a payment system as well.

From a user point of view the issue is about whether Paypal (or even Amazon, who pop up in places other than Amazon itself) can keep a high number of merchants using them and thus making their service appealing as a customer account.

Fraud is the biggest worry, Google claims to indemnify you but how exactly is not clear. Especially if you are not in the USA. Pay pal also do and have already been around and established a solid reputation. Both use credit cards as their route to a purchasers account and as far as I know both Visa and Mastercard also indemnify their customers against fraud. Thus with google or paypal you hopefully have double protection, Passport actually explicitly claimed MS would not be responsible for fraud, which meant they could never be treated as serious.

I guess the final issue is trust. People don't trust Microsoft, perhaps they do trust Google. That will be a big help to Google checkout.

And overall I'd prefer diversity, paypal for my payments, google for my notes and email, copernic for my desktop search and MS for my operating system (though I keep toying with Linux)

via. Dave Winer I remember when my idea of Google soured, it was an instant flip, one day I thought these are good people who love the web, when they grow it's good for me. Really, we used to think of Google that way. But then they started acting like Microsoft, stupidly doing things that undermine the rare priviledge they had won. It was hard to argue that losing the trust hurt them or their shareholders, until today, when their intention to be the identity czar of the Internet became apparent. It won't work for the same reason it didn't work for Microsoft, they screwed with our trust too many times.

I also did the flip on Google in a heartbeat and I have to agree with Dave on this, Google forced my opinion to change overnight. Here is the space of events that happened to make me flip and despise Google search results.

I needed at the time to jump across to the Anti-Virus Security vendor Trend Micro to grab a server side update for a clients Anti-Virus solution. My home page was set to http://www.google.com.au and my browser was open at the time idling waiting for my next search to be dropped in. Quite often I would use Google as a shortcut and just type in this case 'trend' into the search window and 'tap' the 'enter' key and get the results I wanted.

On this particular day in Mid November 2005 I performed the above action and saw that the number one result was for (And still to this day) is for the "Trend Micro Official Site" that displays a URL below the title "www.TrendMicro.com.au" when you click on this link it takes you to digitalriver.com web site who is an affiliate reseller of Trend Micro products who pay Google for that sponsored link.

Now if Digital River and Google did not display that the resulting URL as "www.TrendMicro.com.au" and as a link of ANY other kind, even no displayed URL, but displaying "www.TrendMicro.com.au" as the supposed official link and that link does not take you to what is displayed is why I take such a hard stance on the behaviour and tactics of Google and why I say "Google is Evil".

If I use a search engine and even if the monetary gain of sponsored search results are going to be a part of future internet searching which appears to be the case from most search engines including Microsoft, Yahoo, A9 and Google. I do not believe in openly being deceived by Google, Digital River and Trend Micro in condoning such tactics within a search engine. A search engine has a single purpose and a single purpose only and that is to find content that I search for on the internet and display the results accurately of my search query. How they monetize that is up to them, though complete deception on all parties involved here is completely unacceptable to me.

I e-mailed Trend Micro about this and below is the response I received. Note the bottom disclaimer which frankly I do not give a hoot about as deception by a security vendor such as Trend Micros who supply Anti-Virus, Anti-Spam, Malware, Phishing, E-Mail security products that is actively participating itself in deceptive tactics eliminates in my book Trend Micro and Google as reasonable suppliers of services and trustworthiness .

 This also carries weight in the Sony Rootkit debarkle where US security vendors turned a blind eye and it is still a 'hush-hush' attitude from most US based security vendors in regards to what happened here, Symantec for one knew about it and decided that it was acceptable behaviour which it could not be further from the truth. Kudo's to Mark Russinovich  and F-Secure for not giving a damn about the consequences of outing a major corporation SonyBMG, prepared to where the consequences of their actions which of course turned out to support US the end user and SonyBMG paid for it (Well sort of).

Here is a copy and paste of my e-mail to Trend Micro on the 10th of February 2006

10-Feb-2006



Dear Stephen,



Digital River is our online commerce provider and are actively working

with Google on Online Marketing.



Regards,

xxxxxx xxxxx

Director - Consumer Segment

Trend Micro Australia/ New Zealand





-----Original Message-----

From: xxxxxx@xxxx.com [mailto:xxxxxx@xxxx.com] On Behalf Of Stephen XXXXX

Sent: Thursday, February 09, 2006 3:01 PM

To: All of AU Marketing

Subject: Trend Micro Australia and Google results



Hello,



A couple of months ago I bought this to the attention of the corporate marketing
department and would like to know what Trend Micros's position on this is with
regard to Google deliberately giving misleading search results and Digital River
exploiting the Trend Micro domain name.



If you do a search on Google's Australian site http://www.google.com.au and
enter the query 'Trend Micro' and hit submit these are the results that are
displayed.



http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=trend+micro&btnG=Search&meta= />


Trend Micro-Official Site

Award-winning virus protection plus firewall, anti-spyware & much more!

www.TrendMicro.com.au

As you can see from this that the first item is a sponsored search result for
Digital River, though you have no idea it is Digital River until after you have
clicked the link. At first you are mislead by Google that the resulting link is
the official Trend Micro Australian site by the link below the advert stating it
is http://www.trendmicro.com.au which after clicking you can clearly see it is
not this.



I would be extremely curious to say the least on what Trend Micro have to say
about this as I believe that this form of advertising which is sanctioned by
Google to display misleading and flat out deception is a form of security
threat.



--

Regards,



Stephen XXXXX

XXXXXX XXXXXXXXXX



TREND MICRO EMAIL NOTICE

The information contained in this email and any attachments is confidential and
may be subject to copyright or other intellectual property protection. If you
are not the intended recipient, you are not authorized to use or disclose this
information, and we request that you notify us by reply mail or telephone and
delete the original message from your mail system



As far as I am concerned I, Stephen XXXXX was the intended recipient of this
e-mail so I may disclose the content of this message.

So head over to my favorite search engine now http://www.live.com
, http://www.a9.com or
http://www.yahoo.com.

Google must remember that it was the 'early adopters' who virally converted people from using
http://www.altavista.com to using Google,
it may be a little harder these days due to the fact that Google is now a verb
and all, but if Google represents a security risk/threat with the information
displayed within the search results I will continue to advocate that 'Google is
Evil' and a security firm such as Trend Micro is treating its clients with
contempt.

It appears that 22 1/2 hours later that 'Sponsored Search' has been pulled from Googles index....

Did anyone look at this post....

It has dissapeared not 24 hours after I posted this.

I tried to sign up as a merchant on this Google Checkout an found that you cannot change the country field from the United States. Nowhere does Google say that it's for the US only, they just snuck this one in.