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Something new and something old, eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY) the large Internet trading platform competes more each day with Craigslist, who's platform continues to unfold. They are very much the same, and oh so different, too. Craigslist has been resisting becoming eBay in too many ways, yet eBay has gone through the back door to acquiring partial ownership and tracking a competitive threat from the inside.

Being public, eBay must disclose its financial information, which is not true for the private Craigslist. Craigslist is not happy about eBay's ownership position, and for its part eBay has sued Craigslist. It says the board diluted its interest in the popular site by more than 10%, and the two have been trading accusations since.

For most of Craigslist's history there has been pressure to become public or sell itself outright or make the pursuit of profit a higher motive. That has been shunned in favor of slowly building a user friendly and practical Internet information trading platform.

This has to bother eBay and other Internet companies to no end because without shareholders to answer to or a profit motive they keep taking business away from others, or at least diluting the business of companies that have a different directive --- meaning they must live and die their with their bottom lines.

It is anybody's guess what Craiglist would be worth if it had an IPO or pursued a different business strategy but I imagine one scenario would be simply for eBay to acquire the outstanding shares. So far Craigslist has managed to march to it's own drummer resisting the call of Wall Street, pressure from eBay, or the riches promised by private equity.

Sheldon Liber is the CEO of a small private investment company and the principal for design and research at an architecture & planning firm. He writes the columns Chasing Value and Serious Money. Disclosure: I own shares of EBAY.

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