The Internet is an incredible lubricator and margin compression resulting from immediate and widespread information dissemination is destroying industries on a level never before experienced. Examples include the newspaper deal which has seen classified ad revenue jump to Monster and Craigslist. And in display advertising newspapers are losing business to search locomotive and other online ad locations.

Once pawn shops were a primary place for thieves to receive stolen products except the criminals soon realized auctions are the best way to get the maximum cost for goods. And eBay's auctions are the world's largest meaning they will likely get a thief - or any seller the best price for goods.

Recently a British man went to eBay behind learning $10000 worth of his appliances were missing. He quickly found the exact same products near his home after a short search. He asked the person listing the products if he could see them for measuring purposes and behold they were his!

This reminds us that any tool which can be used for good can also be used for bad and like the Internet continues to lubricate business models eroding margins and helping consumers get better prices it is also a place where criminals will continue to exploit.

And this means that to protect ourselves as a association and reduce the value of stolen items it is likely time to have an independent corporation or agency come up with unique production identifiers for all products and link them to consumers after a purchase. The goal being of course to get notified if one of your possessions is being offered for sale somewhere online - and even offline at pawn shops.

One of the ways global governments can reduce the cost of doing business is to spearhead such an effort. If they do so the following benefits will be realized:

Thankfully we are at a point where GPS and RFID devices can be easily and inexpensively integrated into lots of products making them very hard to steal and resell.

Perhaps a company or group of them will come out with a new set of standards which will let us to seek our belongings more accurately.

I would conceive a couple of the ones who should be involved include Amazon as they sell just about everything. eBay as well as they truly sell just about everything and Google who will obviously want us to use their search engine to track and find all of our products.

So for now Web lubrication is really working to the benefit of the thieves. Hopefully soon we can turn the tables and put the power of technology in the hands of retailers consumers and law enforcement and send more thieves to jail.

Tags: amazon appliances auction gps internet law enforcement retail rfid steal stolen theft thief web