Anyone who's tried to buy tickets for a big event knows what a frustrating experience it can be. You join the scrum of people calling the booking line, but it's engaged. You try to book online, but the booking site keeps crashing. And if you're lucky enough to get through, the tickets have often already sold out.

So it's easy to understand why the government is urging industry to take action to give more fans access to tickets for big events. Many of the points in the government's new consultation on tickets are to be welcomed. But it should be wary of cumbersome and bureaucratic solutions that will only create additional difficulties for ticket buyers.

The Department for Culture, Media and Sport rightly recognises that much of the responsibility for improving access falls on the primary market – event organisers and ticket retailers. At present, the only way many fans can get hold of tickets for
big events is by buying them from other fans. And because it is virtually impossible to get a refund from event organisers, selling a spare ticket to another fan on eBay is often the only way you can get your money back. To add insult to injury, if the event organiser catches you, they will cancel the ticket and pocket your cash.

The government is also right to shy away from an outright ban on fans reselling tickets. Like most people, the users of eBay (of which I am UK manager) take for granted that if you pay for something with your own cash, you're free to sell it at the best price you can get. No one would dream of telling you what price to sell an unwanted CD for. If someone has an unwanted ticket, why shouldn't they have the right to sell it at the price someone else is willing to pay, just like anything else?

But proposals to make it harder to transfer tickets, like requiring photo IDs, are misguided. The vast majority of people selling tickets on eBay are just selling spares to other fans. Nine out of 10 people selling tickets on eBay sold five tickets or fewer over the course of a year, while six out of 10 sold just one. Sometimes, they bought too many tickets in the first place. Other times, their team gets knocked out of a tournament and they no longer want to go. But mostly, a last-minute change in their lives prevents them or their friends from going. If implemented, restrictions like photo IDs would make it impossible for fans even to give tickets away. All that will achieve is an enormous hassle for fans.

Nor is it easy to see how restrictions on the resale of tickets for "crown jewels", events of national significance can be made to work. If you drive the market for spare tickets off reputable sites like eBay, you simply push it on to other parts of the internet. And if you drive it off the internet, you force people to deal with street touts who provide no consumer protection, unlike on eBay or some of the other ticket marketplaces.

Street touts have long ignored the law on reselling football tickets. And studies from America show that if street touts are the only ones left selling, prices of secondhand tickets will go up, not down. Bureaucratic restrictions risk handing control of the market to ever-dodgier characters who don't play by the rules and rip consumers off.

Some tournaments, like the ICC Twenty20, have offered fans "authorised" resale windows. But fans are banned from selling their ticket until everything of similar value has sold out. Fans who paid up to 20% more than the ticket's face value thanks to booking fees are forced to resell at face value minus 5%, thereby losing a quarter of their money. And if they can no longer go after the resale window has closed – almost two months before the tournament – they can't resell their ticket at all. It's easy to see how "authorised resale" benefits the promoter, but not how it benefits fans with unwanted tickets.

The key to improving access to events is to make it easier for fans to get hold of tickets in the first place. To do this, the government should force sports bodies and event promoters to stagger ticket sales, thereby avoiding the mad rush when all go on sale at once. They should address the issue of ticket allocations to corporate bigwigs. And they should work
together with ticket marketplaces to protect fans from fraudsters selling tickets that are fake or simply don't exist.

At eBay we want to help the government encourage a legitimate market for spare tickets. But if people have the right to resell spare concert tickets, they should enjoy the same right in respect of major sports and cultural events.