I've never heard of anything like that being enforced...at all. Ebay's policy claims that they'll give you a warning on the first non-payment. On the second non-payment? You'll get another warning. On the third? You'll be banned. Simple enough.
In other news, how the fuck did the bid get up to 750,000 pounds in the first place? For that to happen, it means that someone else bid 749,999 pounds...
Also, if you look at the pictures on the news page, the monitor in the first picture isn't on the same page as the screenshot later on. If you look at the dollar figure in the first picture, it's quite a bit shorter than 750,000.
Combine this with
this link, a link to the actual auction, and we'll see that, although the article did report the correct actual ending price, it said it was sold to different bidder..which is absolute bullshit. Along with this, a look at the bid history shows us that there weren't any retracted bids of 750,000 pounds.
I'm calling shenanigans on the entire article.