Originally published at: Google drops Argentinian domain name, man buys it for $2, Google takes it back | Boing Boing
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But there is no explanation (in the links) as to how Google “takes it back”.
I suspect the guy may have given it back to them. Or did the registrar void his purchase? Grounds for a legal suit?
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I don’t think Google “takes it back” but NIC goes, “Oh, so sorry. We sold that by accident and it wasn’t really up for grabs”.
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Same thing happened to me! When I bought google.com.arrrr they claimed I pirated it
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Back in 1999, Microsoft let one of their big domain registrations lapse (passport.com), and a Slashdotter/Hotmail user paid the $35 late fee to renew it on their behalf.
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Let’s just say that we won’t be hearing from Nicolas again.
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The registrar likely gave it back. There will also likely be no grounds for a legal suit because of UDRP, and/or any country-specific laws against domain squatting of trademark names.
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Yeah, it’ll always work to the advantage of behemoths, but I can’t say I have a problem with moving beyond the Wild West model of domain name sniping and hostage-taking.
What’s good for the behemoths in this case also works well for the regular moths.
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Agreed, that’s a business model that provides absolutely zero value to society.
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Once upon a time, HostGator screwed up my domain name renewal, and then told me there was nothing they could do when a squatter bought it and used it to run a fishy-looking cell phone repair business for a few years.
Moral of the story: HostGator sucks, and I wonder how much better any other registrar would be.
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That’ll teach you to not be a 900 billion dollar company. /s
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A common model for many businesses these days seems to be a low introductory rate for some service, then jacking up the fee once they have you in their ecosystem; GoDaddy did it to me. I picked up a domain on a whim at a low introductory rate, but never did anything with it. Let it lapse after a year, then returned to see about reacquiring it. The price had jumped from $2.99 to $49.99, for a domain with very little commercial interest. GoDaddy (and other webhosting services) continues to pester me about signing up again.
Registrars are crap. I had an email account hacked and my domain stolen and transferred to a different registrar - I even got a hold of a tech support transcript of the hacker trying to social engineer access to the domain account, but after that my registrar refused to help me get it back, give copies of their communications with the hacker or provide the copies of the Form of Authorization used by the hacker to transfer it out. As far as the registrar was concerned, or ICANN, the transfer was authorized. Same with the receiving registrar. There was no “oopsies” goodness from them like Google got. 
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Oh please let Google be the registrar!
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Blame John Tesh for how Google got it back. 
Stored securely in the google cloud.
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