Student Buys Google.com Domain For $12
For $12, one man briefly owned Google. Well, he owned its domain name.
In a blog post on his LinkedIn page, Sanmay Ved, a student at Babson University, detailed how he was able to purchase one of the most iconic domain names in the world for just $12.
Ved was playing with Google Domains, the company’s domain registration product, when he found that Google.com was available to purchase for just $12. Like any rational human
being, he added the domain to his cart, clicked “proceed to checkout” and boom. Ved now owned one of the world’s most visible domains.
His credit card was charged and Google.com began showing up in notifications in his Google Webmaster Tools, seeming to confirm his ownership of the domain. This brief moment of triumph was followed by an email from Google Domains that notified Ved of the cancellation of his purchase.
Since Google owns the domain registration service Ved used, it was easily able to transfer ownership back to itself, unlike Microsoft, which wasn’t immediately able to reclaim Hotmail.co.uk when a similar incident occurred in 2003.
A representative for Google was not
immediately available for comment. In his post, Ved says he alerted Google Security about the issue and the company acknowledged the incident.
A search on Google Domains reveals that Google.com is no longer available for purchase, though Google-Idiots.com is available for $12, if that interests you for any particular reason.
Ved is currently an MBA student at Babson College, outside of Boston, but he previously worked for Google from 2007-2012 according to his LinkedIn profile.
Generally, large websites, like Google,
automatically renew their domains to prevent a situation like this from happening. It’s possible that Google didn’t automatically renew its domain, but it seems more likely that a bug in
the system let Ved register the domain.
While Ved wasn’t able to further prank Google, for a glorious moment, he owned the domain for the most popular website on the planet. Godspeed, Sanmay Ved.