On Wednesday night, a citizen of Argentina procured the ownership of the country’s Google domain for just 540 Argentine Peso which, as per the exchange rate, equivalents to USD 5.81. It has been reported that the domain of the tech giant in Argentina became obtainable after its previous ownership expired the very same day. This resulted in a temporary shutdown of the popular search engine ‘google.com.ar’.
The alleged offender, Nicolas Kuroña, on the day of purchase tweeted, “I want to clarify that I entered http://nic.ar I saw the name of http://google.com.ar available and I legally bought it accordingly!” According to reports by MercoPress, Kuroña’s acquiring of the domain did not influence the international ‘www.google.com.’
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Actions such as this are known as “Cybersquatting,” as informed by the MercoPress, which indicates the act of holding, registering, purchasing, or selling a domain in order to benefit from the legal owner’s name acknowledgment. The expiration dates of domains are publicly obtainable and can simply be acquired through registration sites like nic.ar.
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There is a possibility that Google Argentina just forgot to renew the domain google.com.ar and, during the short lapse, Kuroña saw the opportunity and used it. “It is all legal!!,” Kuroña tweeted. However, just a few minutes after this activity, MarcoPress established that Google Argentina triumphantly regained its domain and soon restored service to users across the country. Furthermore, MercoPress also mentions that either way, the users of Google Argentina fussed about the website being down for about three hours and assumed a crash in the server. But Kuroña’s tweet helped to clear matters later on.
Google has encountered its fair share of disagreements over the past few years as inspection of major tech brands proceeds to ramp up. Recently, they experienced a backlash for partnering with the controversial organization Autism Speaks on a project to “cure” autism.
Source: News Week
Image Source: Interesting Engineering
