Google.com.ar was a domain belonging to Google, the 1.5 trillion-dollar tech giant. The domain somehow lapsed. A man bought it, perfectly legally, for $2. Then Google took it back. Here's Nicolas Kurona, the 30-year-old web designer who noticed the site was down, couldn't believe the DNS report, and had $2 to spare…
At 21.52 local time on Wednesday, Nicolas bought Google Argentina's domain name. All of those millions of Google searches, and people coming to www.google.com.ar, were now in theory, coming to him. … I want to make it clear that I never had any bad intentions, I just tried to buy it and the NIC allowed me to," he said. Nicolas's night had, in just a few minutes, turned into a major news story. "When the purchase process was completed and my data appeared, I knew that something was going to happen… I was really anxious," he said.
The obvious hypothesis is that Google forgot to renew the domain, somehow, or some automated renewal process failed and humans failed to notice that it had failed. Google, however, claims it had registered the domain through July, implying something went awry at the registrar's end.
