Argentine version of Google falls into “wrong” hands leading to search engine's temporary collapse
22nd Thursday, April 2021 - 08:44 UTC Full article
“It is all legal !!,” Kuroña said
An Argentine internet user claimed realized ownership of the google.com.ar domain had expired Wednesday, April 21 and since it was available, he decided to purchase it for reportedly AR $ 540 (around the US $ 3.85 at the unofficial exchange rate) leading to a temporary shutdown of the search engine ending in “.ar”.
These actions, however, had no impact on the international “www.google.com” version.
It would seem that Google Argentina forgot to renew the site google.com.ar and a user seized the opportunity to register it in his name. The technical term for this type of manoeuvre is called Cybersquatting in English.
Quiero aclarar que entre a https://t.co/XtzUy8WL36 vi el nombre de https://t.co/cK20BdyuxB disponible y lo compre legalmente como corresponde! — Nicolas Kuroña (@Argentop) April 22, 2021
Nicolás David Kuroña said in his Twitter account @Argentop that «I want to clarify that I entered nic.ar I saw the name of google.com.ar available and I legally bought it as appropriate!». Domains listed on nic.ar expire every year and must be renewed, but this time Kuroña was faster. “It is all legal !!,” Kuroña said.
However, minutes later after the manoeuvre, it was confirmed that Google has already recovered the domain.
Users complained about the failure of the website for at least three hours, but when everyone suspected that the server had crashed, as is often the case, Kuroña's posting on Twitter revealed the truth.
Neither Google nor the nic.ar registry has commented on the incident. In fact, the nic.ar site was out of service around 11 pm Wednesday due to the flood of visitors who found out about the case through social media. By that time, Kuroña was no longer the registered owner of “google.com.ar” .
According to the Open Data Córdoba group (which is dedicated to tracking expired Argentine domains) Google's domain had not expired and, in fact, the expiration date was in July. But the group too was unable to explain what had happened or why.
kernel-troutman on April 22nd, 2021 at 16:45 UTC »
I'm not sure how it works with the .com.ar registry, but for most domains (.com, .net, .org etc.) once a domain expires it doesn't immediately go back into circulation. It goes into a deletion process that lasts as much as 60 days (the renewal grace period). During this time the domain wont resolve, but the owner can still renew. So, assuming the .com.ar registry works the same way that would have been a long time where the site would have been down, but Google could have renewed. So not sure how he could have picked it up.
LATourGuide on April 22nd, 2021 at 15:24 UTC »
Long live Nissan.com
Edit: it appears reddit traffic has temporarily shut down the site. For those interested, Mr Nissan owned a computer repair company and refused to sell his company's domain to Nissan Motor Company for the ridiculously low sum they offered. A long legal battle ensued because NMC would rather pay a million dollars to lawyers than offer Mr. Nissan a fair price. Uzi Nissan Died of covid-19 in July of 2020 but the site was unchanged when I checked it this morning. The current state of the legal battle is unclear at this time but I would expect that his heirs would now own rights to it and that Nissan Motor Company will continue to fight to steal the domain.
Edit 2: grammar
usingmybetacapsule on April 22nd, 2021 at 14:34 UTC »
Hunh. At first I thought this guy was lucky for noticing, and that the resolution was Google would give him a “reward.” But doesn’t sound like it.