Sanmay Ved: The man who owned ‘Google.com’ for a minute

Oh, and the cost of owning one of the world’s most valuable domains? $12.

Ved, who used to work at Google, entered his billing details and his credit card was charged.

Yes, the impossible event happened when the executive while wandering inside the Google Domains page found out that the “Google.com” domain as available to buy. “I thought it was a few error, but I could actually complete check out”.

“I clicked the add to cart icon beside the domain (which should not appear if the domain is not available for sale)”. A few emails contained sensitive information that should only be known by the owner of the website – by the webmasters of Google.

“Order was successful”, Ved says in a LinkedIn post filled with screenshots documenting his unusual 1am purchase.

Could you imagine being the momentary owner of the “Google.com” domain?

For $12, one man briefly owned Google.

Further messages came through telling Ved about websites powered by the Google Sites service. 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.

Google is not the first tech giant to run into odd domain problems. As a result, hotmail.co.uk was returned to the open market for pickup by anybody who fancied it. Somebody did pick it up, and Microsoft wasn’t able to cancel the order, and take it back automatically.

While Ved’s control over Google.com may have been fleeting, he’s still surprised that his late-night searching led to actually buying the site. Before leaving his job to pursue his MBA, Ved worked for Google for five-and-a-half years and has been a huge fan of the company, which is proved by the picture of the Google Plus logo as his profile picture on Facebook. And just like that, in the blink of an eye, the transaction goes through and the vaunted and highly valuable Google domain is in your possession. Ved reached out to Google about the whole incident, and says they’ve reverted the domain and acknowledge the incident.