It is one of the most telling stories of this year, and an ex-google employee is at the heart of this story. He brought google.com last night, though for a minute, until Google realized that it had messed up.
Sanmay Ved, the buyer of google.com last night, is an ex-google employee who continues looks out to do something new and especially has eagle’s eye over google’s public space, including its domain.
Last night was no different when Ved was trying to do some odd searches for domain registrations, including the one for google.com which he found was available and proceeded to check out. Initially, thinking it was a fluke, he tried it, but he was astonished when the purchase went through, and he got a confirmation email. The scariest part was – getting access to Google Webmaster tools!
Imagine with such kind of data about an enterprise like Google, one can just do anything on Earth. And if it happens to the most famous internet giant, then it can happen with any domain in the world.
Although Google canceled the purchase in a minute, the one minute access gave Ved all that he needed to shoot in the limelight, getting elaborate press coverage.
Google isn’t the first one to get into this saga, Microsoft’s UK domain was into the same mess about 12 years ago when they failed to renew it. But unlike Google, they had to request the buyer to return the domain as the domain had expired and was not due to some bug.
Some say that this incident may have happened due to a bug. But the problem is, had it been a bug, shouldn’t there be any way to deter users from getting access to webmasters? Google was lucky that one of its former employees did it, had it been a hacker, the results would have been drastic and unprecedented.
Ved, who used to work with Google for over five years post his MBA was surprised and overjoyed for being able to own the google.com for a minute. He perhaps will be the only one who could do this feat, at least in this century.
This story reiterates the possibilities and imperfection in the world of internet.
