Last month, in a surprise incident, Google lost access to blogging platform blogspot.in. Visiting the website throws a “blogspot.in’s server IP address could not be found” error. While most of us expected the software giant to fix the issue immediately, it has been a while and the issue still persists.
On the 24th of June, a registrar named domainming.com purchased blogspot.in. A quick WHOIS lookup at the time of writing this article indicated that domainming.com still had access to the domain. Also, the domain is currently inactive.
The domain, however, is up for sale on Sedo – a marketplace for buying and selling domains. The seller has quoted a starting price of $5999 on the website, which roughly translates to Rs. 4.5 lakhs.
However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that one could own the domain by paying just $5999. The price quoted here is merely the starting price and the seller would naturally sell the domain to the highest bidder. When I checked, there are 30 bids for the website. Considering the importance of the website, the quoted prices won’t be anywhere on the cheaper side.
Moreover, the availability of the domain for anyone to purchase opens up blogs hosted on blogspot.in to become redirected to malware or scams. As per reports, all indexed blogspot.in links are hardcoded, so if someone were to buy the domain, they could easily redirect such indexed links to any webpage they want.
It is indeed surprising that Google has not taken any visible efforts to resolve the situation. Also, it remains unclear if Google is unaware of the situation or is being intentionally silent. Chances are, the company is currently in negotiations with domainming.com for the finalized price.
With all that said, do keep in mind that the blogs are not completely inaccessible. If you own or frequently visit a blogspot.in website, you can access them by replacing blogspot.in to blogspot.com in the website’s URL.
