Oops again… Google temporarily loses German website Google.de

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Tuesday, 23 January 2007 22:29

Your IT - Home IT

Early Tuesday morning, German Google users discovered that www.google.de now pointed to German ISP Goneo in a case of domain name theft through lax German domain registration procedures.

Don’t panic, German users – Google.de is back under Google’s control. According to German newspaper ‘Der Spiegel’, the site was ‘temporarily stolen’ as the result of an Internet user falsely claiming the Google.de domain name as their own.

With the processes for approving domain names seemingly automatic, and no protest from the ISP hosting Google.de, the domain name was transferred causing temporary loss to the German version of the world’s best search engine.

Once the German domain registry authorities were notified, the transfer was reversed, only to be immediately stolen again in what looks to have been another fraudulent transfer request.

As soon as this was discovered, the second illegal transfer was also cancelled, with the Google.de domain restored to its original glory.

Ebay.de went through similar domain name registration and confusion, and obviously the German system hasn’t improved much since then, so hopefully a stuff-up which involves one of the largest companies on the web will give German telecommunications and Internet authorities a much needed kick up the backside to ensure this doesn’t happen to other website owners, be they small businesses, enterprise class companies or companies in between.

Google is continuing its research into more answers on how this could have happened to prevent it from happening again in the future.