The Google.com domain name was bought by a guy last year for just $12, and the company just revealed that it paid a huge amount of $12,012.26 to get it back. Sanmay Ved, a Babson College MBA candidate and former Google employee, bought the domain name in September and owned it for about a minute.
Google pays hefty fine for being one minute late
Ved wrote a LinkedIn post about the purchase, saying, “I was learning more about the Google Domains interface, and typed google.com and clicked search domains. To my surprise, Google.com was showing as available!”
Ved said he was hoping that the transaction would not be successful and that he would get an error message, but to his surprise, he was able to complete the purchase, and his credit card was actually charged. The Internet firm noticed the mistake a minute later and cancelled the purchase, but not before offering a reward to Ved.
In a blog post last week, Google mentioned that it initially offered Ved $6006.13 but doubled the amount when it learned that Ved would donate it all to the Art of Living India Foundation. The foundation runs 404 free schools across 18 states in India and provides education to more than 39,200 children residing in slums, tribal areas and rural belts where issues like child labor and poverty are widespread.
Security awards program
In other Google-related news, the Internet firm also updated its security rewards program in the same blog post. Google had researchers from all over the world, including from countries such as Great Britain, Poland, Germany, Romania, Israel, Brazil, the U.S., China, Russia and India. The company started this program in 2010 and has given out $6 million in rewards so far.
In a blog post, Eduardo Vela Nava from Google’s Security team said, “Tomasz Bojarski found 70 bugs on Google in 2015, and was our most prolific researcher of the year. He found a bug in our vulnerability submission form.”
Over 300 people received $2 million in rewards from the Internet firm in 2015.
Google launched its Android VRP program in June, and has paid more than $200,000 to researchers since then. This amount is inclusive of the largest single payment of $37,500 made to an Android security researcher. In December, the company announced that it allotted $1 million dollars specifically for security research related to Google Drive.
