This Man Accidentally Bought A Google Domain Argentina For Rp.72 Thousand

Illustration (Pixabay)

JAKARTA - Argentina was forced to lose the Google Domain for its country. Because a resident accidentally bought the Google.com.ar domain address for US $ 5 or the equivalent of Rp.72 thousand.

Launching from NewsWeek, Friday, April 23, this incident occurred when an Argentinian named Nicolás Kuroña accidentally bought a Google domain address. Unexpectedly, the domain address he bought was 540 Argentine pesos, or about 5 US dollars.

Google search site from Argentina (https://t.co/OLUXQ9d146) doesn't work anymore. It seems Google forgot to register the domain and somebody else took it 😱😱Somebody in Google is going to lose his job and they'll spend thousands to buy it. h / t @reinstoss pic.twitter.com/G1TqlGgVh1

- Gonto 🤓 (@mgonto) April 22, 2021

As a result of the change in domain ownership, Google's search engine page for Argentina went down. Many users are unable to access Google Argentina for almost 3 hours.

Not a few netizens blame Nic.ar as a domain name manager in Argentina. Moreover, Kuroña in his personal post said that he bought the domain address legally.

"I want to clarify that I entered http://nic.ar I saw the name http://google.com.ar available and I bought it legally as it should !," wrote Nicolás Kuroña on his personal Twitter account.

This kind of incident is called Cybersquatting which refers to the activity of someone buying and registering a domain address. The owner can also sell the domain address for use as a legitimate website.

In Indonesia alone, there is an Indonesian Internet Domain Name Manager (PANDI) that manages domain names for the country of Indonesia. Domain names owned by Indonesia include (.id), (.co.id), and (.my.id).