Google loses ownership of URL blogspot.in; over 4.4 million users affected

Google's blogspot.in is currently inaccessible to many users in India. It seems that Google has forgotten to renew its Blogspot.in domain name, which has caused millions of blogging websites to break. Google bought Blogspot.in domain in 2003.

People who post on the blogging platform are facing issues and not able to gain access to their blogs. This is because Google has lost rights to the URL blogspot.in.

The blogs, however, are visible when users change their existing URLs to blogspot.com, but the major issue is that more than 4.4 million blog users who were using links with Blogspot.in domain on various websites now have broken domain links.

According to Next Web, who ran a WHOIS query, Google no longer owns blogspot.in domain. It is not exactly clear when Google lost control over the domain. Regular blog users with blogspot.in can use their domains as for now.

However, from a WHOIS search, domain name blogspot.in seems to have a new domain service provider. It shows that Domainming.com has now acquired the domain name Blogspot.in.

Domain Name: blogspot.in

Registry Domain ID: DE2DC9C0E8E694C28ADEF0F444F121B45-IN

Registrar URL: www.domainming.com

Updated Date: 2020-06-29T20:00:06Z

Creation Date: 2020-06-24T20:00:05Z

Registry Expiry Date: 2021-06-24T20:00:05Z

Domain Status: inactive

It's surprising Google let the domain name lapse given that renewing the domain name shouldn't cost much. Currently, it's not clear whether Google is already in talks with the current domain owner.

Blogspot.in was part of Google-owned Blogger, which was previously known as Blogspot. As per a report by Neowin, country-specific domains are not different blog addresses but just a redirect based on the country where the blogger is living. When a user searches within India, he will get a domain with username.blogspot.in as against username.blogspot.com.

Country-specific domain names were brought about by Blogger in February 2013, to remove content that would violate local data protection law. This would also allow the company to comply with take-down requests for content hosted on the platform faster and more securely.

However, Google didn't address the issue and didn't notify users about losing its ownership over Blogspot.in, according to the report.

Blogging has become both a trend and a profit-making business. Many active bloggers use their profile as work samples.

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