Google loses blogspot.in domain breaking hundreds of thousands of links

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Google seems to have lost ownership of its blogspot.in domain. The domain is part of Google-owned Blogger, a blog-publishing service, that the company acquired in 2003.

On Blogger, country-specific domains are not different blog addresses, but a domain redirect based on the country where you’re currently located. When searched within India, Blogger points to username.blogspot.in as opposed to username.blogspot.com. A lot of users in India then also end up sharing .in permalinks all over the Web.

From a WHOIS lookup, it seems that the blogspot.in domain has been picked up by a domain service provider.

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

In February 2013, Blogger introduced multiple country-specific URLs. For example, username.blogspot.com will automatically redirect to username.blogspot.in in India and username.blogspot.com.au in Australia. At the time, Google explained the intent that if the company receives a request to remove content that violates local law, that content may no longer be available to readers on local domains where those laws apply.

Blogger doesn’t seem to be a focus product for Google for a while, however, this mess would hurt a lot of bloggers and readers with broken links all over. A search result on Google for ‘site:blogspot.in’, for example, yields over 4.5 million results at the time of writing.

Source: (https://www.neowin.net/)