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A very interesting thing happened a few days ago in Argentina. Nicolas David Kuroña, a 30-year-old web designer from Buenos Aires, Aires, where he managed to buy the official Argentine domain Google.com.ar using a completely normal procedure. He specifically took advantage of a service outage that had just made the domain available.

He was alerted to the unavailability of the site by messages from friends in chatovation service WhatsApp. When he then entered them into a search engine, he found that they were indeed offline, so he simply bought them. This fun only cost him about 62 CZK. When he discovered that Argentina's Google was indeed down, he visited the Network website Information Center Argentina, which manages domains ending in ".ar". To his surprise, he actually saw that there was an address really available, so of course he bought it. It cost 270 Argentine pesos, which translates to about 62 CZK.

As he told the BBC, he didn't think it would be easy to complete the purchase by entering his initials. But to his surprise, it did. He certainly didn't do it with any malicious intent. In any case, a few minutes after the purchase itself, when he visited the Argentine Google website, he found, like everyone else, only his personal information on it. So he rushed to the social network Twitter, where he wanted to ensure that potential visitors to Google there were informed. In a short time, it had reached 10 shares (the original post has since been deleted). However, Google.com.ar is now working as its Argentine visitors would expect. Unfortunately, without anyone giving Nicolas any explanation as to how this could have happened, or anyone refunding him the money he had paid.ancHe returned.

Update: The article incorrectly stated the conversion to Mexican pesos. Now the conversion is set to the Argentinian one.

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