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

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.

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.