I don't follow the logic in the article. As I read it the author reasons: "+.com is not legal, therefore it's a mistake to buy it". However, by the very fact that they were able to buy it, they have a good reason to buy it (e.g. someone else could beat them to it). Therefore, buying the domain sounds like an excellent idea to me.
What am I missing?
"Illegal" in a "violates Internet standards" meaning, not "against the law of a government that has jurisdiction over Google"
Why wouldn't they buy it? It's not like they're going to USE it. They're just preventing mischief.
The problem is that + is not an allowed character under IDN rules, and it certainly not allowed in the .com TLD. Google most likely will NOT be able to renews that domain under Verisign .com rules.
How was it registered initially if it is prohibited under Verisign rules?
Looks to me like it was purchased initially in 2006, which was before IDNA2008. It currently expires in 2016, and I would suspect that it would be tough to renew that domain when it comes up for renewal, because + (the plus sign) is not allowed in the .com TLD.
I'm not familiar with domain name rules, but it sounds to me like Google has ~5 years to lobby to get the rules changed, or to make +.com so ubiquitous that refusing renewal would be a worse idea than permitting it.
It was created in December 2006, wouldn't that predate something written in 2008 that prohibits it?
illegal? i hope someone goes to jail for this!!!
Someone didn't get your humor, apparently. For those that didn't catch it, this isn't illegal at all. It's simply not allowed by the 'rules'.
The pithy comment above was a clever poke at using the word 'illegal' to describe something that wasn't illegal at all.
In Chrome, it takes you to a page of Google results, where the first result is yahoo.com :)
All I read in this article was "+ is NOT allowed in the .com TLD".
That's correct, under IDNA2008, the + symbol is not allowed in the .com TLD. So, it's supposed to be deleted at some point.
This begs the question, who did they buy it from? Also, will this show up in DNS soon? Because typing +.com to get to Google Plus would be convenient even if Verisign doesn't like it.