Google has the gmail.de domain and the Gmail brand in Germany at its disposal

There are quite a lot of cybersquatters in any country. Many of them call themselves domainers, but the point here is not the name, but the essence of their activity - these guys are trying to register beautiful domain names, or domains whose name matches the name of some famous product / service / company. All this is done to make a profit when selling / reselling a domain. For better or worse, we will not judge, but sometimes the work of cybersquatters leads to some incidents. For example, in Germany, Google fought for many years for the gmail.de domain, which belongs to a person, which has nothing to do with the corporation (by the way, gmail.ru also does not belong to Google, but here it seems like no one is fighting).

As far as you can understand, the corporation simply agreed with the cybersquatter, making him an offer that he could not refuse. What exactly was this proposal, unfortunately, is unknown. Whether the domain was purchased (which is most likely) or obtained by virtue of some other agreements is not yet clear. As far as you can understand, even the Gmail trademark in Germany belonged to a private person, and the company was able to agree on the transfer of rights to the company's trademark.

To date, Gmail users in Germany have worked with addresses like user@googlemail.com. Now, probably, the situation will change, and Google will use the resulting domain for appropriate purposes. The company itself has not yet made any comments on this matter, refusing to provide details of the transaction by domain (one of the conditions of the transaction is known - this is non-disclosure of conditions, such a pun). In addition, it is unclear so far what the corporation is going to do with the obtained domain and trademark.

Most likely, gmail.de will become the main address for the Google mail service in Germany. Well, the corresponding trademark of the corporation is also useful here. It is unfortunate that the transaction value was not reported - knowing the amounts that go into effect in such cases, one might think that we are talking about hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of dollars, because it’s not only in the domain that the company received the Gmail trademark.

Via engadget