Google just completed a domain transfer to another company in China. The interesting part is that this domain transfer is for free. The story begins with a recent tweet from the CEO Dash Huang of a Chinese game company called X.D. Network Inc who claims that they obtained the domain name taptap.cn from Google for free.
From the tweet, Mr. Huang expressed his appreciation to Google for freely transferring the domain name taptap.cn to their company. Their company launched some product called taptap which is a game lookup community and they were trying to register the domain name but it turned out the domain was already registered.
Thereafter they checked and found that the domain name was registered under Google since 2010 although there was no clue on what business Google tried to launch with the domain name.
So the company tried to find someone inside Google who had work relationship with them to try their luck to see whether Google could sell the domain name to them. There was no much expectation that the deal would be made soon given Google is a big company which has lots of other businesses. To their surprise, they got the response from Google and Google was willing to transfer the domain name to them and it's free.
On 29 September which is today, the domain transfer was completed. Based on the updated WHOIS information, the domain name is under this Chinese company now.
This domain is not accessible yet. Maybe the team is doing some preparation to set the site up.
It's still unknown what was the plan for Google with this domain name yet. Any guess?