It all started with an idea for an EdTech project: a platform for learning languages. We came up with a name, found a .com domain and worked out the branding. We even had a mascot and a slogan.
I've decided to leave the actual names out of this story. The setup was routine: we registered a project email address on gmail.com - something like {domain}@gmail.com - and got to work. I put together a simple welcome page and moved on to other things. I'd done this dozens of times before. This time, though, there was a surprise waiting for me.
A while later, the domain stopped resolving. I assumed it was the usual issue: I needed to verify my email address and had forgotten to do it. That had happened often enough, so I went straight to my inbox.
To my surprise, Google had disabled the email account. Fortunately, there was an appeal option, along with a note that the automated anti-fraud system might have made a mistake. I submitted an appeal, and the account was restored the next day. So far, so good. Now I just had to sort out the domain.
Even after I verified the contact details, the domain still wasn't working. I contacted support and got on with other things. A few days passed. When I came back to check for a reply, I found that the email account had been disabled again - this time for good. The domain was still down, too.
A little digging with the help of AI turned up another project with a trademarked name in the US, just one character different from ours. In short, it looked like we'd been flagged for typosquatting: deliberately registering a domain that resembles someone else's.
And that's how the greatest projects shut down before they even get a chance to launch.
P.S. The domain hadn't actually been blocked. I'd set the wrong nameservers myself, and it had quietly been hijacked without me even noticing. By then, the whole naming saga had made that almost beside the point. I kept the domain for a test environment. To be continued...
