Days after registering Alphabet as the publicly traded company, Google - which now operates as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Alphabet - has bought an unusual domain name - abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz.com. The domain currently doesn't point to anywhere.
According to domain database Whois, the domain was registered on August 2, 1999 and was updated on October 2, 2015. There is no information as to how much the domain was bought for.
The full sequence of letters of the Roman alphabet in the domain name is an obvious reference to Google's new parent - Alphabet. But Google's intention of actively using this long domain name remains unclear.
Google couldn't get to use alphabet.com for its new parent company as the rights to use this domain name is already with BMW, which has a subsidiary company by the name of Alphabet. BMW's Alphabet provides services to companies with vehicle fleets and operates in 18 countries and supplies 530,000 vehicles to corporate customers.
A legal dispute here, however, is unlikely since Google made clear in its announcement in August that in creating a parent company called Alphabet, it was not intending to build products and brands under that name.
The official web address of the new company, Alphabet, which now houses Google is abc.xyz. On October 2, the company completed the move to reorganise as Alphabet.
Google has picked a name that is also a fairly common brand among American businesses. There are currently 103 trademark registrations in the United States that include the word "alphabet" or some close variation, according to a database search of the US Patent and Trademark Office.
It was in August when Google announced a structural overhaul, which is intended to separate the company's core businesses from ventures such as the driverless cars, glucose-monitoring contact lenses and Internet-connected high-altitude balloons.
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