A man managed to buy the google.com domain name for $12 when it expired

There's news today that a fellow managed to buy the domain "Google.com" after it expired

He saw it on google's own domain sale site which let him buy it and confirmed the sale via two emails, and his card was debited for the money. Google then sent him an email cancelling the order

The question is whether he had a right to hold onto the domain or whether Google had the right to reverse the transaction?

I actually think there's a law now that stops such things happening if you buy a corporate name or logo and try to profit from the fact that it's been accidently released or overlooked.

I had an interesting incident once where I was watching my spreadbet platform and suddenly saw some strange pricing in coffee. It was printing at something like $65 one second then $75 bucks the next. I worked out that they had a feed problem and were pumping two contract months prices into the same month. Me and a colleague sat there and caned it for about £20k until they corrected it. Then came the resulting phone call asking if we would let them off the trades. Legally we were in the right to keep the profits but as I'm not a "scummer" (LIFFE floor term for market abuser) I let them off. One reason being that you never know when you need a favour another time. That decision proved useful to me sometime later

So in the case of Google what would you have done?

  1. Shown Google's cancellation request 2 fingers and slapped a hefty price tag on it?
  2. Put your hands up and say "fair enough, but how about something for my trouble"?
  3. Just handed it over politely?