abc.wtf redirects to Bing; did Microsoft just troll Google and Alphabet?

Google’s big restructuring or rather, a name change came as a surprise to one and all. Within a new day, news emerged that the Alphabet was banned in China and now, an interesting domain troll is making people fall about laughing. [caption id=“attachment_277672” align=“aligncenter” width=“640”]  Image: abc.wtf.ipaddress.com[/caption] Look’s like ‘someone’ in Redmond, Washington, which is the home to the tech giant Microsoft has registered the domain abc.wtf. This domain, redirects to Microsoft’s Bing. Reportedly, the IP address associated with it is located at Microsoft Corporation. It is not clear if Microsoft, in fact, is trolling Google in a subtle way or, whether this URL will remain a permanent redirect to the less popular Bing. In a statement submitted by the company itself, Microsoft says that it wasn’t involved in what seems to be an attempt to mock rival Google, but denied to mention why exactly its IPs are showing up in the domain logs. It is unclear whether a Microsoft employee has created the domain without the company’s knowledge. Search Marketing Daily reached out to Jeff Davidoff, CMO at  Donuts, the domain registrar that owns .wtf, to gain some more information. However, he stated that the identity of the registrant is private. The company stated, “Microsoft did not buy this domain and is not involved in the redirect to bing.com”. In addition, the report claims ‘certainty’ that the the registrant for the URL abc.wtf points to an address in New Zealand, a medical building at Suite 3686, 24b Moorefield Road in Johnsonville, Wellington, according to the Whosis Record. If you think it stops here, it only gets better! abc.fail has also bee registered and this domain redirects people to Bing as well.  However, this domain has been registered from an IP location in Starnberg, Germany. According to Hacked, Google’s press department reacted to the news by stating, “We aren’t doing interviews at this time or providing additional commentary.” In late 2013, a similar troll had occurred when Microsoft launched a campaign along with a website called Scroogled, taking a dig at competitor Google. Though this campaign was discontinued when the new CEO Satya Nadella replaced Steve Ballmer at the helm of Microsoft, it was an amusing  **tale** . On sale were items like a baseball-styled cap, coffee mugs, t-shirts and hoodies. Most of these products contained the Google Chrome logo or the very familiar colour scheme of Google’s logo. But eventually, Google **hit back**  at Microsoft with a funny retort over Scroogled ‘wearables’. In response to the fact that Microsoft had taken its smear campaign Scroogled offline with items like tshirts, caps and hoodies, Google merely said that the competition in the wearables scene has really been “heating up”. The response is an apt and funny one, if you think of the “wearables” dig and the fact that Google, at that moment, was riding a wave of popularity with its upcoming Glass.