For a company that is usually touted as being ahead of the game when taking its site and offerings global, this story smacks of a lot of shortsightedness, more symptomatic of other U.S. companies attempting to penetrate the Chinese market. If what the two articles below say is true, Google waited until after it was offering its Gmail in beta to the public before tracking down the owners of gmail.cn, rather than seek out the purchase of this domain while Gmail was in the R&D phase. (I am assuming, of course, that Google spent at least eight months researching, developing and branding Gmail before releasing it to limited public use.)

A legal source told Reuters that Google was trying to buy the Internet domain name, held by Beijing-based ISM Technologies.

It resembles Google's internationally known e-mail service, gmail.com, and the colors in which the two logos are written are similar. The ".cn" suffix is commonly used for Chinese domain names.

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At first glance, it’s easy to assume that the Chinese site is just a knock-off of the better-known Google email service. There’s just one problem: ISM claims that its Gmail service was here first. And there’s evidence to back up that claim.

For example, ISM registered the gmail.cn domain name on Aug. 1, 2003, according to whois information provided by the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), which oversees the .cn top-level domain. That registration date predates Google’s April 1, 2004, announcement of its Gmail service by eight months.

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According to Wang, Google approached ISM about its use of the gmail.cn domain and the Gmail name in August 2004, shortly after Google launched its own Gmail service in the US. Those talks didn’t go anywhere, and the two companies are no longer in contact, she said.