Developers for the new Google App Engine were baffled when they discovered PayPal was seemingly being blocked by the system.  Even using third-party re-direction tools such as TinyURL were ineffective at providing a solution.

According to TechCrunch, the Google App Engine refused to integrate with PayPal.  Developers immediately went to the Google forums and began accusing the company of blacklisting the PayPal domain.

Google’s App Engine is the company’s new SDK environment for building and hosting third party web applications.  Developers are able to create web apps quickly and deploy it to their audience through Google at a very low cost.  Plus, they gain access to its broad API library, which can be used for further integration, customization, and expansion of their programs.

Within the next day, Google employee, Marzia Niccolai, responded to the posts, claiming that…

“This is a bug, and we have located the problem.  There was an error in our anti-phising protections that was blocking some specific URL domains from being fetched using the URLFetch service.  This was an oversight on our part, and these specific domain restrictions will be removed in the next few days.”

Now granted that Google and PayPal’s owner, Ebay, have had its arguments in the past, I still find it hard to believe that it would try to force people to use Google Checkout on its web applications by blacklisting PayPal domains, let alone not tell anyone about it.  Does it think that we’d never notice?  It’s not like it’s the most popular method of doing online sales transactions.  The early adopters won’t care.

In any case, within a couple of hours since the reply was made, the bug was fixed and the developers went on their marry way back to creating web apps.  I guess we’ll never know if it made an honest mistake or tried to pull a fast one on us.

By TJ Kirchner

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Entry was posted on Thursday, June 12th, 2008 at 7:16 pm under Google, Technology.

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