[borkabrak]

This.. seems to resolve every issue I might have otherwise had with the story, including the impulse to yell at Google about it, but the author himself makes a fair case for not doing that.

It turns out that part of the way the internet is declared to work includes reserved TLDs to be used for testing. So the burden of responsibility for avoiding a situation such as the article describes lies on the developer to use one of those reserved TLDs instead of ".dev", which anyone could (and now, has) come to control.