Microsoft have the money, 1.7mil is a rounding error for them. They could've paid the money, solved their problem and nobody would be discussing this on HN now.

Microsoft have the money, 1.7mil is a rounding error for them. They could've paid the money, solved their problem and nobody would be discussing this on HN now. Instead everybody now knows how incompetent/boneheaded Microsoft are around this issue and they'll probably still end up buying the damned thing. More to your point, this domain is now "too generic" because Microsoft made it so. example.com is going to be used by a wide collection of people, "corp.com" really only has this issue because of Microsoft, there's no generic reason why people would use "corp.com" in the same way they use "example.com". Microsoft created this situation and effectively made that domain toxic, surely it's on them to fix it?