Companies hire MarkMonitor to safeguard their protected marks, which generally involves registering these marks under basically every TLD available. MarkMonitor themselves is an ICANN registrar so companies generally don't need to worry about renewals: MarkMonitor just handles it (how it actually gets billed back likely depends upon the contract).

So unless Google explicitly told MarkMonitor to release the domain, this seems like MarkMonitor dropped the ball.

Despite having it's own generic registrar service, Google uses MarkMonitor for most of it's domains, for reasons people have already outlined.

TIL, thanks!

For at least google.com, they do:

    $ whois google.com
    ...
    Registrar: MarkMonitor Inc.

I read it as that blogspot.in was registered via Mark Monitor and that MM made a big mistake here.