not that many to make it even remotely unfeasible.

Uh, no, more than enough to make it remotely unfeasible. There are tons of variations of the letters in "google" and with all its permutations + all the TLDs, I wouldn't be surprised if there's at least a few million domains. With all the new TLDs as well which are extremely pricey, the costs for this aren't a joke.

And don't forget that there's an endless amount of misspellings and word variations (googleapps.com, ...).

googleapps.com is registerd to google ;) Google isn't just anyone, they aren't going to pay 40$ per year per domain.

Exactly, it's a google domain. And yet, "googleapps.website" is up for grabs right now.

They have thousands of these domain variations. googleusercontent.com? picasa? googleplus? gmail? googlemail? ...

How many could there possible be? 1000? 5000? If google had to spend $50,000/year to never have to worry about this, it would easily be worth it.

Probably considerably more, basically depending on how many unicode variations that would render into graphically similar latin font characters of G,g,O,L,l,E,e and then you have all the permutations.

So that's probably a few 10,000's overall and then you need to register them for every top level domain that Google operates in so, com., de., co.uk. etc...

Overall there are probably a like 100,000's domains that can be registered, under Google.tld_x alone, more if you count in all the other services they have.

It will cost a small fortune for an individual even in bulk registration prices but still it's more than affordable for a company the size of Google.

That said using cyrillic is even better http://www.miсrosoft.com doesn't looks any different than http://www.microsoft.com but it translates to http://www.xn--mirosoft-gch.com/

If there are just 5 alternate ways to represent each letter, that's already over 15000 domains.

If bidi control characters are allowed (not sure if they are), it's even worse.

Then you could have something like *elgoog display as google