I'm sad to see this, not b/c I like Google, but because domain names are otherwise a manipulative space, and Google was saving us from that.
Domain service - name registry - is a weird market because it includes cross-subsidizing businesses and the information has value (and people will pay for anonymity to avoid hassle), so buy decisions aren't just price/performance.
Google and Cloudflare can offer it near cost just to build goodwill in their clients (i.e., to save them from predation). Cloudflare promises for renewals to only pass through their costs, which makes sense (they make back their customer acquisition cost on the first purchase).
What's the business model of others like porkbun? By hypothesis, you have to pay more to go without the cross-subsidy. If cost is on par, then you might expect them to be marketing the information or to customers somehow. Perhaps just making it back on anonymity charges?
At a minimum, the company would need to have some real reputational concerns about maintaining good relations with customers. E.g., with porkbun, it's super-cute in an ostensibly-benign jurisdiction, but it's a completely hidden LLC who's privacy concerns seem limited only to WHOIS anonymity. What exactly prevents them (or any successor in interest) from misusing the information they have?
On the internet, associating real people with IP's will always be a key goal of governments and criminals, and yet domain name services are a free-for-all with no underlying privacy guarantees.
I agree Google had trust here and it was nice to have them in the game.
With this infrastructure move especially, it is hard to trust in Google. This can't have been losing money or been that costly. Google why?
Google Domains integrates well with Google Cloud and Google Workspace and other products. Even if it was a loss leader it had to be useful. Tell me how this makes sense.
Surely this was at worse profit neutral, or could have been with a modest price hike, I know I would have continued using them even if their domains were an extra $1/year vs competitors because I trusted them more
I have a conspiracy theory that a lot of domain registration companies like GoDaddy sell the domain name searches to squatters (sometimes themselves). The larger cloud companies don't have so much incentive do this. I always look up domains from the terminal.
That's awful. So someone pays them them, builds a website on their property and they still have you by the balls. I guess you'd only rent to add a redirect over to a new domain.
I've just tried negotiating with a squatter. I'm trying to resurrect a web game with a few thousand players which the original dev neglected. I've rebuilt it on another domain but the community have game data stored in the browser localStorage against the original site. I offered US$200 and was told no - not even a counter offer. I believe they see the domains as lotto tickets - it's in their interests to let a lot of the negotiations fall though so they can win big on a few massive deals.
TBF, there's no way that $200 is profitable for them to deal with the hassle of selling. IME offers only start to get accepted once you are in the range of $2000+
I guess that's yet another problem of the web platform - data locked to individual operators and not available to others even when the user wants it to be.
>The larger cloud companies don't have so much incentive do this. I always look up domains from the terminal.
somebody runs those whois servers. verisign runs .com and they like money just as much as the next guy - i wouldn't expect your lookups of unregistered domains to be unsold no matter how you do them.
I'm really sad that the list of trustworthy registrars is so small. I use Cloudflare for most of my domains and then Google for my .dev domains but now I'm not sure what I'm going to do with my .dev domains, probably keep them on square space. I'd love for CF to get more TLDs on their registrar because I'm very confident that registration isn't something they'd ever kill but there's a told of niche TLDs they don't have yet.
Was worried about this too, but CF released a blog post the other day saying they're aiming for mid-July for .dev and .app support. Going to transfer mine over as soon as they do.
Yet another business Google bails on. Add that to the pile. Gee wonder why Google Cloud is getting smashed by AWS and Azure—maybe because nobody trusts Google to not flake out on that business or key products within it. They need some management changes!
I'm sure some of these will bite the bullet this year.
1. Exposure Notifications (maybe in 2-3 years)
2. Google Arts and Culture <- this one has to be expensive to maintain
3. Keep
4. Scholar
5. Tilt Brush
6. Google Lens
7. Google Groups
8. Google Drawings
I don't think Keep will go away; its one of only 14 of Google's products that they classify as "Workspace/Enterprise"; alongside Gmail, Meet, Chat, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms, Sites, AppsScript, CloudSearch, and Jamboard.
Lol, so this is the reason I could “call” someone on MS Teams, but in my new org on google chat when I choose to “meet” with someone it just pops a link into their DMs. Bizarre.
Interesting. The only button I have in a 1:1 GChat is a video camera with a plus in the middle, and it simply creates a google meet link which I then send to the other person, and then we both join that link and are talking. The MS Teams functionality was more like a call - I hit the button, and I am in a video chat, and the phone is ringing on the other person's end. Maybe it's just my org's config but I don't have an equivalent function in GChat.
I believe so. and while it's not significantly worse, it is worse. thumbnails don't populate as consistently, the menu has me full screening a chat sometimes, it's just not as nice.
> The open source archive of the Tilt Brush code can be found at: https://github.com/googlevr/tilt-brush. Please note that it is not an actively developed product, and no pull requests will be accepted.
The entry requirements for those two lists are not the same, so you can't meaningfully compare the number of items on them.
Killed by Google will add pretty much anything to the list. It doesn't need to be a product. It doesn't really need to be by Google. And it doesn't even need to be killed.
I'm sure there are major methodological issues with what gets added to that list (I myself have seen some very questionable includes), but ultimately it's a trivial objection -- the overarching theme is very clear -- you cannot trust these products and services to exist for more than a year or two.
Also it's a sidebar, but astroturfing by company employees who stand to benefit from increased stock prices on comment boards such as this seems problematic.
The pandemic is ongoing, we've just started calling the disease "endemic" but that doesn't make it less dangerous.
We have however wound down most of the protective measures. Germany has retired the official bluetooth contact tracing app earlier this year. I wouldn't be surprised if Google retires theirs this year or the next.
> The pandemic is ongoing, we've just started calling the disease "endemic" but that doesn't make it less dangerous
It's just as dangerous (well, it's probably not, due to less lethal variants winning over more lethal ones), but that measure is not what makes it no longer a pandemic.
Endemic diseases are defined as diseases with relatively stable case numbers confined to a localized area. This obviously doesn't apply: COVID is not confined to a localized area.
Per the WHO[1] and the CDC[2] COVID is still a pandemic.
> Germany has retired the official bluetooth contact tracing app earlier this year. I wouldn't be surprised if Google retires theirs this year or the next.
Google does not have their own app. Exposure Notifications is the cross-vendor low-level API which apps like Germany's is (...was) using.
Yeah, someone else pointed that out on another comment and I wasn't aware of that before. However it seems like most countries with apps built on this API seem to have given up on public contact tracing and sunset their apps so the API might go away sooner rather than later.
Wow, you just explained the unpleasant tingly feeling I get when people talk about using Google for infra. I now understand that it's my judgement-radar pinging.
I happen to feel the same way about companies that use JIRA... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
If they kill Keep, that will be the catalyst for me to ideologically de-Google my online life. My previous Google-induced losses were largely replacable but Keep is absolutely the final straw.
I already migrated from Keep just for this reason. It's ok to make temporary notes there but for long lasting organisation I prefer a different solution
I'm trying to get familiar with Obsidian using a folder synced to a private GitHub repo. The flow and type of notes are kind of different from Keep though, so I may actually just detach temporary knowledge types like grocery lists or activity reminders back into physical notes again.
It also better follows my note taking habits. It is usually a single sentence I want to be timestamped and searchable (which is also why I wrote https://github.com/wsw70/dly to simplify the quick note taking)
Different poster here, but I focus on a file based notes system (mine is on iCloud but any DropBox, Drive, etc would work fine), right no Obsidian and Ai Writer share a folder of my “notes” in an iCloud folder.
Keep is good for grocery lists and ephemeral data, but too easy to delete a note and no way to backup — well maybe takeout works for backup.
Academic here- Scholar is used quite a bit, but they are competing with some big players, some that offer a lot of full-text Google doesn't. It can be useful to get your research started, but I don't know anyone who has used Scholar from start to finish for a piece of scholarship. So you're probably right on the money.
I'll be inconvenienced if I lose Keep- it's very handy and I use it extensively on a daily basis. But there are plenty of competitors in that market space- some excellent ones are open source.
To be fair, 100 globally scaled products is quite a lot. They try to churn out a lot stuff, and if they don’t achieve enough adoption, they cancel it. It’s a reasonable business decision.
Domains generates guaranteed recurring revenue unlike most of their business ventures. If it's unprofitable they can raise rates or cut costs. This is typical MBA myopia where steady revenue with low growth potential isn't good enough and they'd rather destroy confidence just to brag on their resume about how they saved Google millions.
Exposure Notifications is probably already dead. It's dead in Washington state, which is also where it was originally developed alongside Google. If it's not being used in the state that it was developed in initially, it's doubtfully being used nationwide. Perhaps other parts of the world still use it, but the US no longer gives a rats ass.
Exposure Notifications was a great try by Google and Apple. If it weren't a thing, most big government would develop more privacy invasive contact tracing app. It seems that it wasn't worked well, but still a great try.
The German "Corona Warn App" (CWA) is pretty good from a privacy POV. It works along the same lines as the Google/Apple ones I think (trading tokens over Bluetooth, then publishing a list of "infected" tokens when you submit a positive test result, risk severity being based on how many tokens you match, i.e. how long you were in the same space). The difference is that it isn't tied to any American corporation.
Of course we also had another app called Luca, which tried to do a lot more direct contact tracing and turned out to be extremely insecure and leak user data, so there's that. And of course there were some plausible corruption allegations relating to its public funding.
CWA was using the Exposure Notifications from Apple and Google[0].
Exposure Notifications is not an app, but a framework and a protocol, and CWA was an implementation of it, hooking in the features developed by Apple and Google for iOs and Android
Ah, I was under the impression Google and Apple had created their own separate apps and these third-party apps merely worked on the same principle. It's interesting that the document you linked indicates the interoperability between different countries' apps was down to an EU-wide standard. I guess this meant the apps of different EU countries were compatible but only with each other.
> Perhaps other parts of the world still use it, but the US no longer gives a rats ass.
Agreed, but it's sensible to keep it as an asset should another pandemic arise - and we have quite a number of potential pathogens, from an evasive COVID mutation over a ton of bat-related viruses and currently-frozen Russian permafrost archives to bird flu.
It also forecloses an entire set of DNS related cloud products that could exist in the future like Cloudflare style DNS proxies, AWS like aliases and DNS load balancing.
I guess those products could work just using hosted zones etc but the DevEx is much worse.
That's where my domain comes from. Unless Squarespace suddenly turns them all over to the public or raises the price by 10x, this isn't quite the same as losing all your data in a cancelled product.
I work for a Fortune 100 company. Years ago we were trying to decide what cloud platform to go with. That is the number one reason Google cloud was the first one crossed off the list. No one trusted it to not be closed down tomorrow.
I tried out Fi when right when it came out, was pretty happy with it. fell on hard times, homeless here and there, so i paused my account because I was broke. I was able to unpause/repause my account every 6 months for a couple years and keep my phone number without paying a dime. It's a small thing, but I'm still pretty grateful I was able to keep my phone number for free like that.
It is probably something they already had internally that they figured they could monetize easily. They develop Android and RCS. Operating their own MVNO could very well allow them to simplify some things.
> many customer support issues.
Huh? I've used them for years. Never had issues which were not directly related to T-Mobile's network. There were no issues the few times I interacted with support.
This! Google has a history and present strategy of making reactive moves to please shareholders. I’m shocked the masses trust them with email. When can we go back to decentralized self-hosted?
Lots of places offer that kind of combined service. I have my domains on namecheap and they're constantly trying to sell me bundled email, web hosting, etc. up sells. I did use their email for one domain once and it was perfectly fine and serviceable web-based mail.
> Upon closing, Squarespace, a long- time reseller of Google Workspace, will become the exclusive domains provider for any customer purchasing a domain along with their Workspace subscription from Google directly for a minimum of three years.
I don't think that's happening, but Google's support document has this to say:
> Once regulatory approvals are obtained and the transaction closes, the billing and support services for Google Workspace (including G Suite) subscriptions currently billed by Google Domains will be managed by Squarespace. After close there will be a transition period during which customer and billing information will be migrated over time, subject to limited exceptions, after which your Workspace subscription previously billed by Google Domains will be managed in a Squarespace account and billed by them.
So maaaaybe? I have no idea what these two sentences mean.
Interesting, I first used GCP maybe 7 years ago and really liked it. Two years ago I came back to it for a year and couldn’t put my finger on it, but it seemed quite a bit worse. I wasn’t sure if it was a case of rose tinted glasses.
Like you mentioned, the docs were really shoddy when I needed them. Certain conventions felt half baked compared to AWS, and I don’t even like AWS to begin with. Overall it seemed like the integration of services was much worse than AWS, though. Administration of different services is like visiting separate worlds at times, like the teams might not be on the same page regarding design and technical language. The other possibility is I’m just a little dumb and don’t pick up on the patterns — I’m pretty open to that.
It’s a shame, I wish there was a cloud provider that I actually liked and at one point, that was GCP.
I’m on Azure, it’s still Microsoft. I like a lot of Microsoft stuff these days that plays nice with open source dev tools. Azure doesn’t get in the way of that, but my defaults are not their defaults.
I’m perfectly happy with AKS. Their Postgres product is great (formerly citus). But at the the end of the day, they still want to sell Windows, Exchange, SQL Server, Active Directory, etc. That’s a choice I will probably never make, so it just feels like a mismatch.
> I like a lot of Microsoft stuff these days that plays nice with open source dev tools.
I've spent very little time in the Microsoft ecosystem, but several years ago I was on a contract with a Microsoft shop and I found the MS server-related offerings to be pretty solid (granted, I was not the one paying for them).
The one thing that still shocks me (and maybe it's changed since I last checked, but I'm guessing not) is their pricing model around some offerings that are applied per processor core. Holy moly! Need to blow a lot of cash really fast? Then MS SQL server is for you. Fortunately (/s), it was a government contract, and at that point in the fiscal cycle they were desperate to blow cash so they didn't get less of it the next cycle.
That's always seemed like a perverse incentive to me: the people who do more with less resources get fewer resources the next round. Wouldn't it make more sense to give them more resources and incrementally expand the scope of their duties? They're clearly doing something right. Of course, it's always a balancing game. Perhaps the reason they were so efficient is because they had a limited amount of work to be done, and with more work they may not have performed with the same efficiency.
Perhaps the reasoning behind such a policy is that they're not generally looking for super heroes who might burn themselves out after doing amazing work. They're looking for people who are okay being a little bored, but who will reliably get a specific job done.
I should have been clear. I’ve barely used Azure. I helped a team migrate to it from AWS a while ago, and that went really well for a few reasons but the platform didn’t really grab me. Maybe that’s because I’m just not interested in delving into yet another platform and I should give it more of a chance.
Comparable infrastructure on Azure somehow ended up costing that team around 60% of what their AWS setup cost which was a bit confusing. Their monthly spend went from $900 CAD to about $650. I never had a chance to dig deep on that, but I assume that before there was something clumsy happening with allowing expensive resources to live too long or something. It was a big difference for such a small company though.
I’m not sure if that’s a thing (Azure being cheaper) but it made me think I should do price comparisons there next time I have a budget conscious client who isn’t already partial to another platform.
It appears to be the opposite to me. They appear to be selling the public facing registrar. Their wholesale registry, which appears to hold the TLDs, is Google Registry: https://www.registry.google/
I suspect Google finds it a lot easier to run a registry with a few enterprise clients than to deal with flesh and blood customers owning domains.
Python 2.7 released 14 years ago. About 8.5 years ago (5+ years later), it was announced that Python 2.7 would be supported until 2020. You had over 5 years to prepare for it, and then Google supported it for another 3 years beyond even that generous warning.
Let’s say you had an old large code base in 100,000s of lines of code that just works and has been mostly untouched for years in eol/maintenance. you expect there to be budget or time to rewrite it into python 3 for literally no reason other then “2.7 is deprecated”?
It’s far cheaper, potentially millions cheaper, to just change clouds/providers and find a way to continue on 2.7.
> Let’s say you had an old large code base in 100,000s of lines of code that just works
I've migrated 200k LoC python 2.7 codebases to python 3. It certainly wasn't painless but tools like black, flake8, 2to3 and other stuff helped. It's not impossible and can be executed in 2-4 weeks
> you expect there to be budget or time to rewrite it into python 3 for literally no reason other then “2.7 is deprecated”
2.7 is not just deprecated. It's dead. There's no more updates. It's not "millions cheaper" to not migrate. I posit you'd save a LOT of money from the sheer performance improvements and bug fixes from migrating than anything else. In my own case we saved a few hundred dollars a month from not having to spawn new containers and EC2 instances
It really depends on the codebase and how complex or well written it is, and the. How much it costs/takes to validate and test. A website is going to be much easier and quicker then something in finance where testing and validating is by far the expensive part.
Your code took a month, not everyone’s will.
so again something is just running and working why spend the money and or time when there are potentially far more important things to spend limited resources on?
op even said “yes I’m gonna but I don’t have the time” be
To be clear, I am upgrading from Python 2.7, but while I do it I'm not building in a way that requires any code from Google and will make sure the app is platform agnostic.
It doesn't really matter how many years of notice they gave me, I just haven't had time to do it.
Having any sort of code on python 2.7, means you don't give a rat's ass about security. It also immediately means your code should be assumed to have back doors, vulnerabilities, because python 2.7 almost certainly does!
This is what happens, when no one is maintaining software.
Security is more important that anything, certainly than having time or not to update your code.
You're 100% in the wrong here, and Google is 100% in the right, and I hate Google more than spammers, more than pretty much any other company there is.
They're not wrong here, and it hurts me to support their stance.
Fix your stuff. Stop blaming others. I doesn't matter why you're in the situation you're in, you're wrong to be there. No matter what.
again: not everything sits on the public internet, and by the time someone gets access to the application there are far more serious concerns then python 2 vs 3
this also really highlights the problem with python's 2 vs 3 split: there is a large body of work that will never be updated and will forever run 2 including actual web/publicly facing code. And saying "just upgrade because security" isn't going get much of that code upgraded.
I’ll blame Google for a lot but in this instance I think they’re right. Python 2.7 is EOL, they’d be foolish to keep running it indefinitely on the servers they’re responsible for.
They still offer startups money to switch. Last year they offered my company 8 figures to go from AWS to GCP. Of course I said no because… that’s insane and useless. You have to wonder how many companies they are paying to use their subpar tech.
It would have taken a solid year of work and all of my DevOps resources, for what? The customers won’t know or care. If I wanted to burn $5 million in salary and a year of feature development I’d rather figure out an on-prem solution, because at least someone might want that. The “pay to switch cloud” model doesn’t make sense.
The product isn't being sold, just the domain names. And you can't exactly just delete millions of domain names, it'd be an ICANN contract violation (as well as just being a horrible idea and causing endless amounts of harm to the Internet as a whole).
How many of the products on the Killed by Google list do you think is "products actively used and loved by users"? Like half a dozen on that whole list? How many had you even heard about?
This Domains shutdown definitely qualifies for the short list though, and is the most mystifying shutdown of theirs in like a decade. It was a paid service with clear strategic importance and clearly a ton of happy customers.
Things I am or was actively using (and mostly liked):
Inbox, Domains, Reader, Wave, GChat, (Hangouts, but it doesn't fully count), AdSense mobile app, Google+, goog.gl, Play Music (YouTube Music sucks), Buzz, Labs (particularly in Gmail), Google WiFi app (the home app is worse), Picasa, and I can probably find more.
I have stopped using any new Google product, and am slowly phasing out my reliance on their other products.
Also, a quick skim of that page lists products from at least the 1990s before Google even existed which seems unfair if you are trying to objectively match up counts. Microsoft does have a few more decades on Google.
Microsoft kills products that were dead anyway. Google hypes you up, cuddles you, tells you that you're the best and then pushes you off the cliff when you're not looking because you farted in bed the other night.
specifically, how are those audio files bought from the M$ mu$ic store when they pulled the plug on the licensing server for their DRM?
your claim of still running on modern Windows would be impressive if it is actually true, but saying to use a completely different OS is not something the vast majority of people not typically reading HN are going to do.
I mean, I'm still running Paint Shop Pro 5 and Winamp on Windows 11 like I'm still in the late 90s.
Windows and Microsoft are the legendary backwards compatibility outlier in the software industry where essentially everyone else moves fast and breaks shit.
Why dafuq would I care about a bug related to a streaming service I've never even heard of when all I do is play locally stored music files?
Incidentally, I still have not come across a suitable replacement for Winamp all these years later. They all have crappy UIs or bring features that I do not want and get in my way.
Fair enough. If you're only playing local files that were obtained from a trustworthy source then you wouldn't be affected.
With a complete RCE like that though, I would definitely not advise playing music downloaded from peer-to-peer networks. While I'm not familiar with the exact requirements to exploit the vulnerability, I would err on the side of caution and assume that music files can be crafted that contain malicious metadata which can achieve similar results without actually being connected to the streaming service.
The details are all right there: It's a vulnerability with the in_mp3.dll plugin (it's the decoder for playing MP3s), specifically with insufficient checks against malformed name and artist tags (probably ID3 tags?).
It's fixed in Winamp v5.52 and above, and the version I use is v5.531 so I'm not affected as it turns out.
I'm sure there are other bugs that I'm affected by, but again: Not really concerned about it.
Yeah, to clarify, the part I wasn't sure about is if it was required to somehow integrate your local Winamp installation with the streaming service, or if it could be exploited simply by playing a downloaded music file. It sounds like it could indeed be exploited without being connected to the service.
At least until Clippy dies, at which point some people will miss loving him, and probably a few more will miss hating him. Either way, he will be missed.
(quiet gasp) He's gone? I must have lost track of the time I guess. Anyway, I'm gonna go get some exercise playing a VR game (kneels down and leans head forward uncomfortably to look into a Gameboy Virtual Boy).
Shit, there are computers doing productive work and going strong on MSDOS 6.22 here in Mexico. Released in 1994, that makes it 30 year old software working without issues.
Google software can only DREAM of doing that. Microsoft was doing software while Google people were still even not planned to be born.
Fun trivia of the day: MS-DOS 1 through 7.0 only reached EOL in 2001, and MS-DOS 7.1 and 8 which were shipped with Windows 9x only reached EOL in 2006.
If we consider the start year to be 1981, the year MS-DOS 1 came out, that is twenty years of official, commercial support, if we count 7.1 and 8 that's twenty five years.
If you need software you can count on to still be there a few decades down the line, if not more de facto, count on Microsoft to deliver.
Meme or not, it legitimately was my favorite "social media" site ever. I'd read interesting things on my feed, and share it to a pool with my other friends, who'd also share the interesting things they read, and we'd all be able to discuss it. It was like reddit but just for my group of friends. It was great.
I watched the recent developments to Twitter, Google and Reddit, and loved it all.
One way for self-hosted service to catch up is to wait for the big companies to mess up, and they're messed up very well at this moment.
Google previously changed their account expiration policy, and decided to lock users out of their usernames instead of allowing the old owner to re-active it, making the expiration permanently destructive for the user.
This effectively told their users that use of Google services is not "maintenance-free", you have to constantly engage with Google to keep it alive. And funny enough... maintenance costs is one of the reasons why people choose to abandoned their soft-host services.
(in the voice of David Attenborough) And thus starts the great domain migration of 2023. 10 million fledgling domains begin their search for safety in new homes, far away from the coming impending onslaught of upsells and limited time offer emails. Some will find refuge in Cloudflare, others, not so.
Wait, let me get this straight... you moved from Cloudflare, because you were worried about the scale of their control of the Internet... and you chose to migrate to... Google, the company that definitively actually controls the Internet, via monopoly-scale shares of search, email, web browsing, and has authored nearly every new Internet protocol specification in the last ten years to subtly make their ads harder to escape?
The protocols Google is redefining to be user hostile are a layer below even infrastructure. The very nature of HTTP and DNS are being rewritten to serve Google's business interests.
Hostile to what? Enterprise middleware that wants to snoop on their users (sure, fair) so they demand entire standards to allow for said snooping? Enterprise users are a small minority of end users.
I guess DNS over https can be antiuser (even for normal consumers) in the sense that it makes it harder to block ads at the dns level but quic?
DoH is now being used by malware to covertly communicate with C&C servers, blending in with all the other encrypted traffic routed through Google DNS. QUIC is quite similar in that the goal is to mandate encryption and obscure traffic and content from security devices. The only supposed benefit to consumers is for websites which need to load an excessive amount of ad content and scripts, again, doubling down on their core competencies at the expense of everyone else. HTTP/1 is more than serviceable for any website that isn't, at minimum, shoving ten times more ad content than actual content.
Honestly, I think that's a core misconception Google has managed to sell people on: That enterprise middleware is somehow bad and malicious, as opposed to the ad company that distributes malware as a primary revenue stream which tells you that the middleware that catches it is bad.
If network traffic is on my home network, I have a right to inspect it. If network traffic is on my work's network, my work certainly has a right to inspect it. To be blunt, with some regulatory supervision assumed, if you're using an ISP's network, they absolutely have the right to manage their network. Why in the actual heck did anyone buy Google's narrative that somehow enabling them to convert the Internet into an end-to-end encrypted ad delivery and spyware platform was a good idea?
The marketing acumen to pull that off, now that's legendary.
> If network traffic is on my home network, I have a right to inspect it. If network traffic is on my work's network, my work certainly has a right to inspect it. To be blunt, with some regulatory supervision assumed, if you're using an ISP's network, they absolutely have the right to manage their network. Why in the actual heck did anyone buy Google's narrative that somehow enabling them to convert the Internet into an end-to-end encrypted ad delivery and spyware platform was a good idea?
Because there are quite the number of countries that run massive nation-scale censorship and surveillance campaigns. Google going all-in on encryption of everything, LetsEncrypt being founded - all of that is a direct response to the actions of the US government wiretapping everything including Google's internal datacenter communications and countries like China, Russia and Iran running massive disruption campaigns.
And that doesn't even touch private entities messing with the Internet traffic of their customers - most notably ISPs not just delivering wrong answers on non-existent domains on their own DNS servers to serve ads instead of NXDOMAINs, but going as far as to hijack and rewrite all DNS traffic for that purpose. Or that sniff on DNS requests to sell that data to advertisers (or to the NSA).
And to make it worse, the various "middleboxes" along the Internet placed there by employers forced to comply with dumbass laws, by ISPs doing above-mentioned DPI and manipulation, or by governments of all kind have led to an ossification of Internet protocols because even trivial stuff could lead to issues (remember DCC SEND STARTKEYLOGGER 0 0 0?).
Yes, it is a good thing that Google leads the way in making encryption ubiquitous. Fuck governments, fuck ISPs, fuck everyone who thinks they have a right to intercept, snoop on, track or analyze my communication.
PS: If an employer (or you) wish to inspect traffic, there are many solutions - the most obvious being a private CA root cert to be installed on the client.
Your basic premise here is that the encryption is good because it provides the privacy to do, essentially, ethical crime. That's all well and good, when indeed, we have governments passing bad laws, but the problem is that it both doesn't actually protect your ethical crime effectively, because Google's only doing it so that they can be the sole arbiter of your data, which they happily distribute to governments en masse on request, and enables a massive swath of unethical crime, aka, the large volume of scams and malware that Google directly profits off the distribution of, while being shielded from any liability for.
The whole evil ISPs tampering with your data thing is just "reading too many Jon Brodkin articles on Ars". I used to have an ISP that tampered with web delivery to deliver a piracy notice, and it nearly didn't get noticed at all, because it neither went to the account owner (me), nor the person who did the crime (not me), but went to a different guest at the house (also not me), who thankfully told me about it, leading me to inquire with their office to get an actual copy of their complaint so I could respond with "wasn't me, told that dude not to do stuff on my Wi-Fi". Which is to say, the effect of an ISP doing this is... generally less harmful than Google using protocols to deliver malicious content, and hilariously ineffective even when they employ it.
What scares me a lot more is not just the actively malicious work shipped through Google's various platforms to target society's most vulnerable (usually seniors), but the sheer amount of money that has been dumped around every journalism outlet, activist org, and lobbyist to sell the narrative you just posted, all to protect a trillionaire corporation that watches your every move, and happily provides that information to all of the organizations you're worried about for free while convincing you it's doing you a favor.
In short, screw governments, but screw Google making it hard for me to filter out the traffic that lets them figure out whose visiting abortion clinics, which they are absolutely handing over to the authorities who ask about it.
That’s the sort of crap you end up with when every network operator asserts their “right” to modify traffic.
Don’t get me wrong I do dns filtering on my home network and block public dns over http endpoints, but there is some balance to be had here imo.
Also I would not attribute https uptake to google only. A slightly less than trillion dollar organization - let’s encrypt - is really imo responsible for making https as ubiquitous as it is.
Let's Encrypt is just the carrot (and to be clear, Google is not just a top sponsor, but two of Let's Encrypt's other top sponsors are organizations themselves sponsored by Google). Let's Encrypt is not Google but absolutely is downstream from that money flow.
Meanwhile Google itself is the stick. Google has used it's policy control over Chrome to effectively mandate using Let's Encrypt, by making using certificates without it a nightmare, and making browser features arbitrarily require HTTPS for no reason other than it pushes more people to do it.
I am not wholly against HTTPS, mind you, I think there's reasonable benefit gains for privacy on balance, but we should definitely be clear that Google and it's subsidiaries and sponsored orgs are responsible for the spread, and the reasons for doing so are not goodwill.
DoH, QUIC, and ECH are where it really begins to go "too far", where we're obliterating norms to ensure nobody can tamper with ad delivery. Things like buying gTLDs and putting them in the HSTS preload list, to roll back to why them selling their registrar business is so unusual.
> by making using certificates without it a nightmare
You can still have "classic" certificates - if exchanging certificates is enough of a nightmare that you can't even do it once a year, it's a clear indicator your tech stack is brittle beyond belief and should be updated anyway. Meanwhile if you're using a modern cloud-based stack the provider (e.g. AWS ACM) does the work for you, and acme.sh makes it a breeze on on-prem/bare-metal stacks as well.
> DoH, QUIC, and ECH are where it really begins to go "too far", where we're obliterating norms to ensure nobody can tamper with ad delivery.
What? Browser extensions still exist and DoH doesn't impact whatever you're putting in /etc/hosts, that one works just fine.
Exchanging certificates once a year is... kinda ridiculous in almost every scenario except the one Google envisions when it dictates the Internet, yes. ACME support is making it into enterprise technology, but it'll probably be another five to seven years until it's common. Literally all businesses just have to suffer bull---- processes to cave to "Google felt like doing this, and Google is a monopoly".
And of course, don't worry, Google is ruining ad blocking browser extensions too, for the 70% of users who use their web browser. (This is one of the reasons defenses for Google's behavior so rarely holds... they are attacking users through so many different avenues at once, the justification only holds if you ignore everything else they're currently doing.)
> Exchanging certificates once a year is... kinda ridiculous in almost every scenario except the one Google envisions when it dictates the Internet, yes.
The thing is, if you're doing it right it should not take longer than 5 minutes. It forces people to actually invest in good infrastructure practices rather than build brittle shit that collapses at the first blow. And most of the "enterprise" stuff you're talking squarely fits into that category.
As said I'm happy for anything that aims to prevent ossification, simply because how often I have heard the lines "why invest into something proper when a thrown-together hack lasts us just the same" or "why replace that old Cisco firewall box if it ain't broken yet".
> The whole evil ISPs tampering with your data thing is just "reading too many Jon Brodkin articles on Ars".
No, it's personal experience. German Telekom did this crap by default until 2019, when they finally relented after criminal charges were filed [1], and they were far from the only one - NXDOMAIN abuse was shockingly common for a long time [2], including court-ordered censorship (e.g. The Pirate Bay, but governments liked to do DNS censorship against Twitter and other services too to squash resistance movements).
> What scares me a lot more is not just the actively malicious work shipped through Google's various platforms to target society's most vulnerable (usually seniors), but the sheer amount of money that has been dumped around every journalism outlet, activist org, and lobbyist to sell the narrative you just posted, all to protect a trillionaire corporation that watches your every move, and happily provides that information to all of the organizations you're worried about for free while convincing you it's doing you a favor.
In the end, you will always be fucked over by someone. At least if you're getting fucked by Google, you're not paying money for the privilege of getting fucked.
> In short, screw governments, but screw Google making it hard for me to filter out the traffic that lets them figure out whose visiting abortion clinics, which they are absolutely handing over to the authorities who ask about it.
Agree with you on that one, dragnet surveillance is plain bad. But the fix for that one is to get rid of DeSantis and his Evangelical ilk one way or the other, these laws have impact far beyond Google. It won't take long until some US state makes it a crime to travel to another US state for obtaining an abortion or for someone to transport a pregnant person to another US state for that purpose, so you'll see women essentially being trapped in these states (particularly those unable to afford their own car). Yes, that may be unconstitutional, but it will take years to reach the Supreme Court in the first place and it isn't guaranteed that the SC will block such outrageous crap.
iirc, custom DNS at CF refers to using your own subdomains as name servers for CF instead of the regular *.ns.cloudflare.com. Basically a form of whitelabelling.
Specifying 3rd party name servers as your domain’s name server was (still is?) not possible with Cloudflare Registrar.
It’s pretty crazy that you can’t setup a custom 3rd party name server. I can’t even transfer my domain from one Cloudflare account to another without transferring my domain to another registrar…
Thank you for this information, I was planning to move my domains.google domains to Cloudflare, but now I think I won't do that. I'll still use Cloudflare, but the inability to use my own NS is a dealbreaker for using Cloudflare as a registrar in my opinion.
Makes sense! That worries me too. I thought it was a new issue with them. Personally I use Porkbun and NameSilo (cheapest .ca domains) and am very happy with both.
I just bought my domain from Google weeks ago. I genuinely considered killedbygoogle.com while making my purchase, and I was like, "Surely domains.google isn't going anywhere, right? I mean, they even have their own TLD!"
Apparently, I was so wrong. We'll have to see if Squarespace goes for any exorbitant price hikes.
There's an old saying in Tennessee—I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee—that says, “Fool me once, shame on...shame on you. Fool me—you can't get fooled again.”
I don't think there is any reason they won't charge the same as they do their own customers, $20 a year, So a 66.6% increase on Google's price. Very annoying as moving registrars is a hassle.
I literally dont understand why they did this. Their product was fine as is so didn't need more features, maintenance burden minimal. Isn't google domains just a UI for their GCP domains product? Will that get shut down? Will all my domains suddenly have a pointless premium on them?
At least we now know that Google really can't commit to anything. What was even the point of restructuring into Alphabet if they're never going to do anything other than ads, search, videos, and email.
I just recently setup a zpaq + insync flow to backup my drive data, I'll setup zpaq +imap for mails. Just recently migrated my mail adress to my own domain (sight Google domains).
This is so disappointing. I never had an issue with Google Domains. It offered free WHOIS protection, easy to buy a domain and set it up. Nothing fancy. No BS fees. Shame
I've been happy with service from Hover.com. It's from "old internet infrastructure company" Tucows and seems incentivized to deliver a good service because it is an infrastructure tool from an infrastructure company.
They offer that now, but back in 2014 when Google Domains launched many registrars offered it with an additional fee (like $1 per mo or some other ridiculous pittance). I admit I don't know the GDPR ramifications of such a thing now.
The comms around this has been weird —- I haven’t been able to find any mention of it from official Google channels. You’d think if they were planning to announce this they’d have a blog post and email to customers ready to go.
I worked for Squarespace 2010-2012 and the focus from management was mainly on keeping customers happy. It's not like it's ad focused and there's a need to extract maximum value from the userbase. It's possible that's changed in the last decade but Anthony (CEO) was really into having a premium product and a quick glance at the about page shows that most of the senior leadership hasn't changed so I don't see why they'd change direction.
going public and focusing on building a "platform" has definitely changed sqsp, although i wouldn't say they don't care about the customer experience anymore.
This comes up all the time when registrars come up...
"I just want a non-scummy registrar that doesn't try and upsell me, has support when I need it, and generally isn't shit."
"Why is this non-shitty registrar $20/yr instead of $10/yr like everyone else! Hell, I can go to Joe's Discount Domain Emporium and get this for _$8_!"
I guess I'd just really like to know, for the people that are looking at it like this... how many domains y'all buying? Because I have to assume it's "lots and lots" or else I don't know how to make sense of any of this.
The $10 difference literally couldn't get me a Big Mac meal these days. Maybe I'm just the super-privileged class to be able to afford an extra 83 cents a month, but I happily pay more for my domains to buy from non-scummy companies.
I pay AWS $13/yr when I could be paying... well, I can't even easily figure out what I'm spending elsewhere.
Godaddy is telling me $0.01 if I register three years up front, and it looks like year two and beyond are $23/yr? But if I bundle this with my other couple domains I get some sort of discount? Also they add the ICAAN fees and stuff after? So something like $16/yr over three years?
Domains.com looks like $10.99/yr once I managed to strip out the upsells.
Namecheap is telling me $6.98/yr with promo code FLASHCOM and I _think_ $13.98/yr after that?
Hover is still playing games but at least it's kind of clear--$14.99/yr up front, $16.99/yr after that.
Name.com is $10.99/yr, $12.99 renewal and they're pushing me to some sort of bundle discounts.
Spaceship is $7.88/yr, and I _think_ $8.80/yr on renewals?
Just trying to figure out the damn pricing on these sites is already stressing me out more than the loss of potentially around $6/yr.
Add to that that AWS isn't really a "registrar", they're a cloud company that lets you register domains. Their support isn't budgeted on the revenue from domain sales, it's budgeted on the $80b in cloud revenue. I've dealt with them before. They're excellent. AWS also has a pretty solid track record of supporting their products long term (SimpleDB is still here) so I have zero concern about waking up tomorrow and finding out that my registrar is shutting down.
My domain is what my entire online identity is tied to (via email). It sits between me and a bunch of (self-hosted) services I rely on. Even without the frustrating pricing and stuff, the $6 is worth it as insurance.
So no, I'm not overpaying. I'm paying a small premium for a product with a better process and better support and me not having to waste valuable brain space thinking about it or staying on top of whatever the hell my pricing is doing this year (though I guess I kinda messed that up getting into this conversation). If it weren't AWS, I'd have no problem paying Gandi $17/yr or Squarespace $20/yr.
Having a premium web hosting and web building service is great. Squarespace makes nice looking pages. But they are offering nothing special for the $20 premium for domain hosting. And really there is nothing to offer. Their DNS management UI is worse than Google's, and Google's is nothing special. I'm already in the process of moving domains - I don't want to be around for the transition.
So disappointing. Google domains is such a clean interface for buying domains, I really thought it was one of the few Google products that would last. They’re really not afraid to burn their customers over there at Google
I have a hacky a solution to update Google Domains Dynamic DNS record but would value a more functional API to update DNS records. Had I known about this before today, I may have migrated my domains to porkbun for this reason alone.
We previously built probably an equally hacky DDNS client using Python, an archive of it is hosted on GitHub under PorkbunDomains. Unfortunately we haven't been able to keep up with dev for it.
I know there's support for our API on the current GitHub hosted version of ddclient, however I haven't had a chance to get it working and a tutorial out, but it's an option.
For no frills dns and dynamic dns update via api, try hurricane electrics dns service: dns.he.net. Not a registrar but free dns hosting. Happy customer for more than a decade now.
This is bullshit... i use Google domains, particularly the easy email redirect. Google domains is a PAID product... for xxxx sake, I already didn't trust google, but this is the nail in their coffin for me.
Same (I also paid for it because of the numerous easy email aliases).
Like, it's a domain name registrar! What was their objective and plan and where did this go wrong? Out of the 2,650+ active registrars, it's the fourth most popular one!
It obviously was never going to be a massive money maker, but even if they had to raise prices, between their easy email aliases and clean interface, even though there were cheaper options, this easily could have been a small but profitable service for them. Also, it kept me in the Google ecosystem (I use Gmail with their email aliases.)
I don't know how this product realistically could have been more successful for what it is, and I don't know why you'd bother killing a service that could pay for itself, especially now that I (and the many individuals and businesses affected by this) don't even trust Google's paid services. There are over 10 million registered domains through Google Domains! That's a ton of paying customers who will be reluctant to pay for anything Google's selling in the future. Doesn't matter how good of a service Google provides if they're just going to kill it.
At this point, you should assume any Google service is purely temporary. If you're relying on any Google product, start migrating now on your own timeline before they give up and make you migrate on their timeline.
Is Google headed down the same path as IBM where the business eventually atrophies into a few select products kept alive by contract inertia rather than market trends?
Honestly? No. Google is headed to become an oil and gas company... one great product that generates so much wealth, yet they're completely unable to find new revenue streams. They'll slowly limp along in their space, for a long time, while the world points to them as an example of the past.
I've been using Google Domains for a few years (previously used Namecheap); but, a few months ago, I took a domain I don't actively use and transferred it to Porkbun after reading so many positive comments on HN about that registrar. I was thinking, "Well, you never know about Google, so I may as well see how it goes, just in case." Have, indeed, been very pleased with Porkbun. The article says it'll be some months before this deal goes through, but...
*Later edit*: Decided to go ahead and transfer the other domains there, too. Done.
I just registered a porkbun account -- I had used google domains because I trust their security.
Re: porkbun: A+ work for allowing multiple yubikeys. If anyone else is looking for a registrar that has their security shit together, they seem promising.
Porkbun is an excellent choice, I love their support! I wish they supported .ca domains (the only reason I'm using NameSilo) but when I asked in the past, they said they have no future plans to.
Just wanted to let you know that we recently onboarded .ca! We're slowly growing out our ccTLD portfolio too so if there are others folks have been waiting on please let us know so we can prioritized.
.it was also in our onboarding queue, it should be live now!
I'd have to check about the EUR and VAT questions, but my guess is because we can only charge in USD currently it would mean any EUR price we showed wouldn't be "true," since banks ex rate may vary/have added fees.
edit: forgot to mention, use code EXODUS to get $1 off three transfers ;)
When you transfer a domain to Porkbun, do any pre-paid years of registration travel across with the domain transfer, or are you starting "from scratch" in that regard?
All registrar domain transfers work the same: you pay for one extra year and then you can transfer. This means if your domain is registered to max years you can't transfer. Or that was my experience anyway.
Nice! So, not only no loss involved, but there's a bonus added? Guess Porkbun's gettin' another happy customer soon. Saw that they also offer a few other services I'd likely use as well, so win/win for them (and me) I suppose.
It's not a bonus, you're paying for that extra year. The way domain transfers work is, they're not free; you pay for a year of renewal as part of them.
No idea. I use them strictly for domain-hosting. I use other services for things like that, mainly to avoid the issues of "too many eggs in one basket" and "jack of all trades, master of none."
Google's enterprise-grade DNS is "Google Cloud DNS" [1]. It's not going anywhere. Google Domains is a consumer-grade product, in the sense that it is lacking most of the features (access control, bulk management) that a large company needs, though it was not lacking in stability / availability. And you could easily hook Google Domains up to Google Workspace to light up email for a small business.
Feels like a good fit for Squarespace - lots of overlap with their target market.
DNS is not registrar services. Comparing Google Domains to Google Cloud DNS is like comparing apples and oranges. Though it's true you'll usually want both if you're working with domains OR DNS.
_Needing_ to interface with a 3rd party for a critical part of any web app or service feels like a step backward for Google's commitment to Cloud.
There's also Google Cloud Domains. It's entirely unclear if that's also being sold off, but the sale would make a bit more sense if it's not. It's insane how bad Google is at communicating things like this.
I had never heard of this service but indeed, it seems to be a registrar builtin to GCP. I suppose this is not going to be killed, and presumably the reason they aren't migrating domains users to it is awkward mapping to GCP projects? It would be great to at least have a button to copy it over for people that do have a GCP project for it...
Edit: it looks like there may indeed be such a button / command. Really strange they wouldn't communicate the option to keep customers on their services!
They're separate services and I thought as a Google Cloud DNS customer buying a domain with Google Domains was just common sense, this is really perplexing. I had seriously thought I should migrate my registrar to Google Domains just to keep things more consistent. Turns out Google doesn't think these products are related at all. And certainly they can be decoupled but it seems like a bizarre product decision.
As you say, I found google domains + google workspace was enough for my needs.
I am shocked they've sold to squarespace -- squarespace seems to have (from looking at their website) no interest, or experience, in just DNS hosting. Their website is all about hosting, I have my own hosting.
I guess they must be planning (or already have, hidden somewhere) a similar service to google domains, but I'm certainly not risking my domains on that assumption.
Squarespace acts as a reseller for Google Workspace (for customers who start out by using their domain for hosting with them and want to add email/etc), so they already had a relationship with Google. It makes sense that they would want to sell domains to their customers, but IDK why they would want to buy all the existing domains that likely are not in the market for their hosting service.
Isn't it like ops 101 to never have your DNS hosted by the same people you registered your domain with (as if you are shut out of the DNS for any reason you will need access to the registrar to quickly migrate to a different provider, while, in the other direction, full registrar access isn't actually ops critical until you need to change your DNS hosting company)?
Is it? Having 2 failure points is worse than 1, if the failure points are in series. It's better to have redundancy. You can have redundant DNS (multiple nameservers), but you can't have a redundant registrar (to my knowledge)
I always chose different DNS because registrars normally suck at DNS, feature-wise.
A few years back, Cloudflare and Amazon did DNS but didn't sell domains or didn't sell your TLD or to your region. And in general, places that were regarded as reasonably good at selling domains didn't have anything in the way of an enterprise grade DNS service. You would go to Namecheap or Porkbun or something and get a reasonable domain they had nothing like the functionality you'd get by putting DNS somewhere better.
It was well established for a long time as a fact you don't mix these roles, it's only recently that decent players started doing both.
Google Cloud includes a service called Google Cloud Domains. They're really screwing up on communication here, because it's totally unclear if that's included in the sale.
Seems slightly more acceptable than killing, but one step better would be having the purchaser maintain the existing product so that users are less impacted by Google's attention deficit disorder.
Does anyone know whether or not this ties in with Google Registry (a.k.a. Charleston Road Registry)? That's the entity that owns GTLDs like .app and .dev. I'm going to guess Google is hanging on to that part of it.
Do you have a source for this? I'm really curious on this for .dev domains, and how it will affect the nicer pricing Google Domains offered against all other registrars for their own internal registry domains
(And you seem really knowledgeable in this space, heh)
So I have a Google Workspace attached to my domain. How will this work when the domain is managed by another company? When I move my domains off Squarespace, how will my Workspace work? I’m confused if they are saying my Workspace services will migrate to Squarespace too?
> Squarespace will also provide billing and support services to Google Workspace customers
I have to admit, I’m at a total loss, this makes zero sense.
I've got a long-grandfathered "free" workspace for a domain that never had Google as the registrar. I don't think there's much concern here -- Squarespace will be (unless they delegate that out) your new registrar and will likely migrate WHOIS and set up the appropriate MX/TXT/... records to keep things working.
Squarespace already acted as a reseller/billing provider for Google Workspace, you could buy it through them if you were using Squarespace hosting.
The support doc is saying that if you bought Google Workspace through the Google Domains frontend, paying with the same method you used to buy domains, Squarespace will take over the billing of it in the future.
If you went directly to Google Workspace, signed up, and then linked your domain manually, with separate billing, then Google Workspace will continue to bill you directly.
Google Workspace has a reseller program. They likely mean that. I believe they already do it; I know Wix does — you can register your domain and with it get a mailbox, drive etc and all of it is managed by google workspace but admin is via wix.
How long until the "don't trust Google to not kill a product" feeling becomes so widespread it begins to hurt them? I don't know any historical precedents...
After being an enthusastic early advocate for Google (Gmail since invite in 2004), I've been slowly migrating away from Google for years.
The turning point for me was when they killed Google Music, which I had been using for a decade, forcing me to move my large catalog of songs elsewhere. I self host via Plex now. Strike 1.
Then they killed the "free domain email", which became freeish (grandfathered)
"google workgroups", which became pay up or we kill it. I spent many hours back and forthing with their email support trying to get admin access to my account to no avail. They claimed I needed to reach out to my domain admin. Uhhh sorry I own it and I'm the only guy thats on it or ever used it. There's no one else but me (I never had an admin, as I was just somehow transitioned during the grandfathering). No luck. I (nervously) let Google auto-kill the account, after quickly migrating everything to Fastmail via IMAP (and hand moving my calendar!). Strike 2.
Then (long story short) my Google Fi and Google Pixel experience was fine, until it suddenly wasn't. No human to complain to. Top of the line Pixel phone died like 14 months from purchase, no recourse. Buy a new phone or else. Strike 3.
The pattern is clear, Google services are fine up until the moment they aren't. At that point you're up a creek, as there are (by design) no humans to complain to.
All that is left now is my domain on Google Domains (well that and a free gmail account which I forward), which I figured was safe-ish (as they can't possibly pull the rug out from underneath domain owners can they?). But secretly been monitoring for signs I need to drop that as well. Looks like the time is now.
So.... any thoughts on whether Squarespace will be an improvement? Or should I start looking for another domain name registrar?
Not to overshadow all your other excellent points, but re: Google Fi, the few times I've had an issue I was able to quickly contact a helpful (if seemingly disempowered - they had to escalate to their manager for any approvals) online agent.
Agree that their service was decent, never had any problems that their automated system couldn't troubleshoot and ultimately fix. Activation process was straightforward. Honestly I do like their services. As I said they're great, until they aren't.
Issue was that my phone was defective, likely a design problem. Battery life problems around 1 year, wouldn't charge. Google fixed first for free under warranty. Problem popped back up around 5 months later and they told me to pound dirt since it was out of warranty. I said it's the same problem, you didn't fix it the first time when it was in warranty. Apparently a lot of people had the problem, likely a design problem related to life of battery/power connector on PCB. End of the day Google refused to acknowledge their problem, and this is on their flagship phone. I had no choice but to buy a new phone... which is ridiculous considering what I paid and only got a year out of it.
I just got to the point where I got tired of being at Google's mercy when something went wrong. This is my digital life, my domain, my calendar, decades of emails. It's too stressful when a corner case occurs and there's no human being in the loop to make things right. I'm willing to pay for service, just not with Google any longer. I figure I'm paying to get a human on the phone, and some accountability.
Google keeps trying to ping my company and get us to switch to their cloud. I say no way in heck I'm going to put mission critical infrastructure and data in their hands.
Since domains can only ever have a max of ten years registration at any given time, sometimes the registry won't allow domain transfers that already have nine years of registration.
Google Music libraries were automatically migrated to YT Music, which honestly is a better product now. They didn't "kill" the functionality and didn't force you to migrate anywhere...
Yeah I refused to be "migrated" (forced) to join YT music, where it was clear that my personal library of songs would be treated as a second class citizen next to the paid promotional content (suggested artists, songs etc) and ads (unless I pay for premium of course).
Felt like bait and switch to me. They forced me to make a decision. I took my ball and went home.
It seems to me it already has. I spent ~ a decade being pretty immersed in the Google ecosystem, and after going through the ringer dozens of times and finally realizing being one of their users will never stop being an unpaid, unrespected beta tester, I gave up on them. Bought an iPhone and moved services from Google where possible.
I remember this[1] article from a few years ago on the subject of Google's shutdowns hurting its brand. It's even funnier to read now with it being written shortly after Stadia's launch. The author and everyone else were pointing out that they have little expectation for the service to be around in a few years. And it turned out we were right!
no one used Google Stadia because the business model and service architecture made no sense for a new service and for a company that has a habit of abandoning project that aren't an immediate runaway success stories.
Google legitimately thought they can enter a brand new market, and treat it like they are already the largest player in it. They duped themselves by honestly believing that "this is not the gaming market, this the the Cloud Gaming market". They did get most of the "cloud gaming" enthusiasts on board. All 200 of them.
They weren't like XBox or Nvidia who just had to go to gaming companies and strike a deal or ask for permission to stream their existing games. They were a new "console", you needed to develop for stadia. They needed to pay millions to incentivize companies to put the effort to port their existing games to stadia. Those companies had no customer for the "stadia console" version of their game other than Google sine no one has a "stadia console" or any way otherwise to play that game.
Those tactics may work for Sony or Nintendo or _maybe_ Microsoft. But not for a nobody in the business that literally has no user-base, no games, no history. They had nothing, and tried to pull a "we're the leaders in this market we can do anything we want and everyone will have no option but to take it"
I wouldn't really say that for any of the new products that people actually wanted to use. Including Google Domains (even if it might not be an effective use of workforce for Alphabet).
I have used Fastmail, and it is good. Currently I'm using my own domain on iCloud+, as I'm already paying Apple for the right to do so. But that's the good thing about owning my own domain...I can take it with me.
Protonmail is very expensive for what it is. I don't care about their privacy (it's email) and I don't need anything but an email service that can support 3+ domains.
It has been like that for a long time, but it seemed like a lot of people thought they wouldn't kill GCP. But this makes sense, they might partition GCP instead of just killing it.
> it seemed like a lot of people thought they wouldn't kill GCP
I'm one of them. Cloud services is a large opportunity Google will be stupid to ignore/give up. I anticipate the service evolving, but I don't see an outright death of Google Cloud.
I'd say it's "besides ads" just like Search is. It's a destination site that also serves ads, instead of serving ads on other people's destination sites. One could imagine a world where Search and Youtube were separate entities, both using Ads for income. Ads itself is more of a marketplace of eyeballs.
For what I know it already does. I know people considering migrating some infrastructure to the cloud and if they're not already aware of Google's reliability I'll tell them.
Another headstone in the google graveyard. This one doesn't make any sense to me, either, unless there are weird regulatory issues they want to avoid since it seemed like a very popular registrar. Or maybe they just didn't want to staff any limited customer support team.
I'm also confused, it's a paid product! If it wasn't making enough money, why didn't they just raise the price? It already wasn't the cheapest name registrar, so I don't think people were selecting it solely based on cost (I went with it because of the free 100 email aliases included, but others liked the clean layout and simplicity compared to some other options.)
I get why they kill free things that don't make them money, but it seems very strange with a paid product, especially when, as others have said, they have GCP, which will presumably require a third party registrar in the future.
It's not a traditional "paid product" where you can reduce cost, increase efficiency and/or take advantage of economy of scale. There are foxed ICANN fees per domain, most registrar add a markup on that, sell ownership data, auction popular expired domains, squat good names, etc. Google Domains (and Cloudflare) main spiel is they sell domains at cost as they make their money else where. It was intentionally a business that was never meant to make money.
It wasn't "the cheapest registrar" because they didn't offer "signup deals", just like cloudflare. Other cheaper registrar offer a signup deal for $1 or $2 a domain (subtext: renews for $24 dollars the next year)
I knew better than to trust Google, and yet... I switched everything to Google Domains because the UI was very clean and the attempted upsells were minimal.
I had moved from GoDaddy to Name.com years prior for similar reasons but Name burned my good will.
Is there a service that replaces Google Domains in simplicity and not pushing add-ons?
I use porkbun.com. Their site is simple. When you click the "Checkout" button you're taken to a confirmation page with a "Continue to Billing" button. There are discreet links you can click to add email/web hosting, but no interstitials to click through.
Google simply has no incentive to serve the customer who uses them for domain management. They make so much money from ads that they're far more concerned about their ad revenue than they are about money from paying customers.
As a GCP customer this actually is really concerning, it makes me wonder if some day they are just going to up and sell BigQuery to Salesforce or something.
I think Google knows that BigQuery is their only successful cloud product. Everything that isn't BQ is more at risk of being left to stagnate until it's discontinued.
Amazon makes so much money of e-commerce yet manage to support their cloud computing business which includes domain management. Their CEO is just incompetent and can’t run a business that has multiple major revenue streams.
Domain registration by itself isn’t a revenue stream if you’re charging base rates (which Google was doing). I think domain registration is to keep you in their cloud ecosystem.
Maybe not in its current form (disregarding the hyperbole).
I'm more surprised that given Google's scale, they couldn't do it in a way that makes them much more money, but perhaps at the expense of ethics/user experience
Now would be a good time for Cloudflare to announce they've (finally) added .app and .dev support.
Nonetheless, Squarespace isn't bad but I found their domain pricing to be overpriced to target the specific market that doesn't really care about domain pricing they just want their domain and Squarespace set up at once. I can't see myself sticking around post the grace period mentioned.
I like Squarespace’s domain hosting. The only problem is indeed that they will be a couple of bucks more than competitors.
That being said, they seem the most stable of the companies in this space that is not otherwise egregiously bad in some way or the other, so I’ve been willing to pay those few bucks more. For the key domains I own it adds up to around $20-$30 more a year which isn’t bad for the greater piece of mind IMO.
I briefly transferred one of my domains from Google Domains to Cloudflare, but at least at that time CF required the domain to use its DNS. While that's generally not an issue with me because I use other CF services, I felt it might limit me too much down the line so I transferred the domain back to Google after the 60-day waiting period. Ah, well.
Yep still the case. Good if you're already using cloudflare and therefore the at cost pricing can wind up saving you a bit, otherwise you would be better served with the likes of porkbun or namecheap. Gandi used to be another before it was sold.
The thing I take biggest offense to is the fact that I hear about this from Bloomberg before Google making any outreach. Also no mention of if Google Cloud Domains is impacted.
It says they’ll only honor existing prices for 12 months after the transaction closes.
Any recommendations on where/how to transfer to get a) similar price, b) mail forwarding, and c) self-service subdomains? (Maybe the last two are standard—I have no idea since I’ve always used Google Domains)
I know. Unfortunately, I don't know of anything better than Gandi, which actually has all the TLDs I need. Every registrar out there just has some subset. Having a single point of payment is a big deal for me; if it costs me 50 euros extra a year to not have to deal with three different UIs, logins, accounts etc it's well worth it.
Not yet. I am about to switch. My domain bill will jump by more than 50% (comparing Gandi after 13 July 2023 with Netim for prices on renewals), and Netim came up top for an EU company doing renewals.
EasyDNS (easydns.com) has been good for us. They're also not one of the places that easily rolls over to fake legal notices, which reduces one potential stress vector as well.
This is exactly what I am here looking for. I have 18 domains. 14 have mail forwarding, 2 have dedicated emails through Google workspaces and 2 are forwards to another domain. I’m not paying an extra 144$ a year for the domains PLUS whatever additional fees I’ll run into after this to follow this to Squarespace.
I know email forwarding isn’t the standard because Hover charges you 5$ per year per domain just for email forwarding. So frustrating.
Cloudflare is even cheaper than Google AFAIK. I already use them for my main domains and will probably move all my other Google domains over there as well.
I’ve used namecheap for many years and have started using porkbun recently. Both have given me no problems, have reasonable prices and have those features.
In my conversations with Google employees, no one actually wants to work there. There is little to no respect for the company. Turnover has been massive. Even folks that have been there for 5 years have 80% seniority.
The problem is not leadership or management. It is the owners. It is Larry and Sergey.
Does this impact Google apps (or whatever their grandfathered personal email hosting/google drive is called now)? I hope it's just the registration component, but I think I should plan the move to another email/file sharing provider.
I've been paying a tiny amount to use Google Cloud because the handful of domains I control were registered with Google Domains, in turn because I trusted Google to run a good registrar.
Maybe there was no special reason to use Google Cloud DNS, or the other Google Cloud services I use, with Google Domains. It's been so long since I set this all up that I honestly can't remember. But I wouldn't be revisiting any of that but for this announcement that Google Domains is turning down. Now, in the process of finding a new registrar, I'm revisiting all of it.
I'm a tiny customer, less than a rounding error for Google. But this still seems like a strategic error to me. How much can it cost to run a domain registrar? How does this weigh against the goodwill and trust gained from maintaining an important service you've implicitly promised that you would maintain?
Ugh, this makes me sad. Google Domains was hands down the simplest, most reliable, fastest domain service I ever used. I originally was on GoDaddy, then migrated everything to Namecheap, then migrated everything to Google Domains.
I hope they don't change anything for as long as possible. I hate having to deal with DNS busy work.
I have 97 domains with Google Domains. 20 of them are in active use. ~10 I manage for family and friends. ~10 are redirects. I'm embarrassed to say I have ~57 side project ideas (GitHub pages + Google Domains is a bad habit—looks like I would brainstorm about 1 per week). Maybe the fact that Google Domains made it so easy to buy and manage many domains was actually a bad thing for me, as I picked up too many. So maybe I should be less sad :).
Ouch! I only have a handful of domains I've hung on to and I also went from GoDaddy to Namecheap, but I've been contemplating moving them to Google recently since I already use enough of their other services. Glad I waited?
Anyone knows how domain name pricing works? Why some domains are cheaper in first year and then 10 times expensive the next year?
Can a domain registrar exploit the situation where they know you have a good business around that domain so now the domain price per year is let's say 5,000 dollars?
I work in the domain industry and there are a few answers.
A company can be a registry for a tld, like how Google owns the .app tld. That is different than a registrar, like godaddy, who resells the names in namespaces provided by registries. The registries set the price for that tld and other things like requiring .app namespace to be secure, so you need HTTPS and an SSL certificate for your website to load on most browsers. Due to these SSL requirements, domain forwarding isnt supported. another example of requirements set by a registry is the .AI namespace which is more expensive by default (over $125 a year last i looked)and requires a minimum of 2 years when you register.
Registries also charge more for names they think are worth more. So if you see a premium .app name that cost $2,000 per year, that is because the registry (Google in the case of .app) decided the name was valuable (probably because its a short common noun) and they want a lot more per year for it. Ive never heard of this happening after someone already had it for cheaper, so no rug pull type situations.
As for why some names renew for more than when you first get them, its a strategy for registrars (not registries) to attract new customers. Companies give items away at a discount or loss to get you into their ecosystem and then make profits at renewals. It’s like getting a free smartphone from a phone company and then paying more for the service than if you had owned the phone and not got it free.
> Due to these SSL requirements, domain forwarding isnt supported.
That's just a limitation on some registrar. Domain forwarding absolutely does work on .app; you simply need to configure an SSL certificate on the web server serving the redirect for the forwarding.
I'm not an expert here by any means, but my understanding is that some TLDs are just more expensive, but for the first year they're sold at a discount to get you in the door.
I was a Google die hard, everything except Reader that they killed made sense. At this point it seems like the CFO is in charge and no good product is safe.
Reader probably made “sense” too for the axe-wielding CFO, in that I can’t imagine it generated any meaningful revenue. But I also can’t imagine it consumed much in the way of resources either…
I still use Gmail, but that’s it for me among Google’s offerings. (I can’t easily transition away from that due to using my email address for several hundred login credentials, though I suppose I really should begin that project.) But certainly for anything new, I have no confidence in any Google products, paid or unpaid.
I’ve been a (paying) customer of Google Domains for quite a number of years now. Better options have arisen for my needs over the years (largely family name domain parking and email aliases/forwarding), but it honestly hasn’t been worth my time to bother rejiggering everything and transferring it all out.
I guess now it is? How bad is Squarespace for this sort of “set it and forget it” kinda thing?
(Also you are correct for most domains. If they don't have a Specfication 9 exemption in their registry contract (or Specification 13 in the newer registry agreements), they are general availability)
True, but they had better pricing on all their own registry domains. I'm wondering if I have to pay more now xD, or if SquareSpace will continue the price discount.
I hadn't heard about that. It always seemed like an all-Google affair for the registry services. They filed a lot of gTLD applications under the name "Charleston Road Registry"
That might be true of their registries. Early Google domains was a private label API customer of Go Daddy, though. Go Daddy had been sunsetting API resellers and then Google came in and that plan was scrapped. This was ≈2007-2008.
Just yesterday there was a post here not too thrilled about how Gandi is handling their latest price increases and their dropped support for 'free included' email?
To the various people saying they’ll transfer their domains away, why is this bad that they transfer to another registrar company? Is there something concerning about Squarespace?
1: Price (66% increase in price for no additional value)
2: Uncertainty around Squarespace's technical ability. Are they going to be a rock solid DNS provider? When DNS is down it is no fun. I left a smaller registrar because they couldn't handle large DDoS attacks (we weren't targets, but were affected).
Registrars in general have many failure modes. Customer service nightmares (stakes being high if you lose an important domain, either through error or social engineering), malicious behavior (NetworkSolutions sniffing searches to buy domains[1], WhoIs privacy shell companies used to steal domain ownership, Unregistry increasing some of their new gTLDs by 500+%[2]), stability problems are all non-rare occurances.
It's hard to trust a new registrar when it's so easy to fuck over customers
Sure; but, we're talking about Squarespace specifically. Why are they problematic? And, how are they problematic for someone that decided Google was a trustworthy company to register their domains with, knowing their history to kill all of their products?
Sorry, my answer was for why transferring to _any_ registrar is a problem. It involves a lot of trust built up over time. I don't know SquareSpace's business dealings, but I'm sure many others who were on Google Domains don't too, and will need to build the same trust.
Google Domains has been around longer than their more recent reputation of frequently killing things. It also felt "complete". It worked (just maintain it) and people liked it, why kill it? It felt stable. But apparently everyone misjudged.
But that's also why I personally am no longer on Gmail, Google Drive, Google itself, etc. I have found replacements.
I tried finding pricing info on Squarespace's site and it just wasn't as easy to find compared to some other sites. I also tried finding how they were doing previously by searching for "domain name registrar market share", and they don't seem to rank pretty highly there either[1]. So that wasn't particularly reassuring.
Squarespace feels like an unknown to me because I don't know why they were selected and when the domain will move, so I transferred my domain away just now. This way, the registrar and transfer date are both within my control.
[1] On the other hand, Google Domains appears to consistently rank in the top 10 for market share and they still want to give it up, so maybe market share doesn't mean anything.
I purchase all my domains from AWS Route53 to prevent this kind of thing from happening.
I wonder what the rationale for doing this is? I just assumed cloud providers offered domain registration as a loss leader keep you in their ecosystem.
Can AWS offer support for “.dev” domains so I can transfer it there?
If AWS ever decides to suspend your root account, good luck with that. They never, ever, ever give it back. I had a root account I used for free tier stuff on my primary e-mail address that I never got back because I had $2 charges I didn't pay for 4 months because I didn't realize they were even trying to charge me.
... and the new registrar (Squarespace) is increasing pricing for seemingly no additional features.
>Under the terms of the agreement, Squarespace will honor all existing Google Domains customers' renewal prices for at least 12 months following the closing of the transaction
As a user of GCP it reads as a huge red flag to me that they offloaded this instead of rolling it into GCP.
Domains are a pretty core part of cloud infrastructure. The fact that they could have brought domains under GCP and didn’t makes me wonder what they know about the future of GCP that isn’t public yet.
This is interesting. Part of the fact that Google owned Domains was that GCP domain validation was smooth when doing this. Now, we probably have to do the slow motion validation. Bit annoying, honestly.
I use email forwarding and won’t be switching to Porkbun because they do t offer wildcard email forwarding. Does anyone know any other provider that does offer it?
I never really even thought about using Google domains, from the first time I heard of it I assumed it would last a few years and they would shut it down.
I need to find one quick. We really use this a lot and auto share all pics between my wife and Is phone. We also really enjoy the auto tagging face feature. That's a must.
Partner sharing, Face tagging, adding photos to albums based on faces.. these things are great. I even enabled the auto add thing on my brother in law's phone because he was notorious for forgetting to share photos of my kids (they spend a lot of time together). So now any time he takes their photos, google photos adds them to my shared album and I have 'Auto save' enabled on my side so those photos get copied into my account automatically.
Also recently Google photos has really done a good job of adding editing features. Ah I really hope Google keeps it going.
It has been a while since I switched from Google Photos, but I've found EZ Gallery to be a good gallery replacement.
For backups, sync your camera roll to a computer/different service. Dropbox can do this, but there are third party apps like Autosync that can sync to a variety of services and protocols. Better than locking it all up in Google anyway.
God damn it. Google Domains was my registrar of choice because I figured I wouldn't have to ever think about logistics and their lookup rules. Ah well. I guess I'll see what Squarespace does to the experience. I'd transfer them to Cloudflare, but have similar concerns.
It seems Domain is part of Cloud in Alphabet's revenue breakdown, which recently turned profit with just $191m in 23Q1. Not sure the exact term and accounting operation, but this sale of $180m may just double that line of income?
I don't think that domain registration would generate enough revenue for Google to care about it as a core business unit, especially because part of Google Domains' pitch was that they had all these obscure domains that were cheaper. My inference is that Google cared about domains because they were complementary to another, core business unit. The obvious one to me is Google Workspace: You come to Google, get your domain, set up your business email, and you're well on your way to having an online business presence. The big missing piece is a website.
What? Crap, my router has built-in support for Google domains for dynamic IPs so that's why I'm on them -- wanted my kids to have a nice name for a local Minecraft server. I assume that's going away.
At least Google allowed me to pay in BRL, porkbun and others use just USD, with taxes and converting I'll pay a lot more for domains now... Well, stick with Brazilian domains now, that's a shame.
My family name .com is still available. That should be very rare in 2023. The name has only 4 letters.
It is also a word that is hard to pronounce in the english speaking world and I hope to get a reasonable price with that argument. Chances for a company with that name are slim and I also have no company or business in that name (normal employed software dev that I am)
The squatter in question has a form up asking for contact details and initial offer.
How would I go about doing that and what should I expect price wise?
Try getting someone that doesn't have that name to buy it for you so it's not obvious why you want it. It's hard to say on the price, but I would guess $500 absolute minimum.
This is incredibly annoying. I migrated all my domains from Badger to Google Domains. I'm really losing any remaining faith I have in Google, they kill any products that are remotely usable.
Sundar is trying to be the next Steve Ballmer. Alienate the tech community by just focusing on cost cutting. I do wonder if he would have cut YouTube back when it was bleeding cash if we was the CEO back then.
I use Google Domains frequently because they support domain forwarding for both HTTP and HTTPS requests. This is critical for end users that type or click an HTTP address.
Can anyone suggest a domain registrar that supports forwarding over SSL?
How many engineers should it take to maintain domains.google in a steady state, maybe fixing bugs and patching security vulnerabilities that come up, doing an occasional release?
This bites because there was a little-documented little integration between Google Domains and Gmail to allow you to use a custom domain for a personal Gmail address.
If your domain registrar supports forwarding emails, I think you can continue to receive emails through a custom domain.
Sending email with your custom domain in the from/reply-to address is a different business, I recall it requires getting gmail to verify that you can receive via that custom address, and also set the mail server to smtp.gmail.com port 587.
I never understood them being a domain registrar in the first place. Maybe as a back-up to secure an important internet core function. The seems quite (very) high.
Sure, happy to. It's a bit long-winded, though. For context, I'm in the UK and I'm registered as a business.
I was perfectly happy with Gandi until 2016 or so. Political changes in my country made dealing with the EU more complex and potentially more expensive, and I needed to to move my ~100 domain portfolio elsewhere. I originally started looking for a UK domain registrar[1] to keep the UK sales tax (VAT) simple and avoid the credit card fees & arbitrary conversion rate for an overseas transaction. I spent a Saturday or so scouting out options, factoring in:
* purchase and renewal price, with VAT
* overall look and feel of admin panels
* workflow of (and feedback on) transferring domains in and out, and other admin tasks
* how likely the company was to be eaten by another registrar
I've tended to have my web + email stuff split across multiple orgs to reduce instances of single point of failure:
* domains at one registrar, so I can keep track
* DNS at Cloudflare (reliably fastest at DNSPerf), all but one domain is on the the free plan with Cloudflare features disabled (i.e. purely DNS).
* hosting at a build-your-own cloud provider (DigitalOcean and recently Hetzner)
* email at managed provider (Fastmail currently)
Ultimately, UK registrars turned out quite expensive compared to north American registrars, with no clear advantage. Even with the VAT being reclaimable, the sums worked out in favour of looking overseas.
I found Porkbun when I was looking for off-piste domain registrars for a couple of ccTLD domains I had. There's a single .ag which is the most expensive to renew, and comparatively few registrars support it. I ran the numbers on the portfolio of domains for each of the off-piste registrars if I moved all the domains in…and that was expensive.
I told myself I could manage >1 domain registrar if I'm organised, so I re-ran the numbers with a split between the exotic TLDs and the boring ones. I was left with Namecheap & Porkbun for the boring (cheaper) domains. I registered 3x domains at each -- all burners, a ccTLD + a gTLD + their cheapest 99c offering -- and ran some tests. I ignored the SPOF stuff above since these were r&d domains, effectively. The tests included:
* how easy it was to administer via the control panel, including transfers in and out
* testing the support team with a minor, non-documented issue
* how much junk email I'd end up with
* the overall 'feel' of the registrar
Namecheap didn't fare well, sadly. The ccTLD I set up was transferred out (to Porkbun), but remained in the Namecheap control panel. I deliberately chose a .uk domain to test this with, since the process is a little whacky[2]. To their credit, Porkbun handled it seamlessly, exactly as their kb doc explained. Namecheap continued to send my expiry warnings about the domain (which was safe at Porkbun), and a support ticket was not able to have it removed from my account at Namecheap. Minor, granted, but enough to put me off.
Porkbun was mostly better out of the gate. I set up a CAA record on my burner domain (at Porkbun) and it broke DNS completely. I opened a ticket, explained what I'd done, and had a prompt, courteous reply back within a few hours. I'd used the wrong CAA syntax, which clobbered the DNS. When I fixed that, it worked perfectly. This not-in-the-kb support ticket stuff was not planned, but it worked out really well.
I moved all-but-one of my domains to Porkbun. I'd move the .ag domain if they supported it, but they don't yet. The .ag is languishing at Gandi, and there's a support ticket open with them (2 days and counting) to get an auth code to transfer out since it's not shown on the domain control panel, and with their upcoming price changes I'm keen to get that out before the PE folks turn it into a wasteland.
So, Porkbun: it works, they have a good experience that fits my workflow, and they don't have the upselling bullshit that GoDaddy and Namecheap seem to peddle.
Jeez, could they have possibly given less notice? Now I have to scramble to migrate all of my domains away from Google/Squarespace this weekend. Damn it.
I have zero desire to be in business with Squarespace.
I don't like businesses I haven't specifically chosen managing my digital affairs and buyouts put me in that position. Plus I don't trust Squarespace at all.
Fortunately this is the last Google product I was still using, so after this migration I will be 100% google free, which will be a great day.
Sounds like you had a very deep relationship with Google that went beyond just a simple registration of a domain name.
I don't know Squarespace as a company, but looking at the wikipedia entry, they are a publicly-traded American company on the NYSE and appear to have removed websites that promoted bigotry or hate, etc. so how bad could they really be? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squarespace
> ...appear to have removed websites that promoted bigotry or hate, etc.
This is exactly the problem. I don't go to a domain registrar to be my parent and/or make social decisions for me. I go there to register domains and manage DNS records, that's it. That Squarespace management felt the need to assert themselves into that process with social contagion related matters is deeply concerning and frankly, a deal breaker for me. It'd be like AT&T cancelling your phone service because they didn't like the content of your conversations.
Imagine if you were still a freelance website designer or something for small businesses and now your biggest low cost competitor just bought all of your domains with the intention to convert as many as possible to customers. Very cool Google.
There is little difference here between killed and sold. Squarespace charges 66% more per year for .com domain, so it is going to make sense to transfer out for most people. Same result as if Google killed it, just a slightly longer window to go through the hassle of transferring.
For stuff like stadia, which has no real identical products, a transfer would indeed be nicer.
But the whole sell of the google domains product is that you are getting a domain from Google. If it is no longer from google, the product is largely indistinguishable from those from other large cloud providers like Cloudflare or AWS (or more boutique or focused offerings like Porkbun and Namecheap).
