I feel like this is one of the things that Gergely has sensationalized recently to drive attention. This started with a bunch of tweets which amounted to "why wasn't I told about this immediately". I suspect that this decision was made at exec levels with the lower levels asked to work out the details which obviously resulted in a delay. As a Google Domains customer, this wasn't particularly problematic. It's just a big company getting its ducks in a row which takes time.
It's self-evident that acquisitions can happen and that data will be transferred as a result. Most most attention is typically on other aspects of how Google handles data and this seems like an attempt to latch onto that.
I personally feel better about basic data security and processing under Google than I would under a company like Squarespace. I know Google have faced nation state attackers so they've got some security chops. I feel that they'll enforce reasonable contractual requirements on the purchaser, but those won't override Google being a safer bet with the basics.
> I feel like this is one of the things that Gergely has sensationalized recently to drive attention.
It's important to remember that Gergely is in the business of clicks and views. While I've enjoyed some of his reporting, it's very clear that he's optimizing his reporting based on what gets engagement. On places like Twitter, sensationalizing topics and riding waves of outrage is a cheap way to drive engagement.
This material plays well to certain subsets of Twitter, HN, Reddit, and other social media sites where people thrive on sensationalism and outrage. His previous thread about leaving Google Cloud because it might be abandoned at any minute (lol) was sensationalist enough that even the usual outlets were starting to call him out on it, but I'm afraid the engagement may have only incentivized returning to the well for another dip into the "Google Bad" outrage pool.
This isn't the only Substack author I've followed who veered into audience capture like this. There's something about the ultra-tight feedback loop where authors/influencers can see the real-time engagement with their topics and continue pressing whatever button drives the most engagement.
Author here. I noticed this tweet made it to Hacker News. (I didn’t even notice that another one did yesterday as well)
I don’t care about the views or clicks or “engagement” or “driving attention” or similar. I understand talk is cheap so I have asked dang to blacklist all tweets from my Twitter account (this URL) going forward on HN, which should significantly reduce such views and clicks.
The tweets are not editable, and I often type them out as I go. I shared this, for example, after talking with a current Googler who was very, very frustrated exactly because of this. I thought it’s an interesting angle, especially as I’m also a Domains customer.
“Sensationalist” is something I would definitely like to avoid. I used to “break” layoff news at tech companies the fall of 2022 (before or as they happened) which had very high “engagement” but sat increasingly poorly with me - and it did feel sensationalist - so I stopped doing all of this, regardless of anything I learn ahead of some other outlet sharing it. I’m happier for it.
I do have my own opinions and experiences with Google as a customer, going back all the way to the massive GAE price increases in 2011 when I was an early customer, and of course this contributes to my - necessarily biased - outlook.
There is also truth to Twitter takes often feeling sensationalist - brewity doesn’t help with nuance - and I don’t want to get more views/clicks/ “engagement” on any of these or contribute to “outrage.”
(By the way, thank you for an earlier criticism that I took to heart.)
> This isn't the only Substack author I've followed who veered into audience capture like this
It was an entirely predictable outcome of Medium-/Substack-/Patreon-based journalism. People were complaining about mainstream media reporting being biased, and cheering on democratization of journalism; but Substack more directly ties specific stories to financial rewards foe the authoe. Pandering to your audiences biases will make you more money, so why would you ever report on anything outside of their bubble (or contradicts their worldview) when that hits your pockets?
> It's self-evident that acquisitions can happen and that data will be transferred as a result.
Correct, which is one of the big reasons why I do my best to avoid all data collection I can, even if I fundamentally trust the company doing the collecting.
Sure they happen, but this should trigger class action lawsuits.
"We don't sell your data" is a plainly worded claim, and is blatantly false if/when a company is sold. Companies should be required to say "We don't sell your data unless acquired" or "We don't sell your data now but might in the future".
Allowing consumers to make an informed choice is critical for properly functioning free markets, let's enforce this.
> It's just a big company getting its ducks in a row which takes time.
It is most common for both sides of a transaction to announce simultaneously. This was a bit weird in that SquareSpace made an announcement and there was nothing from the Google side. If Google was still preparing their communications, the norm would be SquareSpace waiting for Google to be ready.
> It's self-evident that acquisitions can happen and that data will be transferred as a result. Most most attention is typically on other aspects of how Google handles data and this seems like an attempt to latch onto that.
I mean it's not that surprising though? The better option would've been to allow the user to opt out of transfer to squarespace and move their domain to somewhere else in the meantime?
> allow the user to opt out of transfer to squarespace and move their domain to somewhere else in the meantime
I don't mean to downplay the overall idiotic nature of this sale, but you've always been free to transfer your domains out of Google Domains at any time (or any other registrar for that matter).
I don't understand the reasoning that some company has better security than another. It's honestly trivial to set up good security. The main problem is incentive to go against/ break that security, which will likely grow with company size, or other factors. So it seems completely unreasonable to trust certain companies over others.
Perhaps trusting governments, since they have less silly financial reasons to break security is reasonable.
Google is "selling" your billing data, which Squarespace is not allowed to do anything with other than bill you for the service they provide.
This exact data already goes through many intermediaries in many different countries for the payment to successfully settle. So will you also complain that Google is selling your data to Visa/Chase/Stripe/PayPal and the hundreds of other companies they have agreements with?
> which Squarespace is not allowed to do anything with other than bill you for the service they provide.
Where are you getting this from?
Google says that Squarespace's privacy policy will be applicable, and that policy gives Squarespace the right to do plenty of other things with user data: https://www.squarespace.com/privacy
I will say, I'm super frustrated by the Domains sale as well. I also work on Payments, and can at least give some insight here. The amount of data given to a payment processor definitely differs by country and form-of-payment. But one big difference is that a full billing profile tends to have lots more data than just what is required to process a payment. Many payments (like credit cards), just need a payment description, name, address, and the card details. But this doesn't always include stuff like email address, IP address, phone #, etc. So the card processor will get the minimum info required to process the payment. There are also agreements in place with what these processors can do with this PII data.
I'll definitely be interested to see what Google does regarding data transferred to SquareSpace. It's unclear right now what kind of restrictions will be placed on any data (if any) that is shared with SquareSpace.
Unless Squarespace is going to break ICANN agreements they'll at least need full contact information for registrants, technical contacts, etc., unless they do some fancy private registration deal where Google keeps that data and Squarespace doesn't have access to it.
I mean, I'm pretty liberal with my billing data? I buy stuff online all the time, and thanks to credit cards it's pretty easy to handle the situation of billing data getting stolen by reversing fraudulent charges and getting new billing data.
No, you cannot “buy” people’s personal data (name, phone #, address, email, etc) from Google.
Yes, sale of a business unit usually includes the customer contracts, leads and historical data of that business unit. No, there isn’t anything nefarious about that, and every other business you transacted with does the same thing.
Yeah sure there is a cottage industry trying to use google’s data to augment other data sources, but that’s not “Google selling my personal data”.
I do think when a company is bought by another, you should need to 'opt-in' to continuing your business with them.
There shouldn't be an assumption that consent is transitive and that if you consented to Company A having your information, that you're also happy with Company B that takes over also having it.
It's the same thing with time; consent when given should not be eternal.
I don't want to be contacted by a company I signed up to 12 years ago and forgot about to contact me about a new product.
From what I know, at least in my country, this is the case. Additionally, in the case of Google Domains, nothing is stopping you from migrating your domains to some other registry right now, before they get transferred over to Squarespace.
One could argue that having your data with Google is more damaging to one’s privacy than having it with any other company, considering that Googles business model is the selling of ads based on your data, but that’s besides the point here.
I’m not sure about this one - seems like it significantly reduces the value of data, which would have a downstream impact on the entire industry. I guess that’s what you intended, but my mind quickly went to a rabbit hole with the second order effects of this one.
Squarespace bought the personal data (name, phone #, address, email etc) of all Google Domains customers. I cannot do that, but Squarespace could. Google sold, among other things, that data, to Squarespace.
Squarespace is giving Google money, and in exchange they're getting my personal information so they can bill me. That seems extremely clear-cut. Not sure if you're talking about some obscure legality interpretation but in plain speech, that is what they're doing.
Nothing has happened yet, and it’s easy for anyone who wants to opt out to do so. Transfer your domain and close your google domain account.
The bigger point though is that you are right, but it also applies to literally every business sale ever. What’s the point of talking about it now? Do you think GitHub sold your data to Microsoft?
Coming from the guy who yesterday talked about how much of a reputational risk selling Google Domains is... It's ironic he doesn't see tweeting something this dumb as a reputational risk...
Everyone makes the mistake of trusting Google once or twice. At least in this case it's just a domain name, easily transferred anywhere. It would suck to depend on a GCP bespoke service only to have it disappear next week.
It was the best domain registrar I had ever used - fast, streamlined, and convenient. So of course Google, the GM of Silicon Valley (1), had to sell it off or shut it down.
1: GM also has a reputation for getting a product just right and then killing it.
Same. I'm honestly shocked they're getting rid of the service. It's core infrastructure, cheap as chips to run, and binds people to using Google. Same reason why Microsoft hosts domains.
You have your mail, storage, office suite, photos, chat, etc, hosted by Google, they made it easy to host your domain there working with all those services, and all that vertically integration kept us comfortably in their warm embrace.
Now they're selling it because... why? Only theory that holds water is it doesn't make _enough_ money. Well sure it isn't a huge revenue source but it isn't losing money either, and the intangibles felt like they more than justified keeping it in-house.
Hopefully the inside story comes out, as I would be fascinated to hear their thought process.
It's not a sale of information to a third party. It's the sale of a business and transferring the business to the first party. Businesses buying and selling businesses happens, all the time. Customer data is being transferred in the process, all the time.
Is there anything noteworthy going on here, or are we just confused/pretending to be confused about the world and looking to put a spin on it?
That sounds like a distinction without a difference to me.
If I (the first party) have given data to a company (the second party), and that company is sold to someone else (the third party), then my data was sold to a third party.
> Customer data is being transferred in the process, all the time.
Right. Being common doesn't mean it isn't problematic, though. This is one of the reasons to minimize the amount of data you reveal to any company.
> Being common doesn't mean it isn't problematic, though.
Certainly. However, taking a common business/law(?) issue and making it a Google issue is lame.
EDIT:
> That sounds like a distinction without a difference to me.
> If I (the first party) have given data to a company (the second party), and that company is sold to someone else (the third party), then my data was sold to a third party.
Well. I can see where you are coming from, but we have to be able to differentiate between
a) an ongoing 1p<->2p relationship, where 2p is selling data to a 3p
b) a relationship, where the entire 2p gets replaced
These two setups are clearly not equal. There is a distinction. And a difference.
> It's not a sale of information to a third party. It's the sale of a business and transferring the business to the first party.
Suppose I let you borrow my car, on the condition that you not allow your son to drive it. When the car gets totaled, you tell me that you gave the keys to your spouse, and they were the one who let your son drive it. So I have no reason to be angry at you, because you didn't directly hand the keys to him.
If you draw an imaginary line around some of the people and assets in a company, declare that the data belongs within that imaginary line, and then say everything inside that imaginary line is being sold, that's the same sort of shell game.
> Is there anything noteworthy going on here, or are we just confused/pretending to be confused about the world and looking to put a spin on it?
Yes. There's a lie being told that "selling a business" and getting customer data along with it is somehow distinct from "selling data".
I'm dubious of the "confirmed internally" part unless their source is someone in a high level in the CFO's org. It's not really possible for a regular engineer or someone else working on the product to know exactly what resources the company is providing their project in terms of salaries + benefits of everyone involved, hardware/cloud allocations, marketing, legal costs, accounting, customer support, insurance, other vendor fees and tons more. You might think that the tiny server or DB you are provisioning from a seemingly infinite pool or that email exchange with legal are free, but there is a dollar value attached to everything.
We’re taking about a database that stores on the order of 1KB per customer. The product operating costs round down to zero per customer.
The only real expenses would be dealing with customer service and card fraud. While it’s possible that those costs could be substantial, Google isn’t exactly known for throwing a lot of money at customer service.
Surely that's a lot more trivially fixed with a small price bump than throwing the entire revenue stream & user sentiment into the trash?
Google Domains is currently charging $12/year for a .com domain, which we know from cloudflare the "at cost" price of that is $9.15/year. Comparing the $12/year to other providers it's kinda middle-of-the-road, not especially cheap or anything. Shopify is $15/year while porkbun is ~$10/year, so $12/year certainly appears to be a price that has adequate margin to either be profitable or if not only needs a small bump to be profitable?
That doesn't matter. In big corporations, unless they're making a strategic investment in a particular area or product, the ROI on any project is compared with to all other projects.
The ROI on Domains is likely to be no where near that of, I don't know, GKE or BigQuery. You can argue all you want about how those are totally different projects with totally different considerations. But at the end of the day, unless Google wants to have a strategic investment in maintaining an end user facing Domain Registrar service, the ROI is all that matters. They are focusing and consolidating all their "developer facing" services in GCP. What makes sense will eventually move there, what doesn't will get cut.
ARR and YoY growth tell you nothing about profitability or the ROI. Google never shied away from deprecating services that they don't care about to focus on things they care about.
Could be true, but it's worth noting that Gergely has been wrong about his "confirmed internally" facts before. To his credit, he did issue a correction when it was discovered. However, take his "confirmed internally" stories with a grain of salt.
Probably lesser known here is the Charleston Road Registry, Google's entity which manages their TLDs:
"Google Registry is currently offering .app, .dev, .dad, .phd, .prof, .esq, .foo, .zip, .mov, .nexus, .page, .new, .how, .soy, .day, .boo and .みんな. We also own .ads, .eat, .fly, .here, .ing, and .meme among others. We'll be using some of the domains we own, such as .google, .youtube, and .chrome, for Google products, so they won't be open to the public."
It seems Google will continue working with registrar partners, but not operate a registrar themselves anymore (Google Domains). It does not seem like anything will change for this wholly owned registry entity.
In the future we'll be renewing our .dev domains with other registrars who themselves register the domains with Google Registry / Charleston Road Registry as the TLD administrators.
The weird part to me at least is that they don’t ask for affirmative consent prior to transferring all your data, billing details, etc., to Squarespace. This isn’t some 1:1 acquisition, the Google Domains UI won’t even exist anymore. Even stranger considering the Google workspace subscriptions are moving as well, no idea how Squarespace is handling that. At least transfers aren’t frozen so you can get away from Squarespace’s terrible product prior to the deal closing.
(I know Google has the legal right to do this, but that’s not the issue here.)
I read somewhere that Squarespace is already a reseller of Workspace, so the new accounts they acquire will likely slot into whatever current mechanism exists for managing and supporting these customers.
Apparently the Google Domains UI is sticking around too, although who knows how long that'll last.
Wait, like THE Google Workspace subscriptions are moving? Do you have a source? I might have missed that in the announcement - sounds like a total disaster waiting to happen..
Better to shut down than sell people's data without consent. Better still to seek consent, but between what they're actually doing and simply shutting down and deleting customer data, the latter would be preferable.
Edit: If anybody disagrees, I have a question to ask you: How would you feel if Google sold your youtube view history to the likes of Facebook, Tiktok, or Palantir? Better for them to ask first, or simply delete it. This SHOULD be required by law.
This isn't a new issue. For example, WhatsApp and all of its data was sold to Facebook. I'm sure some people closed their WhatsApp accounts because they didn't agree with Facebook's privacy policies.
Yes, I would prefer that. Give a year of notice then turn off the service. I can choose where to send my business next.
And I am, I'm moving to Cloudflare. It's a superior service anyway and they support my TLDs. I never bothered moving before simply due to the minor effort involved.
Isn't it obvious? If you want your domains to be automatically transferred, fine, do that, but otherwise refund any payments for future services and provide assistance for transferring domains to another provider.
The latest tweet in the thread already deals with this objection:
> And for those saying: "well, better than shutting down Google Domains"
> Google Domains was profitable, I confirmed internally. Growing extremely fast (~$120M ARR now, ~growing $40M/year)
Which, I mean, obviously the product isn't so unprofitable that it needs to be shut down, or nobody would be interested in buying it.
Maybe Google Domains isn't the company's most profitable product, and maybe Google would be able to make even more money by allocating those resources elsewhere. But the point that people are upset about is that Google is going against a principle it had publicly committed to. Principles don't count for much if you only follow them when there's no cost to doing so.
> But the point that people are upset about is that Google is going against a principle it had publicly committed to. Principles don't count for much if you only follow them when there's no cost to doing so.
This is surprising to literally nobody who's paid even a cursory amount of attention to Google over the past 20+ (and especially 15) years.
Readit News
It's self-evident that acquisitions can happen and that data will be transferred as a result. Most most attention is typically on other aspects of how Google handles data and this seems like an attempt to latch onto that.
I personally feel better about basic data security and processing under Google than I would under a company like Squarespace. I know Google have faced nation state attackers so they've got some security chops. I feel that they'll enforce reasonable contractual requirements on the purchaser, but those won't override Google being a safer bet with the basics.
It's important to remember that Gergely is in the business of clicks and views. While I've enjoyed some of his reporting, it's very clear that he's optimizing his reporting based on what gets engagement. On places like Twitter, sensationalizing topics and riding waves of outrage is a cheap way to drive engagement.
This material plays well to certain subsets of Twitter, HN, Reddit, and other social media sites where people thrive on sensationalism and outrage. His previous thread about leaving Google Cloud because it might be abandoned at any minute (lol) was sensationalist enough that even the usual outlets were starting to call him out on it, but I'm afraid the engagement may have only incentivized returning to the well for another dip into the "Google Bad" outrage pool.
This isn't the only Substack author I've followed who veered into audience capture like this. There's something about the ultra-tight feedback loop where authors/influencers can see the real-time engagement with their topics and continue pressing whatever button drives the most engagement.
I don’t care about the views or clicks or “engagement” or “driving attention” or similar. I understand talk is cheap so I have asked dang to blacklist all tweets from my Twitter account (this URL) going forward on HN, which should significantly reduce such views and clicks.
The tweets are not editable, and I often type them out as I go. I shared this, for example, after talking with a current Googler who was very, very frustrated exactly because of this. I thought it’s an interesting angle, especially as I’m also a Domains customer.
“Sensationalist” is something I would definitely like to avoid. I used to “break” layoff news at tech companies the fall of 2022 (before or as they happened) which had very high “engagement” but sat increasingly poorly with me - and it did feel sensationalist - so I stopped doing all of this, regardless of anything I learn ahead of some other outlet sharing it. I’m happier for it.
I do have my own opinions and experiences with Google as a customer, going back all the way to the massive GAE price increases in 2011 when I was an early customer, and of course this contributes to my - necessarily biased - outlook.
There is also truth to Twitter takes often feeling sensationalist - brewity doesn’t help with nuance - and I don’t want to get more views/clicks/ “engagement” on any of these or contribute to “outrage.”
(By the way, thank you for an earlier criticism that I took to heart.)
It was an entirely predictable outcome of Medium-/Substack-/Patreon-based journalism. People were complaining about mainstream media reporting being biased, and cheering on democratization of journalism; but Substack more directly ties specific stories to financial rewards foe the authoe. Pandering to your audiences biases will make you more money, so why would you ever report on anything outside of their bubble (or contradicts their worldview) when that hits your pockets?
Correct, which is one of the big reasons why I do my best to avoid all data collection I can, even if I fundamentally trust the company doing the collecting.
"We don't sell your data" is a plainly worded claim, and is blatantly false if/when a company is sold. Companies should be required to say "We don't sell your data unless acquired" or "We don't sell your data now but might in the future".
Allowing consumers to make an informed choice is critical for properly functioning free markets, let's enforce this.
It is most common for both sides of a transaction to announce simultaneously. This was a bit weird in that SquareSpace made an announcement and there was nothing from the Google side. If Google was still preparing their communications, the norm would be SquareSpace waiting for Google to be ready.
I mean it's not that surprising though? The better option would've been to allow the user to opt out of transfer to squarespace and move their domain to somewhere else in the meantime?
I don't mean to downplay the overall idiotic nature of this sale, but you've always been free to transfer your domains out of Google Domains at any time (or any other registrar for that matter).
Everyone can already do this.
Perhaps trusting governments, since they have less silly financial reasons to break security is reasonable.
This exact data already goes through many intermediaries in many different countries for the payment to successfully settle. So will you also complain that Google is selling your data to Visa/Chase/Stripe/PayPal and the hundreds of other companies they have agreements with?
Where are you getting this from?
Google says that Squarespace's privacy policy will be applicable, and that policy gives Squarespace the right to do plenty of other things with user data: https://www.squarespace.com/privacy
I will say, I'm super frustrated by the Domains sale as well. I also work on Payments, and can at least give some insight here. The amount of data given to a payment processor definitely differs by country and form-of-payment. But one big difference is that a full billing profile tends to have lots more data than just what is required to process a payment. Many payments (like credit cards), just need a payment description, name, address, and the card details. But this doesn't always include stuff like email address, IP address, phone #, etc. So the card processor will get the minimum info required to process the payment. There are also agreements in place with what these processors can do with this PII data.
I'll definitely be interested to see what Google does regarding data transferred to SquareSpace. It's unclear right now what kind of restrictions will be placed on any data (if any) that is shared with SquareSpace.
No, you cannot “buy” people’s personal data (name, phone #, address, email, etc) from Google.
Yes, sale of a business unit usually includes the customer contracts, leads and historical data of that business unit. No, there isn’t anything nefarious about that, and every other business you transacted with does the same thing.
Yeah sure there is a cottage industry trying to use google’s data to augment other data sources, but that’s not “Google selling my personal data”.
It's the same thing with time; consent when given should not be eternal. I don't want to be contacted by a company I signed up to 12 years ago and forgot about to contact me about a new product.
One could argue that having your data with Google is more damaging to one’s privacy than having it with any other company, considering that Googles business model is the selling of ads based on your data, but that’s besides the point here.
What's dumb about that take?
The bigger point though is that you are right, but it also applies to literally every business sale ever. What’s the point of talking about it now? Do you think GitHub sold your data to Microsoft?
Coming from the guy who yesterday talked about how much of a reputational risk selling Google Domains is... It's ironic he doesn't see tweeting something this dumb as a reputational risk...
1: GM also has a reputation for getting a product just right and then killing it.
You have your mail, storage, office suite, photos, chat, etc, hosted by Google, they made it easy to host your domain there working with all those services, and all that vertically integration kept us comfortably in their warm embrace.
Now they're selling it because... why? Only theory that holds water is it doesn't make _enough_ money. Well sure it isn't a huge revenue source but it isn't losing money either, and the intangibles felt like they more than justified keeping it in-house.
Hopefully the inside story comes out, as I would be fascinated to hear their thought process.
Everyone believes they know the hard line Google will not cross for shutting down products, and everyone eventually is wrong.
Is there anything noteworthy going on here, or are we just confused/pretending to be confused about the world and looking to put a spin on it?
If I (the first party) have given data to a company (the second party), and that company is sold to someone else (the third party), then my data was sold to a third party.
> Customer data is being transferred in the process, all the time.
Right. Being common doesn't mean it isn't problematic, though. This is one of the reasons to minimize the amount of data you reveal to any company.
Certainly. However, taking a common business/law(?) issue and making it a Google issue is lame.
EDIT:
> That sounds like a distinction without a difference to me.
> If I (the first party) have given data to a company (the second party), and that company is sold to someone else (the third party), then my data was sold to a third party.
Well. I can see where you are coming from, but we have to be able to differentiate between
a) an ongoing 1p<->2p relationship, where 2p is selling data to a 3p
b) a relationship, where the entire 2p gets replaced
These two setups are clearly not equal. There is a distinction. And a difference.
Suppose I let you borrow my car, on the condition that you not allow your son to drive it. When the car gets totaled, you tell me that you gave the keys to your spouse, and they were the one who let your son drive it. So I have no reason to be angry at you, because you didn't directly hand the keys to him.
If you draw an imaginary line around some of the people and assets in a company, declare that the data belongs within that imaginary line, and then say everything inside that imaginary line is being sold, that's the same sort of shell game.
> Is there anything noteworthy going on here, or are we just confused/pretending to be confused about the world and looking to put a spin on it?
Yes. There's a lie being told that "selling a business" and getting customer data along with it is somehow distinct from "selling data".
Google Domains *was* profitable, I confirmed internally. Growing extremely fast (~$120M ARR now, ~growing $40M/year)
We don't know what the expenses were. It's still possible it wasn't profitable.
The only real expenses would be dealing with customer service and card fraud. While it’s possible that those costs could be substantial, Google isn’t exactly known for throwing a lot of money at customer service.
Surely that's a lot more trivially fixed with a small price bump than throwing the entire revenue stream & user sentiment into the trash?
Google Domains is currently charging $12/year for a .com domain, which we know from cloudflare the "at cost" price of that is $9.15/year. Comparing the $12/year to other providers it's kinda middle-of-the-road, not especially cheap or anything. Shopify is $15/year while porkbun is ~$10/year, so $12/year certainly appears to be a price that has adequate margin to either be profitable or if not only needs a small bump to be profitable?
The ROI on Domains is likely to be no where near that of, I don't know, GKE or BigQuery. You can argue all you want about how those are totally different projects with totally different considerations. But at the end of the day, unless Google wants to have a strategic investment in maintaining an end user facing Domain Registrar service, the ROI is all that matters. They are focusing and consolidating all their "developer facing" services in GCP. What makes sense will eventually move there, what doesn't will get cut.
ARR and YoY growth tell you nothing about profitability or the ROI. Google never shied away from deprecating services that they don't care about to focus on things they care about.
"Google Registry is currently offering .app, .dev, .dad, .phd, .prof, .esq, .foo, .zip, .mov, .nexus, .page, .new, .how, .soy, .day, .boo and .みんな. We also own .ads, .eat, .fly, .here, .ing, and .meme among others. We'll be using some of the domains we own, such as .google, .youtube, and .chrome, for Google products, so they won't be open to the public."
It seems Google will continue working with registrar partners, but not operate a registrar themselves anymore (Google Domains). It does not seem like anything will change for this wholly owned registry entity.
In the future we'll be renewing our .dev domains with other registrars who themselves register the domains with Google Registry / Charleston Road Registry as the TLD administrators.
https://www.registry.google/faqs/
(I know Google has the legal right to do this, but that’s not the issue here.)
Apparently the Google Domains UI is sticking around too, although who knows how long that'll last.
Edit: If anybody disagrees, I have a question to ask you: How would you feel if Google sold your youtube view history to the likes of Facebook, Tiktok, or Palantir? Better for them to ask first, or simply delete it. This SHOULD be required by law.
Some folks -- perhaps those who believed the lies about "unequivocal policies" -- would rather have it shut down than have their data sold.
And I am, I'm moving to Cloudflare. It's a superior service anyway and they support my TLDs. I never bothered moving before simply due to the minor effort involved.
> And for those saying: "well, better than shutting down Google Domains"
> Google Domains was profitable, I confirmed internally. Growing extremely fast (~$120M ARR now, ~growing $40M/year)
Which, I mean, obviously the product isn't so unprofitable that it needs to be shut down, or nobody would be interested in buying it.
Maybe Google Domains isn't the company's most profitable product, and maybe Google would be able to make even more money by allocating those resources elsewhere. But the point that people are upset about is that Google is going against a principle it had publicly committed to. Principles don't count for much if you only follow them when there's no cost to doing so.
This is surprising to literally nobody who's paid even a cursory amount of attention to Google over the past 20+ (and especially 15) years.
I thought they've been shutting down products for a long long time now?