I’m still in disbelief having heard this for the first time today.
Lots of top-quality dumb news this week
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How is it a money printing machine? They sell domains at cost based on ICANN fees. They don’t mark them up like other registrars, which is one of the main ways to make money in that business.
Don’t build on or depend on google products… That is the message they are sending
This site is interesting… every time you reload it, the short blurb about each tool changes. Is it using a llm, or do they write alts that get served at random?
Seriously. They have been sending this message out for more than a decade now. Every new Google product or service that is any good will be shut down at short notice just when people start getting used to it. Only the search engine and Gmail endure.
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Yes you said new product now they are killing established products. This has been out for just under a decade.
RIP inbox
People think Google is in the business of providing services. They aren’t. They’re in the business of data collection and their services exist to facilitate that. Useful data dries up, service shuts down, every time. It sounds harsh but people who still use Google services are just setting themselves up to get fucked over.
Google is in whatever business they decide to be, and saying that it’s expected because the well dried up is not an acceptable answer. Ultimately it just tarnishes the brand and dooms whatever new things they try to venture into. Stadia never got off the ground for this very reason.
Google’s not going to be able to collect a lot of data if no one trusts them to run a service for more than a couple years. Hell, can I even trust them to keep Chromium going at this point!? Surely they won’t let that waterfall of data dry up…
Yup. I migrated everything out of Google when they killed Listen. Was on the edge after Inbox, but Listen was the last straw. They don’t know how to keep great products alive, and I’m tired of getting suckered punched by them.
Exceptions are Android (because there’s no other options) and Angular/Golang, because they would survive being abandoned by Google. Hell, they’d probably improve!
Came here to comment that — glad it was the first comment
A few years ago I hit a point where the Google graveyard got so large that I no longer trust them with any of my stuff. I know the mantra is to always have multiple backups of important stuff, but I’ve started doing Google drive, OneDrive, iCloud, AND local (own cloud) copies of stuff because you just never know when Google is going to decide to kill Google maps or Google photos or whatever.
lol, I think they are half way there with google photo. XD
If you made yourself dépendant on a Google product then that’s the risk you assumed. They can and will kill off products at a whim, history has made that very evident.
Who’s a good registrar for .ca? Cloudflare doesn’t support it :(
@oxideSeven dreamhost is decent
Joker.com are an awesome registrar that I’ve used for years.
I have used Joker since the 90s for personal domains.
I had recently move my work domains from Dreamhost to Google since we already had business GSuite. Having it all in one place was convenient. Now I dont know where I will move them since I dont really care for Squarespace.
This is so frustrating, I knew that I should never trust google but i still fell for the slickness and how easy it is to administrate domains on google domains so I’ve been buying all my domains through them… I really really gotta learn to stop trusting google and basically never use their products.
The article covers this a little bit, but I thought I’d share my email response from Google when I asked them “how can I prevent Squarespace from receiving any of my data?” They responded with:
Based on the summary you have shared, I understand that you need help with your general inquiry about the Google Domains transition to Squarespace. To answer this, if you will be transferring your domains out of Google, all of the data will also be removed. This means that once the transition between Squarespace and Google happens, your data will also be removed.
I responded to this and basically said, that wording is ambiguous. Will my data be removed before or after the transition? They replied:
I’m sorry for the confusion. To be clear, Squarespace will not receive any of your Google Domains data. Only the active domain names, excluding the domain names that have been deleted or transferred out, will be affected by the data shift to Squarespace.
So if I trust their word, it means, if I’ve already transferred out my domains (which I have), Squarespace shouldn’t receive any of my customer information, or even have a record of who I am. Hopefully that’s true.
I’m fully transferred, if Squarespace gets my information as a past customer I will be frustrated.
It clearly reads as autogenerated reply. It seems ambiguous to me still whether it’s thinking you’re trying to move your domains to squarespace and wondering if google sill keep data or if it’s about them moving domains to squarespace.
Though I’m general I’d assume if you move all your domains out of Google Domains before the transition, there shouldn’t be anything for them to transfer to squarespace.
I didn’t put my actual inquiry in the comment since it would have made it too long. But I wasn’t asking them about moving to Squarespace, I was very clear that I am burning a bridge with both of them and have no interest in being a customer of either of them. I told them I’ve already moved my domains out of Google Domains, and I wanted to clarify if any historical data about me and my domains (domain ownership history, purchase history, receipts, etc) would go to Squarespace. And they replied with what I put in my comment.
If I consider their reply to me, and the stuff I’m reading in the link OP posted, this isn’t really a “transition,” Squarespace is just buying the rights to all 10M+ domains Google Domains owns. But if Google Domains doesn’t own a domain anymore, it won’t be part of that transaction.
That’s what I gathered, anyway. Hopefully they can be less ambiguous before the transaction actually happens. It will probably take the better part of a year, so there is plenty of time.
This is interesting, thanks for sharing
Google: the grim reaper of online services
Another Google service destined for the glue factory.
Yep… I saw this last week and transferred my domain to CloudFlare afterwards. It took me a day or two to get it all fixed back up with my iCloud stuff and other DNS crap, but it’s done now. I’m really getting sick of google killing all their products.
Was even easier for me since I was already using cloudflare as my dns for my domain so it all just stayed the same
Same thing for me, my domains were set to renew in August, but I transferred to Hover (cloudflare didn’t directly support my tld) but I set up my nameservers with Cloudflare.
Everything google touches dies, I’m very distrustful of any of their services, I should probably think of moving off gmail too haha
Same! I went with CF because I refuse to ever use SquareSpace because they have ads in every podcast
Yup, that’s my backup plan if I don’t like where things are going… Funny enough, after the announcement, exactly 1 day later, Cloudlflare sent me a migrate to them ad, as one domain was close to renewal.
We’l see how prices hold out after the transfer, as well as features. If anything gets a price hike or features restricted, I’m out. Will probably move domains to CloudFlare in that circumstance.
Wow, was pretty heavily bombarded by domains ads just a few weeks ago!
Google Fi customers beware. I’ve been saying for a while it could be next and always met with the argument “well actually it’s easy for them to run and profitable so it’s definitely safe.” By the looks of this nothing is safe besides their most core products
Based on my experience in many privacy roles covering US, EU, UK and other countries, the sale of a company will likely be covered in Google’s privacy notice and is not considered a sale of personal data considering customer’s personal data will immediately be covered by the purchasing company’s privacy notice.
Funny, because if I decided to go into business with Google by renting a service from them, that honestly shouldn’t mean that I automatically decided to go into business with some other corporation at Google’s whim.
But hey, capitalism really cares about personal autonomy. It’s not like it just exploits our labor and treats us like commodities or anything. /s
I think what they mean to say is, me big you small
