The world’s 3rd most popular domain registrar has been sold to Squarespace – but Google didn’t notify customers just yet. When could this happen, and why is Google silent?
I’m still in disbelief having heard this for the first time today.
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.
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.
Yeah nah that’s just the places like YouTube, that they can throw the most advertising at, the issue is that they’re not muscling into any other avenues for income, e.g. Google Cloud, YouTube Music, Google Music Studios etc, shared specialised platform for music production and computing hardware, with more exclusive use of Golang tools etc, Vs AWS, a general all purpose solution.
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!
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?
Most times companies do acquisitions just because they want to get a patent, or just hire the dev team with specific skills. The product for them was worthless from the beginning,
To be slightly fair a decent number of those are redundant or were successfully merged into other projects while others were clearly very experimental in nature.
This product was also sold, not deleted. So to be a bit pedantic, it doesn’t belong there. People are acting like this has died entirely or they aren’t able to transfer their domains. It’s not the end of the world.
But I guess people can feel good posting “Don’t be evil I guess” over and over again (as has been posted in all the threads about this numerous times) or being all snooty about how they’ve “warned people forever” not to use any Google service ever.
Yeah, they tend to be like that… have dumped quite a few great services. Google+ was my favorite place until it was gonne. I was mostly using Reddit afterwards, and given current circumstances, I’m jumping at alternatives immediately. I at least want to be able to access them and know how they feel.
Oh man, ain’t that the truth. I really gotta make a point to get a backup of all my photos from Google Photos onto a hard drive one of these days. Problem is, Google Takeout batches only last about a week or so and I have a very hefty amount of data to get out. The alternative is to download it month by month, year by year, which I’m not looking forward to doing at all.
I did exactly that. And ever since then, I’ve been backing up my full uncompressed photographs onto several duplicate hard drives and flash drives. Plus my videos, of course. I really should set up a server so I could do all that automatically, but I don’t really know how and don’t have the energy to figure it out.
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
Really? It’s not uncommon for me to have a service through one company and have that company be sold to another. I can think of at least two banks that I was a customer of when this happened. Similarly I’m sure it’s happened with some utilities, and maybe a telco.
In this case, the service is disconnected from your data. With Google et al., your data is the product.
Closing or some other form of taking your banking account hostage until you give them permission is not exactly something that should ever be possible to happen. This kind of service needs to be heavily regulated. Much unlike Facebook or some other social media stuff.
Who said anything about “common/uncommon”? Are you really enough of a subservient piece of shit to think that the way capitalism does things dictates the way they should be?
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.
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
@Kizaing could you imagine if google announced they were going to kill Gmail. (Honestly I would be happy with it. That would mean I can pursed people in my life to send emails to a custom domain I own by saying thats the only way I know I will be able to continue receiving emails to that domain)
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.
This is so fucking annoying. I specifically used Google Domains so I can have a trivial email forwarding to my Gmail without data exiting Google’s servers.
I’m in the same boat you are, I had numerous domains (over a dozen) each with e-mail forwards to a single gmail account. I ended moving my domain registration to AWS Route 53 and pointing my DNS over to cloudflare. Cloudflare offers both DNS and e-mail forwarding for free, so I’m back in business. They also provide analytics on email forwarding that google lacked. not gonna miss google one bit.
correct, and I’m aware that google has all this information as well. With the way e-mail gets routed, there’s always a 3rd party that can acquire some or all of the information contained in an e-mail.
on the cloudflare side, you click on your domain from the home page and select the Email tab on the left and follow their instructions.
on the gmail side, you don’t need to do anything beyond responding to cloudflares email confirmation unless you want to setup reply-to addresses for one or more of your forwarded accounts. To do that, follow this: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/22370?hl=en
If you trust google with absolutely anything then you are a fool. They start and close things constantly. You should 100% expect any google service you use to shutdown at any time.
Now i understand. Upper management compared the numbers to the usual numbers they see (billions of google accounts for example) and saw “what the hell? Only a dozen million domains? Literally nobody is using the service, get rid of it”
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.
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.
Yah now I am not trusting anything Google. This isn’t the same as others as it has been around what 9 years and was turning somewhat of a profit as they charge more then cloudflare and supposedly they are selling at cost.
Squarespace announced today it has entered into a definitive asset purchase agreement with Google, whereby Squarespace will acquire the assets associated with the Google Domains business, which will be winding down following a transition period. This purchase includes approximately 10 million domains hosted on Google Domains spread across millions of customers.
Hold up - can anyone else read many of the comments in this thread and notice that many seem to be bots, all repeating comments by other users but slightly changed as if by AI and automated?
The commentary in this thread reads as very unnatural. (I agree with the skepticism of Google, it’s not that, it’s the syntax of the thread).
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
Don’t build on or depend on google products… That is the message they are sending
https://killedbygoogle.com/
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.
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.
RIP inbox
Yes you said new product now they are killing established products. This has been out for just under a decade.
Yeah nah that’s just the places like YouTube, that they can throw the most advertising at, the issue is that they’re not muscling into any other avenues for income, e.g. Google Cloud, YouTube Music, Google Music Studios etc, shared specialised platform for music production and computing hardware, with more exclusive use of Golang tools etc, Vs AWS, a general all purpose solution.
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!
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?
The Google Graveyard grows ever larger. Nearly at 300 now.
Yeah, this is basically their business model/modus operandi
This was a trip back in time, seeing things like Meebo and Picasa that G purchased and killed off. 😕
That’s just the nature of corporate pirates, they loot and plunder what they can use and integrate into their own products then scuttle the rest
Most often not even taking the things that made the plundered product great in the first place, unfortunately.
Most times companies do acquisitions just because they want to get a patent, or just hire the dev team with specific skills. The product for them was worthless from the beginning,
To be slightly fair a decent number of those are redundant or were successfully merged into other projects while others were clearly very experimental in nature.
This product was also sold, not deleted. So to be a bit pedantic, it doesn’t belong there. People are acting like this has died entirely or they aren’t able to transfer their domains. It’s not the end of the world.
But I guess people can feel good posting “Don’t be evil I guess” over and over again (as has been posted in all the threads about this numerous times) or being all snooty about how they’ve “warned people forever” not to use any Google service ever.
I still miss igoogle at times
I will never trust Google for anything since they killed off Google Plus. Getting rid of “don’t be evil” as their corporate motto was a huge giveaway.
I use Google Fi for my cell service and have loved it, but them killing off or selling so many of their products has me real nervous over here…
Yeah, they tend to be like that… have dumped quite a few great services. Google+ was my favorite place until it was gonne. I was mostly using Reddit afterwards, and given current circumstances, I’m jumping at alternatives immediately. I at least want to be able to access them and know how they feel.
Oh man, ain’t that the truth. I really gotta make a point to get a backup of all my photos from Google Photos onto a hard drive one of these days. Problem is, Google Takeout batches only last about a week or so and I have a very hefty amount of data to get out. The alternative is to download it month by month, year by year, which I’m not looking forward to doing at all.
I did exactly that. And ever since then, I’ve been backing up my full uncompressed photographs onto several duplicate hard drives and flash drives. Plus my videos, of course. I really should set up a server so I could do all that automatically, but I don’t really know how and don’t have the energy to figure it out.
Don’t be evil is still in one of their slogans or whatever you wanna call it but it’s just at the end like “and as always don’t be evil.”
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
Really? It’s not uncommon for me to have a service through one company and have that company be sold to another. I can think of at least two banks that I was a customer of when this happened. Similarly I’m sure it’s happened with some utilities, and maybe a telco.
Who said anything about “common/uncommon”? Are you really enough of a subservient piece of shit to think that the way capitalism does things dictates the way they should be?
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.
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
@Kizaing could you imagine if google announced they were going to kill Gmail. (Honestly I would be happy with it. That would mean I can pursed people in my life to send emails to a custom domain I own by saying thats the only way I know I will be able to continue receiving emails to that domain)
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! 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.
This is so fucking annoying. I specifically used Google Domains so I can have a trivial email forwarding to my Gmail without data exiting Google’s servers.
I’m in the same boat you are, I had numerous domains (over a dozen) each with e-mail forwards to a single gmail account. I ended moving my domain registration to AWS Route 53 and pointing my DNS over to cloudflare. Cloudflare offers both DNS and e-mail forwarding for free, so I’m back in business. They also provide analytics on email forwarding that google lacked. not gonna miss google one bit.
Right but now CloudFlare reads all the email. 🥲
correct, and I’m aware that google has all this information as well. With the way e-mail gets routed, there’s always a 3rd party that can acquire some or all of the information contained in an e-mail.
Have you got a good guide? I have about 8 domains with email 5 log-in’s for family. Really getting sick of google
ex legacy G Suite user from decades gone
on the cloudflare side, you click on your domain from the home page and select the Email tab on the left and follow their instructions. on the gmail side, you don’t need to do anything beyond responding to cloudflares email confirmation unless you want to setup reply-to addresses for one or more of your forwarded accounts. To do that, follow this: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/22370?hl=en
If you trust google with absolutely anything then you are a fool. They start and close things constantly. You should 100% expect any google service you use to shutdown at any time.
They had 10 million domains (according to the article). Even with a successful business they drop stuff. Maybe I am a fool!
only 10 million domains?
Now i understand. Upper management compared the numbers to the usual numbers they see (billions of google accounts for example) and saw “what the hell? Only a dozen million domains? Literally nobody is using the service, get rid of it”
They often shut things down that seem successful and popular. Google can’t be trusted.
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:
I responded to this and basically said, that wording is ambiguous. Will my data be removed before or after the transition? They replied:
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.
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
I’m fully transferred, if Squarespace gets my information as a past customer I will be frustrated.
I mean, this is Google we’re talking about…
Another Google service destined for the glue factory.
Yah now I am not trusting anything Google. This isn’t the same as others as it has been around what 9 years and was turning somewhat of a profit as they charge more then cloudflare and supposedly they are selling at cost.
Been bought by square spaces.
Who are surprisingly expensive.
I’m super pissed about this.
I have a ton of client domains registered with google, and squarespace’s pricing is double.
They had by far the best platform I’ve used for managing domains. This sucks.
I’m imagine your pricing with your customers is already detailed as well.
I’m so annoyed. Squarespace is the worst
I thought that was godaddy?
Can you elaborate? Worried about my services after the switch.
Their UX sucks
Hold up - can anyone else read many of the comments in this thread and notice that many seem to be bots, all repeating comments by other users but slightly changed as if by AI and automated?
The commentary in this thread reads as very unnatural. (I agree with the skepticism of Google, it’s not that, it’s the syntax of the thread).
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
Google: the grim reaper of online services