But to be fair: In an organisation where your product is going to be compared against Adwords, your product will seem insignificant and irrelevant, and that's not because of how your team works on the product, and it's noe because of how the organisation does the comparison.
One one hand: killing a product for not being multi billion user multi billion dollar overnight success is incredibly on brand.
On the other hand: I 100% believe that they just found government pushback too burdensome to comply with. That would match what I saw when I worked there.
That's absurd to me.
[...]
> Meanwhile, there are no changes to the free Pixel VPN introduced with the Pixel 7 series in 2022.
Ah yes, nobody is using it, so Google is saving cost by... discontinuing it for paying services customers, but continuing to provide it to hardware customers (that actually don't pay per month for it). Makes total sense.
Either way, it’s good they leave some for the next guy to earn. ( not because the goodness of their heart I’m sure )
I imagine its frustrating to be working on these projects which would mean untold riches to any individual or small group but having it get shut down because it's not making a half billion or so.
Google isn't a random fly-by-night VPN operator that can just ignore subpoenas and takedown notices, so they probably did some cost-reward analysis per country before offering it there.
They could have bypassed some (but probably not all) of that by offering cross-country VPN nodes, but I suspect that given their size they didn't want to get into the business of "jurisdiction shopping", nor did they have any interest in landing on various media companies' "geo-bypassing VPN IP range" block lists.
So it's really kinda insulting for them to offer a product where the central purpose is to provide *privacy*.
Apparently, the public is not quite as dumb as they thought.
Google has a lot more to lose from a privacy or breach of contract lawsuit than a random shady VPN operation that can just disappear when word gets out that they're actually feeding everything to data brokers, and open shop under a different name the next day.
Hand waving, smoke and mirrors.
When the authentication and the service are both run by the same company on their servers, a huge potential exists for there to be nothing really "blind" about.
As many, many examples show; Google = Privacy Invasion. It's way too late for them to try and establish privacy credibility.
