What did you expect?
Any service, not just Google, will shut down apps and extensions for similar reasons. This has nothing to do with
> I just don’t think it is worth it to put any amount of effort to build something on a platform that turned out to be so unreliable.
But what the author refers to is completely another issue: the complete lack of support from Google. The extension author complied with the request. Tried to contact several times an only got canned responses. I guess Google doesn't care much about people that develop for their platform. At least that's what I got from the blog post. Therefore, author's conclusion about developing for that platform seens right.
This seems to happen to every company reaching a certain size and in need of some belt tightening (either pressured via investors or internally realized). Microsoft, for instance, has consistently flushed new frameworks away over the last decade, driving tons of Microsoft-centric developers away from the idea of building on any novel platforms and frameworks they put out. Google seems to be going down the same route by torpedoing APIs, torpedoing entire services, killing Chrome apps next year, hampering support requests, etc.
If there's good harmony between the broader dev community and a given platform, it stays. There's no point in supporting a framework that doesn't catch on fast enough (why invest the time?) and also no point in supporting outliers who have a hard time implementing a service unless -- as the author hopes -- it becomes a press headache for them.
...since I upvoted the link, I suppose I'm on the author's side here.
Let's pretend Google actually had great developer support (remember: we're pretending here) which was staffed to whatever degree it 'should' be. He still would have likely gotten nothing but automated/canned replies because this particular 'issue' has been brought up time and time again by inexperienced and/or bozo developers (i.e. 'whhaaa... you mean I can't make a living off of someone else's brand?'. No company is going to spend much/any time fielding these types of support requests, even if it's paid support) It would have been a stronger argument if he had an issue that a real person on the other end would have been able to help him with.
So you do not have to pretend here: If Google had developer support that would be as good as Apple's (which I believe is a very low bar considering all the anger Apple is getting about how they treat developers), the extension would still be in the Chrome App Store and doing just fine.
I agree that the developer should have guessed that by himself, but the real issue here I believe is the lack of any useful response, the automatic takedown of the extension and no way to get any response after "expending" the apparent "two tries" that you get from Google when something like this happens.
I'm generally a pro IP guy but this seems extremely draconian.
I also do agree that FB here is somehow taking advantage of said laws to send to /dev/null the extension that renders one of their revenue streams ineffective.
I'm no expert in US trademark laws by any means, maybe they're entitled to leverage it for these kind of cases.