Finally. Took them long enough.
There is literally no other business reason for Google to maintain Google Fonts, but to augment its tracking insights. None. That's the sole purpose of the very existence of Google Fonts.
There is literally no other business reason for Google to maintain Google Fonts, but to augment its tracking insights. None. That's the sole purpose of the very existence of Google Fonts.
We've literally spend tens of thousands of dollars on our font archive, but decided that we can't continue to use these fonts on projects anymore, due to "we can change the licence at any time" clauses and rent seeking behaviour, that is eerily similar of the stock photo industry licensing (which pretty much has ruined photographers) and scientific publishers (which pretty much have ruined science).
I hate google as much as the next guy, but our small design company is in their dept for creating google fonts, and we plan on contributing to the the repository if we ever create a font as part of a project.
The payment being "user data" is the problem. Not the product in and of itself.
If you are in the EU such a platform would probably need to be GDPR compliant.
I'm sure there is a opportunity for a font market that fulfills your needs. It might not be easy but eventually studios like you will probably have to charge clients an ongoing fee for "premium assets".
The end user is paying for it and while you and your clients are probably fine with it, the lawmakers are obviously not.
Google fonts is primarily a github repo with specifically licenced fonts. Google paid a lot of the artists and foundries behind these fonts for an open licence.
Therefor there is no need to build a "similar product", when the existing one is alrady free as in free beer, without any hidden data-/ad-funding.
We are are primarily a PRINT-MEDIA shop. Non of GDPR applies to this, non of our customers or customer clients pay for anything with their data, because paper doesn't have an uplink. Yet the google font project is as much key to our survival as sci-hub is for the scientific community.
I suppose Google does not pay artists and foundries out of the goodness of their hearts.
They pay them to earn money through user data. If this is illegal a different service will turn up eventually.
Any different "service", would have the EXACT SAME ISSUE: Hot-linking leaks user IP-Data to whoever hosts the hot-linked content.
If you use the google fonts home page _as designed by google_ it already makes you download the fonts to self-host them along with your own sources.
And as for their motivation, google fonts originated from android, because again licensing fonts plain sucks, and google has an incentive to make developing apps and websites as easy as possible in order to strengthen their ecosystems.
I argue for downloading fonts yourself and hosting them yourself: https://google-webfonts-helper.herokuapp.com/fonts
But let's not pretend that isn't an extra step that some people regard as unjustified.