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Comment by duringmath | Hacker News Reader

Guess that's how these deals work. Would you rather they shut it down?

The weird part to me at least is that they don’t ask for affirmative consent prior to transferring all your data, billing details, etc., to Squarespace. This isn’t some 1:1 acquisition, the Google Domains UI won’t even exist anymore. Even stranger considering the Google workspace subscriptions are moving as well, no idea how Squarespace is handling that. At least transfers aren’t frozen so you can get away from Squarespace’s terrible product prior to the deal closing.

(I know Google has the legal right to do this, but that’s not the issue here.)

Wait, like THE Google Workspace subscriptions are moving? Do you have a source? I might have missed that in the announcement - sounds like a total disaster waiting to happen..

Probably means they will act as a G-WorkSpace reseller for those accounts affected.

You want companies to consult users on M&A decisions? What's next cookie consent style popups but for merger contracts?

Maybe this is a radical position, but if users have given you data based on the agreement that you'll follow a particular privacy policy, then material changes to that policy should require the user's consent.

If a user doesn't consent, then sure, you can go ahead and do whatever policy changes or mergers or acquisitions you want, but you don't get to include that user's data in the deal.

I read somewhere that Squarespace is already a reseller of Workspace, so the new accounts they acquire will likely slot into whatever current mechanism exists for managing and supporting these customers.

Apparently the Google Domains UI is sticking around too, although who knows how long that'll last.

Better to shut down than sell people's data without consent. Better still to seek consent, but between what they're actually doing and simply shutting down and deleting customer data, the latter would be preferable.

Edit: If anybody disagrees, I have a question to ask you: How would you feel if Google sold your youtube view history to the likes of Facebook, Tiktok, or Palantir? Better for them to ask first, or simply delete it. This SHOULD be required by law.

This isn't a new issue. For example, WhatsApp and all of its data was sold to Facebook. I'm sure some people closed their WhatsApp accounts because they didn't agree with Facebook's privacy policies.

That _is_ how these deals work.

Some folks -- perhaps those who believed the lies about "unequivocal policies" -- would rather have it shut down than have their data sold.

This deal isn't special, the data is priced in, and unless you want to ground all acquisitions to a halt this is how it should be.

In the Twitter thread linked here, it is being called out as the first time Google has done a sale like this including their collected user data.

So it’s not “special” in terms of acquisitions in general, but directly defies the public statements of Googles CEO and is notable in that way.

Yes, I would prefer that. Give a year of notice then turn off the service. I can choose where to send my business next.

And I am, I'm moving to Cloudflare. It's a superior service anyway and they support my TLDs. I never bothered moving before simply due to the minor effort involved.

Isn't it obvious? If you want your domains to be automatically transferred, fine, do that, but otherwise refund any payments for future services and provide assistance for transferring domains to another provider.

The latest tweet in the thread already deals with this objection:

> And for those saying: "well, better than shutting down Google Domains"

> Google Domains was profitable, I confirmed internally. Growing extremely fast (~$120M ARR now, ~growing $40M/year)

Which, I mean, obviously the product isn't so unprofitable that it needs to be shut down, or nobody would be interested in buying it.

Maybe Google Domains isn't the company's most profitable product, and maybe Google would be able to make even more money by allocating those resources elsewhere. But the point that people are upset about is that Google is going against a principle it had publicly committed to. Principles don't count for much if you only follow them when there's no cost to doing so.

Wait, what principle did they commit to?

I thought they've been shutting down products for a long long time now?

Sorry if I wasn't sufficiently clear. The principle I was talking about was this one, from Sundar Pichai, referenced in the tweet thread:

> To make privacy real, we give you clear, meaningful choices around your data. All while staying true to two unequivocal policies: that Google will never sell any personal information to third parties, and that you get to decide how your information is used.

The parent commenter was presenting a false dichotomy, as if either selling the product or shutting it down were the only options. But there's no reason that has to be the case.

And even if it was -- which seems unlikely to me -- shutting down the product and giving users the option to switch to a different provider would be more ethical than just selling their data without asking for consent.

That makes sense!

> But the point that people are upset about is that Google is going against a principle it had publicly committed to. Principles don't count for much if you only follow them when there's no cost to doing so.

This is surprising to literally nobody who's paid even a cursory amount of attention to Google over the past 20+ (and especially 15) years.

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