Comment by teraflop | Hacker News Reader

Comment by teraflop | Hacker News Reader

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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.

> 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.

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!

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