Google One VPN will be discontinued | Hacker News Reader

Google One VPN will be discontinued

9to5google.com

50 pointsraizer8829 comments

I’m convinced the Google treadmill of products that are created, shut down, and recreated is due to a promotion oriented culture. They must be getting rewarded for launches, not for building useful products or successful businesses.

Rumour has it that it's easy to get a bonus or raise for a new something, hard if you work on maintaining something. The new something doesn't need to be totally new, though.

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.

The other explanation I’ve seen is that the 20% time leads to lots of small products without much of an overarching biz strategy

20% time was also killed by Google (even if not officially)

Yeah it’s effectively dead. Also referred to as 120% time.

Not shocking. Their VPN app sucked ass. A) it randomly disconnected several times a day, and B) it had no "kill switch" option which would block all traffic when the VPN went down. So my connection was frequently unprotected throughout the day.

I can’t remember, but didn’t it require the Android Google One app to do VPN on Chromebooks? I remember it being hard to setup, but perhaps I’m misremembering my journey through dodgy VPN clients.

Not sure. I only used it on Windows

on android there is a Killswitch.

Yeah, their client was pretty bad, especially on macOS where it would sometimes get borked in a way that needed a full OS reboot to start working again.

I think it's 50/50 whether or not I believe the reasoning.

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.

This impacts me quite a bit as I use this often. I pay for Google One for the extra storage and VPN. Now the VPN is going away but my costs will stay the same.

That's absurd to me.

If this wasn't clear before, it's now clear that Google services are unreliable even if they're paid.

I somewhat anticipated the discontinuation of Google VPN because Google didn't address the issue of DNS hijacking, particularly on their Windows client. Ironically, this unresolved issue is why I stopped using their service.

[0]: https://github.com/google/vpn-libraries/issues/36

> Google is now “discontinuing the VPN feature as [they] found people simply weren’t using it.”

[...]

> 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.

I don’t know if it’s just bad management or they want to stay out any possible antitrust case. Because with their weight Google could easily make this a multi million “small” business.

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'm pretty sure that for Google a "multi-million" sized venture is considered a complete waste of time; they probably don't consider it worth pursuing until it hits the hundreds of millions. The scale they operate at financially is beyond comprehensible.

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.

One billion+ users is the size of market that Google is interested in

One less incentive to pay for Google One, I guess!

I wonder what their marketing is thinking about this. Google One is effectively just Google Drive storage with some feature add-ons. Until now, that VPN was their only 'additional' thing in the package. Without the VPN it's just a few enhancements to existing products that aren't compelling enough.

One less predatory service to worry about.

The service didn't even work if you signed up for google one from most of the world and then they discontinue it coz of low usage? Pretty funny stuff

To be fair, there are some legal implications to providing VPNs in many countries, since they're effectively making you look a lot like an ISP from a legal and practical point of view.

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.

It was so half-assed to begin with.

Another one bites the dust.

Everything Google does has privacy invasion baked into it.

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.

I think this was actually a somewhat compelling product: Sure, Google tracks users where they can, but for this they were explicitly claiming to be using authentication via blinded signature tokens, and to not log any traffic.

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.

* ... authentication via blinded signature tokens*

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.

The blind signing part runs locally on your VPN client.

> It's way too late for them to try and establish privacy credibility.

I personally don't think it's a good idea to trust any corporation to be a good or bad custodian of your personal data based on their public image or even past actions. These values can change very quickly, especially in publicly-traded corporations.

What matters much more than self-proclaimed statements or public perception are economic incentives, and I believe Google has quite strong incentives to not get hit by huge fines for violating the GDPR and other privacy regulations.

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