Will Google Fonts Ever Be Shut Down?

The reason is only one. Having a website use Google service requested on random pages gives Google ability to get insight what pages users are visiting.

This goes together with other things Google provides for "free" such as jQuery and other interesting libraries.

The author don't seem to understand it, based on him comparing it to Google Reader and quickly dismissing it is not the data. They don't care about tracking page owner, they want to track the page users.

By providing a service that majority of websites use and that is essential for the page to work makes much harder to block through adblock, ghostery and friends.

This basically gives them an edge over any other competitors, whose only option to gather similar data is to make users install their toolbars.

Google wants a pixel on as many pages on the internet as possible. Some pages will never try to show ads and don't care about analytics. Google wants to keep those pages from being dark to them so they use other ways to incentivize publishers to pixel their users.

>It can’t be cheap to serve fonts on this kind of scale. To date there have been over 2.6 trillion pageviews using Google Fonts. Sure, the fonts are oftentimes cached in the user’s browser but that is still a lot of requests and a lot of data being transferred. A trillion is a big number, even for a company like Google.

I randomly picked 10 font families and downloaded them, and the files were 11.8MB in total after unzipping. At approximately 1.2MB per pageview, 2.6 trillion pageviews is only around 3 exabytes. That's only $100k in bandwidth costs at your average CDN. I'm sure Google's infrastructure costs are even lower than that.

Of course it will. Right after you build something that depends on it.